Camille Paglia's Sex, Art, and American Culture: Essays
Willis, Ellen
SEX, ART, AND AMERICAN CULTURE: ESSAYS, by Camille Paglia. Vintage Books, 1992. 337 pp. pb. $13.00. • She's loud! She's angry! She's on a speed trip! She's an egomaniac! She wears red lipstick!...
...Call this number in Paris now...
...We agree that feminists' dismissal of Freud was a terrible mistake and that you can't talk about sex without talking about biology or rape without talking about sex...
...Yes, she's unfair, the apocalyptic urgency is overblown, there's a certain kind of know-nothingism in her blanket condemnation of women's studies and her dismissal of the Holy Trinity (Derrida, Lacan, Foucault) as utterly without redeeming social value...
...Or at least she acts as if she doesn't...
...The issue I want to raise is not whether political correctness is a neocon figment or the most serious totalitarian menace since wine and cheese but why political correctness should have become such a hot issue in 1991 and what this has to do with Camille Paglia's making the cover of New York and Harper's (not Rolling Stone so far as I know, though her media biblio notes that she was named the magazine's "Hot Critic" that year...
...Paglia waves the banner of Nietzsche and Sade...
...Modern feminism, as she sees it, is the ideological captive of Rousseau and his belief that nature is benevolent, society corrupt and repressive...
...Zing...
...It includes a more or less verbatim transcription of one of her talks ("The M.I.T...
...campaign, which brilliantly diverted people's incipient discontent with the Regime of Repression onto . . . feminists, blacks, queers, and pointy-heads...
...We hate the brand of feminism that defines women as nurturing, compassionate, and nice...
...and so on...
...Anyone who, like me, has traveled in feminist and left circles knows perfectly well that it exists...
...the crusade against "pornographic" sexually dissident art...
...And once the Zeitgeist threw her onstage, she handled the opportunity like a pro...
...Why you can't change that...
...Terrified of pain and annihilation, we reject ecstasy in favor of the futile quest for security and control...
...To fight nature is admirable but doomed...
...I'm a pop academic...
...instead of those New Haven women who, she says, "nearly tarred and feathered" her for defending the Stones and thereby drove her in fear and loathing from the movement...
...Paglia disclaims any conscious attempt to become a celebrity...
...Be a master of the universe...
...Starved of the deepest pleasure, we get what joy we can from power...
...And I'm still crazy after all these years...
...Would her life have taken a totally different turn...
...There followed several attempts to rev up the engine once more: the Gulf War (the most spectacular, but the shortest lived...
...9. Paglia hates to be called a conservative...
...Right there she shows that consciously or not, she knew exactly what to do: conjure up an irresistible image, preferably one that's novel (a female Gary Cooper) and "classically American" at the same time...
...We didn't need Derrida: we had Jimi Hendrix"), women's studies ("a jumble of vulgarians, bunglers, whiners, French faddicts, apparatchiks, doughface partyliners, pie-in-the-sky utopianists, and bullying, sanctimonious sermonizers"), academic careerism ("the academic theorists were the first wave of yuppie speculators, the first corporate raiders of the Wall Street gilded age...
...In contrast to Paglia and to Mailer, I would characterize my own world view as "conservative radicalism" or perhaps "Jewish skeptical utopianism...
...Human beings are not innately sadistic, my attraction to Paglia's killer prose notwithstanding...
...Rather, "There is a hunger for new ways of seeing and thinking...
...It starts out by attacking two books on homosexuality as the scholarly equivalent of junk bonds, and goes on to rail against French theory ("The Seventies French fad was a flight from Sixties truths, a reactionary escape into false abstraction and rationalism, masquerading as distrust of reason...
...Those bullets of uninhibited scorn, passionate hero worship, and outrageous generalization, encased in gleaming English prose, hit a scene overdue for a shakeup...
...She doesn't care who likes her...
...3. A while ago, as I read a newspaper article about a purported female serial killer of men (later it turned out that the story was considerably more complicated), an involuntary smile came to my lips...
...We're not Lacan or Foucault fans...
...I offer this anecdote, along with my fondness for the SPRING • 1993 • 251 Books movie Basic Instinct, as partial metaphor for my response to the Paglia phenomenon...
...Some readers will object that Paglia's targets are mostly women, with a few gay men thrown in...
...Radical feminism offends her not just because of its puritanical, anti-libertarian strain but because of its fundamental claim that women's liberation is a collective, political process...
...Now I should say first that I am not of the party that argues that "political correctness" does not exist...
...that serve up a history and detailed bibliography of her media coverage, along with a gaggle of cartoons (one portrays her in a Madonna outfit, another has her waving a weaponlike spatula while burning the eggs she is making for the rapper Ice Cube, who glares sullenly at his plate...
