CP is asexual...like the Teletubbies, but unlike them, CP was driven to self-loathing by Catholicism...here's Camille!
Enjoy!
Interview with the Vamp
Why Camille Paglia hates affirmative action, defends Rush Limbaugh, and respects Ayn Rand...
Interviewed by Virginia I. Postrel
Hurricane Camille swept into American culture five years ago with the publication of Sexual Personae, a learned 800-page treatise on sex, art, and literature through the ages. After two decades of rejection and obscurity, Camille Paglia was famous. Her demanding master work wasn't exactly accessible to the educated lay reader, but it became a bestseller--as have her subsequent reader-friendly essay collections "Sex, Art, and American Culture" and "Vamps & Tramps". The secret to her celebrity is Paglia's own persona--a blend of comedienne, scholar, con-troversialist, self-promoter, and performance artist. Her speeches are events, designed as much to entertain as to provoke and inform. And, as she herself has remarked, the times have been friendly to comic-serious iconoclasts who capitalize on
their egomania: Rush Limbaugh, Howard Stern, Ross Perot, Camille Paglia. The public is sick of pious discourse. But not of ideas. Amid Paglia's tirades and comic turns are serious thoughts about art,
scholarship, politics, and civilization itself.
Some are fully developed, others mostly attitude.
But they are all interesting.
Despite the detractors who deride her as a con-servative antifeminist, Paglia is clearly a woman of the left--How many conservatives use "white middle-class" as a term of derision?--and an unreconstructed advocate of women's achieve-ment and independence.
She has, however, been tempered by time and experience, forced to
rec-ognize the constraints of nature and the limits of radical change.
Amid her celebrity, Paglia still teaches classes and gives exams at The University of the Arts in Philadelphia where she's a professor of humani-ties.
Editor Virginia Postrel talked by phone with Paglia in early April.
Reason: Last weekend, feminist groups led by the National Organization for Women held a rally in Washington to protest "Violence Against Women," a category in which they included such things as rolling back affirmative action. What did you think of that?
Camille Paglia: "NOW is pretty desperate at this point. One of the things I'm most proud of since I came on the scene five years ago is that I have managed finally to get it fully established to the media that one can be a feminist and fully uphold the great progressive principles of the feminist movement of the last 200 years without being part of NOW or even approving of NOW. I just hate the present NOW. In terms of affirmative action, I am stunned to see affirmative action, which was one ofthe great no-nos in the national debate, suddenly come to the fore. When I gave the lecture at MIT in September of 1991, one of my first public appearances--I went on for hours, thousands of people turned out, it was very turbulent, people were yelling--well, that night with enormous trepidation, toward the conclusion of the lecture, I said, "I know this is going to be extremely controversial, but I feel that minority designations are
short-sighted and they have outlived their usefulness. They should be dropped." I'm telling you, I was practically in a sweat to raise that issue. But I regard affirmative action as pernicious--a system that had wonderful ideals when it started but was almost immediately abused for the benefit of white middle-class women. And the number one sign of it is in the universities. The elite schools were destroyed by affirmative action for women, not for blacks. I want to see more African Americans everywhere, but I do not want to see any kind of quota system. The way the Ivy League just absolutely, servilely pursued candidates because of the nature of their gonads, not
the nature of their mental life or of their intellectual accomplishments: Every single humanities department faculty in the Ivy League was polluted and destroyed by affirmative action in the '70s and '80s, and we are paying the price for it now."
Reason: You repeatedly call yourself a Clinton Democrat. What do you mean by that?
Paglia: "I can't help it. I like him. I know he is a terrible administrator. He has very bad judgment in choosing staff. I'd like to fire the whole staff. I know I just cannot blame the staff, because he's responsible for choosing them.
But I liked the Clintons in the campaign. I thought they were a great power couple. I think that he needed her to be around him, because she is shrewder than he about a lot of things. He needs her to be like the mastermind, to discipline staff and keep him on a schedule. And I think that the fall of the Clintons came the moment he split her off from himself and put her in charge, very hubristically, of health care. A job for which she had no real credentials, a process in which she behaved like Evita Peron and totally lost my respect--the secrecy and the high handedness, the arrogance, the simplistic political
judgments that brought down the whole enterprise. I've never left behind the larger principles of the Clinton Democrats."
Reason: What do you believe are the larger principles?
Paglia: "I believe that we are suffering from a false polarization of liberal versus conservative in this country, and what is needed by the '60s generation, to which the Clintons and I belong, is a kind of rethinking. To say in effect: We uphold the great liberal and progressive principles of the '60s, which would be racial harmony, equal rights for women, toleration of gay lifestyles, and so on.
