Ancient mythology, with its sinister archetypes of vampire and Gorgon, is more accurate than feminism about the power and terror of female sexuality. -- Camile Paglia ("No Law in the Arena: A Pagan Theory of Sexuality")
She did it for me and I am forever in her debt because of it. She broke the spell I was under from my liberal arts PC brainwashing and embittered, desperate shyness. Before Paglia I had no way of knowing the tonnage of self-loathing being dumped on me (by myself, mainly) for being a straight white middle male wasn't necessarily deserved. I'd have to get super drunk to muster the gall to hit on any woman, even if she was in my goddamned bed lest I somehow 'cross the line!' Hell, I'm still that way, but Paglia sure helped me get me over my rationalizations for it... now I know its shyness and karma-related intuition, and not at all 'the right thing to do.'
"Ambitious young women today are taught to ignore or suppress every natural instinct, if it conflicts with the feminist agenda posed on them. All literary and artistic works, no matter how great, that document the ambivalence of female sexuality they are trained to dismiss as “misogynous.” In other words, their minds are being programmed to secede from their bodies … there is a huge gap between feminist rhetoric and women’s actual sex lives, where feminism is of little help except with a certain stratum of deferential, malleable, white middle-class men." (No Law, p. 28)I had read a compilation of her essays a friend had loaned me, which included the above quotes, and we were in awe; having been at Syracuse U. together from 1985-1989 we had seen the rise of academic PC feminist thuggery firsthand. I had even had a comic strip censored in the alternative newspaper 'the Alternative Orange" because angry literal-minded feminists couldn't tell I was joking when I portrayed the big baseball cap-sporting orange mascot of the SU football team as a sexually frustrated endomorphic frat pledge.
Campus speech codes, that folly of the navel-gazing left, have increased the appeal of the right. Ideas must confront ideas. When hurt feelings and bruised egos are more important than the unfettered life of the mind, the universities have committed suicide.Of course, mainstream feminism and PC thuggery has done some good -- frat parties are now well known to be date rape zones (girls my freshman year had no clue and their misery after their first experience 'sleeping over' at the frat parties was epidemic) and now everyone knows to keep their drink in their hand and not let the guy serve you the grain alcohol punch, and that sexual harassment in the workplace will get you in serious trouble, and all that's good stuff. But when I was a young unemployed recent graduate struggling in Hoboken in 1992, PC fever was still a new craze... it was overzealous and before Camille became my post-academic idol, I was so anti-myself that I could barely stand to be in the same room with myself, so deferential
But lo, Camille Paglia's Sexual Personae appeared. For one thing it was heavy, packed with words and references I had no familiarity with, but in 1992 I needed to have a big, thick book to anchor me, like a bible, to the bed as I writhed and convulsed through the days, tapering off on wine then trying to stop drinking altogether. Paglia snapped me out of it with a dominatrix whip snap.
Paglia smartened me up, and gave the finger to my feminist brainwashing. She was a rock and roll professor, cutting through guilt tripping bullshit like a chainsaw sculptress. Her way of incorporating her own Catholic Italian heritage and personal detail into her writing was revolutionary, harkening her back to Emerson and Whitman, the same brazen stance against the machine. Women, she told me, would be all right with or without my help. I had been falling for the sticky sweet messages purred by the chthonic Venus flytrap. It was time for me to stop wringing my hands and join in the merry, eternal battle of the sexes.
"The most threatening thing about her, from the American viewpoint, is that she refuses to treat the arts as an instrument of civil rights. Without talent, no entitlement." -- Clive James (Break Blow Burn Review for NY Times)
Of course she catches a lot of shit for these ideas but she dishes it out as well. I get mad when she bashes 'blog writing' as generally worthless, and I think she gives way way too much credit to Madonna, but I dig that her media persona is deliberately confrontational and that she believes in the theater of sexual politics and would rather provoke a visceral negative response than a pis-warm liberal head nod. I'm not sure of course if her writing is ever read in universities. I graduated before I'd heard of her but I've seen firsthand how liberal bandwagon jumping has left the liberal arts canon lopsided with 'safe' writers, spouting the revolutionary stance while submitting to a tyrannically conservative core of 'approved' western thought that is merely the pendulum swing to the opposite direction of Alabama. Where once openly gay literature like Burroughs was banned now it's Rush Limbaugh. Meanwhile, Paglia is out there singing the praises of governor Sarah Palin! I like Sarah Palin, and I’ve heartily enjoyed her arrival on the national stage. As a career classroom teacher, I can see how smart she is — and quite frankly, I think the people who don’t see it are the stupid ones, wrapped in the fuzzy mummy-gauze of their own worn-out partisan dogma. So she doesn’t speak the King’s English — big whoop! There is a powerful clarity of consciousness in her eyes. She uses language with the jumps, breaks and rippling momentum of a be-bop saxophonist. I stand on what I said (as a staunch pro-choice advocate) in my last two columns — that Palin as a pro-life wife, mother and ambitious professional represents the next big shift in feminism. Pro-life women will save feminism by expanding it, particularly into the more traditional Third World. (Salon, 2008)She's so wrong she's right for a whole different question.
The problem with America is that there's too little sex, not too much. The more our instincts are repressed, the more we need sex, pornography and all that. The problem is that feminists have taken over with their attempts to inhibit sex. We have a serious testosterone problem in this country. … It's a mess out there. Men are suspicious of women's intentions. Feminism has crippled them. They don't know when to make a pass. If they do make a pass, they don't know if they're going to end up in court.I was cured all right.
(1995 - Playboy Interview)
...all these stars today, accumulating children with an army of nannies. Despite all her children, no one would ever call Angelina Jolie maternal. But Elizabeth Taylor’s maternal quality is central to her heterosexual power. Elizabeth Taylor could control men. She liked men. And men liked her. There was a chemistry between her and men, coming from her own maternal instincts. I’ve been writing about this for years, and it was partly inspired by watching Taylor operate on-screen and off. The happy and successful heterosexual woman feels tender and maternal toward men — but this has been completely lost in our feminist era. Now women tell men, you have to be my companion and be just like a woman; be my best friend, and listen to me chatter. In other words, women don’t really like men anymore — they want men to be like women. But Elizabeth Taylor liked men, and men loved to be around her because they sensed that. (Salon - 3/11)She taught me above all that academic writing can be thrilling, that it needn't bow to the unwritten edict that one must always use obscure points to mask that one has nothing to say--one can combine personal details with theory, and indeed should to provide insight into the writer's unique subjective position (her working class Catholic Italian background anchors her unflinching eye for blood and paganism, her comfort in the arena of conflict), vs. the draining of all autobiographical blood from a text as done by most academes who genuinely believe that with enough time clocked at the library there can be gleaned such a things as an 'objective truth.'
I am popular with certain people, but I'm still blocked out of the establishment. I hate that incestuous world. It makes me sick. It's impossible for anything truly original to get done. Thinking is not allowed. It's all PC. It is so horrible because it is a fossilized, parasitic version of Sixties philosophy.While most academes flee from it, Paglia actually courts controversy, rocks the boat, flips it over, and laugh maniacally choking and stabbing the now senseless drowned Phoenician sailor of safe mainstream academia. The dearth of like-minded voices in the academic mainstream testifies to the accuracy of her picture, and most academics I know, agree, but not always publicly, that this guarded PC conformity is choking cultural progress. But they don't dare go public with it, in this guarded age. That's why Camille is such a one-of-a-kind natural treasure, and I place her in my personal canon right up with my favorite film critics, and hope and pray that one day she'll live up to that promise of Sexual Personae 2, Keith Richards Edition.
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