...This is not an easy thing for an intellectual to do...
...4. What I don't have in common with Camille Paglia: well, to start with, while I write about pop culture figures, she has managed to become one...
...Well, on that point, at least, I agree: never whine...
...She's on her twenty-first minute of fame...
...In contrast, she has no great quarrel with conservative censors and moralists, who merely fulfill the necessary function of maintaining the social order against which heroic individual rebellion can take place...
...With baroque eloquence and passionate conviction, Paglia cries, over and over, "You can't change that...
...She is a libertarian, she protests, pro-prostitution, propornography, pro-abortion...
...All the pent-up fury at fifteen years' worth of sensual deprivation was now to be concentrated on the piddling forces of left-wing moralism...
...As Paglia sees it, to deny that women who walk alone in the dark will always risk rape and murder not only endangers women by encouraging an unconscionable naiveté, but invalidates the heroism of women who defy convention and accept the risks of seizing their liberty...
...8. What we don't have in common (continued): what Paglia calls her "Italian pagan Catholicism" resembles Norman...
...She must be prudent and cautious...
...and in that sense it is part of the anti-sixties backlash...
...q 254 • DISSENT...
...Granted that if you're hit by a bulldozer (like the hapless lecturer who attempted a Lacanian interpretation of fashion photography in Paglia's horrified presence), you aren't going to care much whether the driver was aiming at you or merely clearing a path...
...The heroic individual may seize a measure of liberty, but there can be no genuine politics of freedom...
...Yet neither are we innocents corrupted by outside forces...
...This was exactly the wrong thing to do...
...Eat dirt, post-structuralist pedants, deniers of the body and the pulsing self...
...She interrupts...
...The Dionysian impulse, glorious and destructive, struggles with Apollonian reason and civility in an endless standoff...
...If all this nature-red-in-tooth-andclaw Darwinian melodrama sounds familiar, not to say banal, you probably went to the same college bull sessions I did...
...Gain power by attacking power...
...Anti-establishment mavericks like me are back in fashion...
...5. Paglia is a great polemicist, great because even though she is merciless toward those who have offended her notions of the true and the beautiful, she is not mean-spirited about it...
...Just asking, Camille, just asking...
...article called "Can a Feminist Love the World's Greatest Rock and Roll Band...
...6. Back to Paglia's rendezvous with the Zeitgeist: it has another, less attractive side...
...estrogen tranquilizes" (something obviously went wrong in her case...
...but this is a victim's eye metaphor...
...But on a deeper level, Paglia is convinced that sex is so intractably antisocial and dangerous for women that any feminist critique of the sexual culture is antisexual by definition...
...Certainly this book is best understood as an extension of her public persona...
...In a review of a book on career women, she opines, "It is not male society but mother nature who lays the heaviest burden on woman...
...Repression, after all, runs on the stores of closeted energy that Carter's lust in the heart and Reagan's sunny sadism represented...
...Zing...
...Either way, women must "take personal responsibility for the path they choose" and above all "stop whining...
...We are divided beings, whose urge for the intense pleasures of sensory, emotional, and intellectual immersion in the world clashes with the consciousness of our own vulnerability as fragile, mortal animals...
...and three appendices—"Look ma...
...a compendium of interviews in the wake of her notorious Newsday piece on date rape (which is also reprinted...
...2. What I have in common with Camille Paglia: in 1969 we knew the Rolling Stones were the greatest rock band in the world...
...Under the libidinally impaired Bush, a slight, at first barely perceptible energy leak began...
...Her comment on Madonna's "Justify My Love" video: "The video is pornographic...
...Yes, Madonna fans, too...
...and— most important for my present purposes—the attack on "political correctness...
...She too sees us as prisoners of sex, fractious egos caught in the muck of our biological natures...
...From the spectator's point of view (and her polemics are somehow visual even when they're printed), the image of Paglia as grandiose, pop Lone Ranger gets closer to the spirit of her undertaking...
...When she makes a mistake she must accept the consequences...
...Down the legions of intellectual accountants who squelch imaginative speculation about the human condition by dismissing it as "essentialist...
...She loves her bad reviews...
...She calls names...
...Yet her Sadeian cosmology leads ultimately to conservatism in its profoundest sense...
...And what more appealing, iconic figure to embody the contradictory impulses defining this aspect of the Zeitgeist than a rebellious antiacademic academic and anti-feminist feminist of self-professed "wavering sexual orientation" who believes in an innate will to power and says stuff like, "I now see the hierarchical as both beautiful and necessary...
...In part this is pop opportunism: the complexities of the feminist sex debate don't lend themselves to her style of media broadside...
...She's a dirty fighter...
...Nor is her rejection of cultural change limited to the sexual arena...