But at the same time, to acknowledge the excesses of the '60s--the way there was a total breakdown of law and order, a self-destruction by drugs. (And I support legalization of drugs even while I can see the damage that was wrought to my generation through drugs.) How the sexual revolution ended in AIDS. Again, I uphold all pagan expressions of sex. And at the same time I say that this is the way nature reacts toward unrestrained promiscuous sex, that the evidence was there in the history of syphilis. It's not true that AIDS came out of nowhere. I feel that Clinton was beautifully positioned to lead a kind of national discussion on these issues.
Leftism should be about the people. That's how it began. Instead, what it has become in the last 20 years is a white upper-middle-class elitism which preaches to the people and says, "Oh, you don't agree with us? You're homophobic, you're so uneducated. You're in the darkness. You need us to bring light and truth to you." I hate that paternalistic, condescending kind of stuff that's coming out of this lawyer-heavy elite structure of the Democratic Party in Washington."
Reason: You also call yourself a libertarian. What do you mean by that?
Paglia: "I consider myself not a conservative libertarian but a radical '60s libertarian."
Reason: How would you differentiate those two categories?
Paglia: "I believe that government should confine itself to the public realm and that it should be as stripped down as possible, within reason. It should not be burdened by excess bureaucracy.
I feel that government has no right to intrude into the private realm of consensual behavior. Therefore, I say that I'm for the abolition of all sodomy laws.
I'm for abortion rights.
I'm for the legalization of drugs--consistent with alcohol regulations. I'm for not just the decriminalization but the legalization of prostitution. Again, prostitutes must not intrude into the public realm. I think it's perfectly reasonable to say that civil authorities have the right to say that prostitutes should not be loitering near schools, or on the steps of churches, or blocking entrances to buildings and so on. Prostitution should be perfectly legal, but it cannot interfere with other people's access to the public realm.
Furthermore, the public realm is not owned by Judeo-Christianity. It is shared by people of all cultural and religious backgrounds. Therefore, I'm arguing for the Greco-Roman or pagan line, which is very tolerant of homosexuality and even of man-boy love. I've argued controversially for a reduction in the age of consent to 14--there are some countries in the world that do have that. I'm open to considering even lowering it further.
That's the way I would be separate from a conservative libertarian, who would not necessarily take the position of the legalization of drugs or the very positive attitude I have toward prostitutes and pornographers and drag queens. I take a celebratory attitude toward them. Similarly, I think that most conservative libertarians would not
agree with my idea of lowering the age of consent and so on."
Reason: Most libertarians, however you modify the word, would include other issues also, including free markets for things besides sex, drugs, and popular culture.
Paglia: "In the first chapter of Sexual Personae, I made a defense of capitalism. I feel that capitalism has a very bad press with the pseudo-leftists who clog our best college campuses and that in point of fact capitalism has produced modern individualism and feminism. Modern capitalism has allowed the birth of the independent woman who is no longer economically dependent on her husband. I despise the sneering that our liberal humanists do about capitalism even while they enjoy all of its pleasures and conveniences. I just despise it.
However, I do believe that capitalism is inherently Darwinian and that a totally free market is ultimately inhumane, because you'll have what happened in the 19th century--a kind of piling up of profits at the very top, with working-class people falling way below. I do think that there should be some kind of safety net, that we should not tolerate, in an affluent society, extreme levels of poverty or deprivation. At the same time, I think that the way that the welfare state has developed is just atrocious. It's part of the condescension and paternalism and the guilt of the affluent white upper-middle class to say: "Oh, they'll be taken care of." And so we have that huge culture of dependency which is suddenly, shockingly being broken, just like affirmative action. I never dreamed of the speed with which these issues which have been so long suppressed have come to the fore, and it seems like anything is possible now.
I think it's a very exciting time; I only regret it's not my party, the Democratic Party, that started this whole process. Because Clinton was elected for change. I wish that he had taken the aggressive tack the Republicans have of really investigating every single bureaucracy, stripping it down.
I despise bureaucrats. I despise administrators. That has been one of the most pernicious effects of the post-war years in academe. There has been an overgrowth of an arrogant master class of administrators on college campuses who are being paid twice the level of the salaries of the faculty and regard themselves as being in charge and everyone else as being their lackeys. What the Republicans are doing in Washington, looking at the federal government, I want people to be doing on the college campuses--to have a thoroughgoing review of this parasitic class of administrators."
Reason: One of the strangest things about the response to you is how you've been embraced by conservatives--not libertarians, actual conservatives, even those who would abhor many of your views.
Because CP "despises" Women...easy one!
Paglia: "I wouldn't say I've been totally taken up by them because after all I'm attacked in Commentary--Elizabeth Kristol attacked me.
I love the way Vamps & Tramps was attacked by both Commentary and The Nation, from right and left.
But I think that many conservatives, like many priests, seem to like me. I don't think it's because they agree with my views but because they are just invigorated by my discourse. I've constantly said, about Rush Limbaugh, for example--even though he and I don't agree politically, I have always respected him because I feel that he is a principled thinker--I think that any true intellectual finds it stimulating to listen to a principled thinker, a person who has a vigorous independent mind, a new way of approaching contemporary issues. It helps you to reexamine your assumptions and firm up your
assumptions. And I think that's what's missing from our culture right now. For example, in early 1994 I was invited to speak at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, and there was a dinner with the policy fellows, about 50 people in the room. Highfalutin' media people and academic people. During this meal, Rush Limbaugh came up casually--some woman who was a radio person in Connecticut mentioned that her competition was Rush Limbaugh, and there was a snicker throughout the entire room. Well, I lost it, I went totally bananas. I lit into them, and I said: "This is outrageous, this kind of demonization of Rush Limbaugh! How many people in this room have actually listened to his program?" One hand, all right? "How many people here have looked at his books, which are bestsellers?" No one. "You are supposed to be here at the Kennedy School of Government as experts in contemporary politics, contemporary cultural issues,
right? Do you understand that when you have that attitude toward Rush Limbaugh, you are insulting and demeaning and excluding the millions of his listeners? There's an entire world out there in America that you have no knowledge of!" Of course, everything I said that evening was a prophecy, because later in the year when the Republican sweep went through and Rush Limbaugh was celebrated in Washington, I'm sure my words came back to haunt many of those people. Suddenly all the media were like, "What happened? We don't understand any of this at all!" Anyone who had been listening to Rush Limbaugh, monitoring what was going on on The Rush Limbaugh Show with an open mind, would not have been surprised with the Republican sweep. One saw it building for years. There was no surprise in that sweep to anyone who had been intelligent enough to be interested in the general culture outside of this Washington-New York-Cambridge insular, arrogant little coterie."
Reason: You're proud to say you watch television.
Paglia: "I love television. I love soap operas. I love The Young and the Restless. It's my favorite show. I love everything about television. The ads. I love the glitzy part of TV. I love Hard Copy. I learn a lot of things from Hard Copy. You'd be surprised. Television
to me is the culture.
In point of fact, that is where politics is being decided, for good or for ill. The TV screen is now like the national community forum. It's a way that people test out candidates. Without television, Clinton could have never won the presidency. We watched him being tested over time. I just don't believe that television has been negative. In fact Marshall McLuhan quite correctly pointed out--a thought I had independently--that Hitler could never have risen if television had existed, because Hitler would not work well on TV. He was primarily an
orator. If you really look at him up close, he looks ridiculous. So I think especially now with C-SPAN--my God, what a change! C-SPAN has allowed us to really look unedited at major news events, even minor news events, and then to compare how they're reported on the major network news shows. We see that kind of naked bias and manipulation of the news that I was very aware of as a student of TV and an admirer of
TV."
Reason: In a lot of your writings, you have at best an ambivalent and at the extreme a very hostile view of the professional workplace, of office life. I'm curious about that.
Paglia: "I've had a tremendous struggle, just because of my personality type, with doing well in that kind of a group situation. I feel very claustrophobic in an office environment. One of the first jobs that I got fired from was at a payroll office. I hated being in this large room with other people. I got fired because I wasn't good at it. What I am talking about is the committees that I have been forced to sit on in the academy. I do not work well in meetings or committees. I'm an inflammatory type. I get very impatient. I think people are wasting time. My attitude toward committees is, "Just give me all the work and I'll do it! I'll do it in less time than it takes us to talk about what we're going to do!" I'm terrible. It's not that I have a hostility to office life, it's just that I'm personally temperamentally unsuited to that kind of just sitting there for hours letting your rear end go dead. I'm very restless physically. I want to be moving. I don't like to be kept in a room with people for that long. I'm also very aware why very masculine men are not represented in academe. Very masculine men cannot sit still long enough. And so all the ideology of feminism is coming out of these women who are married to wordsmith men, who are not that combative or confrontational to begin with, because the really masculine men, the high-testosterone men, are so restless they can hardly sit still in class. I'm very, very worried about this new kind of bourgeois imperialism which predicates the ultimate human type as someone who is good at sitting still at a desk."
Reason: Schools have rewarded that for a century.
Paglia: "Well, here's the point. My father's generation, the Italian immigrants--my father was born here but my mother was born in Italy--they were leaving school earlier. The boys who were really restless were leaving school at 14."
Reason: People who were leaving school at 14 were not becoming college professors.