...But face it (all you postmod junk-bond dealers out there), her basic point is right: the imperious ubiquity of poststructuralist language at once homogenizes thought and makes unthinkable the realm of the wordless, of direct experience, 252 • DISSENT Books psychedelic vision, love's body...
...We're Simone de Beauvoir, Elizabeth Taylor, Mary McCarthy, and Norman O. Brown fans...
...Zing...
...You must be out of your mind...
...Make a killing...
...if her aim isn't always true, the noise is a relief...
...It's decadent...
...When Sexual Personae was published in 1990, the steamroller of sexual repression, which had picked up speed during the Carter administration and run amok under Reagan, was just beginning to lose momentum...
...The most spectacular of these shootouts, worth the price of the book, is "Junk Bonds and Corporate Raiders: Academe in the Hour of the Wolf," which first appeared in the journal Arion...
...Perhaps it is time for a book called Without Rousseau or Sade...
...We identify with the demon decade—the hedonistic neon side of the sixties, not the moralistic earthtone side...
...It's a classically American story, the loner riding out of the desert to shoot up the saloon and run the rats out of town...
...I was not in control of my career when it was a disaster, and I am not in control of it now...
...What has happened is not my doing but that of the Zeitgeist," she asserts in the introduction to her collected essays and ravings, Sex, Art, and American Culture...
...She defends Woody Allen...
...7. Suppose in 1969 Paglia had run into radical feminists like me (or my friend Karen Durbin, who later wrote a Ms...
...While most of us float tranquilized in the chthonian estrogen swamp, reveling in motherhood, "the primal source of life" with its "dark, ambiguous dualities," a liberated happy few will stand as shining moral examples to those who aspire to a different path...
...That is, her rhetoric is powered by an urgent sense of so much horseshit, so little time, rather than a desire to humiliate her targets...
...Those readers will have a good point...
...feminist puritans, anti-pop snobs, middle-class nicemakers, sanitizers, euphemizers, advocates of a constitutional amendment decreeing that equality means always having to say you're sorry...
...Liberals, emotionally tin-eared as always, seized on the restlessness as an occasion for guilt: let us/you/them repent those greedy, callous, rotten eighties ways...
...Never mind...
...It is possible to choose otherwise...
...And it's fabulous...
...And the truth of our biological natures, like it or not, is aggression and violence, domination and submission, and a male-female polarity that Paglia memorably sums up as "Androgen agitates...
...and more...
...My feminist models are the boldly independent and childless Amelia Earhart and Katharine Hepburn, who has been outspoken in her opposition to the delusion of 'having it all.' " This is what Paglia's feminism comes down to: there are, or ought to be, two kinds of women...
...In the wake of the May 1968 upheavals, a Frenchman, Jean-Francois Revel, wrote a book called Without Marx or Jesus...
...There never was and never will be sexual harmony," she declares in the date rape piece...
...No husband or day-care center can ever adequately substitute for a mother's attention...
...Anyway, as I was saying, at the turn of the decade the right was still in power, its conventional wisdom had a powerful grip on the culture, including the liberal media—and yet there was that energy leak, a ripple of restlessness, an inchoate desire for something new...
...Mailer's "radical conservatism...
...Yell your head off...
...Many of us imagine that we would love to do it, but even those of us who are theoretically hip about what it takes to be a media star tend to speak visual with a literary accent...
...Which is not to deny how insanely difficult is the struggle to choose, how very far from inevitable the outcome of that struggle, and how easily it turns into its opposite—an outbreak of the will to power more terrifying than ever...
...Every woman must take personal responsibility for her sexuality, which is nature's red flame...
...What I don't, finally, have in common with Camille Paglia: in her classic The Dialectic of Sex, Shulamith Firestone, who herself argues that women's liberation requires a revolution against nothing less than nature itself, offers a pithy summation of most people's gut reaction to the early radical feminists' ideas: "That...
...Lecture"), complete with stage directions ("[imitates electrocution - like spasms]") and questions from the audience...
...Speaking of conscious—and of irresistible— does Paglia mean to allude to Oriana Fallaci's wonderful interview with Henry Kissinger, in which her subject compares himself to a cowboy...
...It handed the right the perfect setup for the p.c...
...Paglia makes no distinction between these two offenses, stubbornly refusing to recognize the existence of feminist sexual libertarians no matter how often they are called to her attention...
...The fall from paradise is our choice, individual and collective, constantly recreated as SPRING • 1993 • 253 Books each generation reproduces human culture...
...but who isn't...
...In fact, the second most cliched and disingenuous political disclaimer, trumped only by "I'm not a women's libber, but . . .," has to be "I know this is politically incorrect, but...
...Except for Madonna...
...MTV was right to ban it...
Vol. 40 • April 1993 • No. 2