Paglia: "I know that. What I'm saying is that in terms of ideology, sexual politics, we're getting a biased view. People of the white upper-middle-class professional elite have very little direct contact
with working-class men, even though the working-class men are everywhere around them and are keeping everything going. They are the ones who are the janitors, the construction workers, the plumbers, the police and firemen, and so on. It's everywhere. But the world that those men have created works so well, they maintain it so assiduously,
that there has been a contempt on the part of these complacent, pampered, coddled upper-middle-class people who are spouting a lot of this rhetoric. There's this arrogance that masculinity isn't something that we need anymore--this is the Gloria Steinem line: Masculinity is something that is pernicious and is the cause of all wars and destruction and violence and battering against women, and slowly we're going to be programming it out of our youth. I said it in the Playboy interview: All it takes is one natural disaster for that entire artificial world to come crumbling down, and suddenly everyone will be screaming and yelling for the plumbers and the construction workers. Only masculine men of the working class will hold the civilization together."
Reason: Since you're always ragging on WASPy middle-class people, let me ask you about two different feminists in the public eye. One is your friend and mine, Christina Sommers [author of Who Stole Feminism?], who is a very nice, WASPy, bourgeois, conventional academic. And the other is Naomi Wolf [author of The Beauty Myth and
Fire with Fire], who is the ethnic daughter of Berkeley bohemian leftists, who insists on telling the world in the pages of The New Republic the details of her sex life and who doesn't have a regular job. Yet it is Christina Sommers who is the rigorous critic of
victimhood feminism, and Wolf is its darling. How does that fit into your anti-middle-class schema?
Paglia: "Number one, there are two different generations. Christina Hoff Sommers is my generation, so she's coming out of the '60s revolution. She's a very independent-minded woman. Christina Sommers, as I made clear in the introduction to Vamps & Tramps, was out on the scene before my first book ever made it into print. In the late '80s, she was already out there, fighting hand-to-hand in the professional philosophers association against the encroachment of a certain type of propagandistic feminism. She was one of the earliest people who wrote to me to express her support of my work and to pass on to me all these documents about her struggles in the American Philosophical Association. She is one of the most courageous women of my generation.
She went out single-handedly without even Paglia out there to take some of the abuse. Her spirit is actually the '60s spirit. She's someone who believed when she entered professional philosophy that women should achieve at the highest levels that had been established by men of the past. She believes with me that the proper education for young women is exposure to the greatest that has been thought, the greatest that has been written or achieved in the history of the arts, in philosophy, and so on. One does not go around finding fifth-rate works by women or 10th-rate works by women and using up precious college time in women's education for that.
Secondly, Naomi Wolf. One of my criticisms of Naomi Wolf is that, excuse me, the portrait of her parents as left-wing is one of her pieces of propaganda. Her father, if you just read his prose, is a very sober, learned man, a traditional scholar. And this is part of
Naomi Wolf's propaganda about her life. Next, one of my major criticisms of Naomi is that she has drifted from any kind of ethnic
affiliation. I have constantly said this about her, Susan Faludi, or Gloria Steinem: tha these women are not identifiably anything. Feminism has become their entire metaphysical, religious, and cultural world view. But feminism is not sufficiently developed as a system yet--at least it wasn't before me! What I'm trying to do is add aesthetics and psychology to the very narrow kind of ideology that these women are fanatically promulgating.
That's one of my criticisms of Naomi, that she's so WASPized. She has adopted this WASP manner, OK? It's a completely bland, white-bread, upwardly mobile manner,OK. There's nothing Jewish about her. That's one of my charges against her--that she's simply a yuppie.
Meanwhile--in fact, I couldn't believe Playboy put this in--they cut my whole philosophy of feminism to leave space for my theories about Naomi Wolf's hair! I'm saying that without her hair she would never have gotten attention at all. There were a million books like that, The Beauty Myth--a lot of books. It was only her hair that gave her cachet. People remembered her hair, and the male reporters thought she was hot, and she spent a lot of time sticking her boobs in people's face. She's done this seductive number on men for her entire career. Her primary style of approach is seduction. Her thinking is completely incoherent, as opposed to someone like Katie Roiphe [author of The Morning After], who in my view is a true intellectual who has a very, very fine book. She is the first intellectual of her generation, and I hope she can survive psychologically after the devastating and malicious attacks on her by the feminist establishment, like that bitch Katha Pollitt, the biggest Stalinist of them all, in The New
Yorker--a lying piece of defamatory prose that I hope she burns in hell for. I have constantly said that Katie Roiphe's book is a wonderful description, from the inside, of the American bourgeois mind. I think that's the way she should have been packaged by her publisher. Naomi Wolf--whatever the prevailing wind is, Naomi Wolf will go with it. So she was pushing P.C. feminism, and all of a sudden it turned out, "Gee, the Paglia brand of anti-P.C. feminism is more popular. I think I'll go in that direction now!" So then her next
book completely reverses the last book. No one notices, because her readers are all nincompoops--they don't notice anything."
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