So in the late 1960s, I saw immediately—and still we have this problem, twenty years down the line from the birth of contemporary feminism—that there are two huge areas that feminism has excluded that need to be integrated within it. That’s what I’m doing. That’s my contribution. One of them that was excluded was aesthetics. Right from the start there was a problem with aesthetics, a difficulty with dealing with beauty and with art. If you think that’s an old problem, it isn’t. The present prominence of Naomi Wolf and her book indicates that what I’m criticizing is still a contemporary problem. The accolades on the back of that book from leading feminists, including Germaine Greer—who said, “This is the most important book—since my own book!”—show that that’s still an issue.
So: aesthetics. Because one of my earliest faculties was my responsiveness to beauty. I think it may be something innate in Italians, I honestly think it may be. There’s an art thing, an art gene that we’ve got. Early on, I was in love with beauty. I don’t feel less because I’m in the presence of a beautiful person. I don’t go [imitates crying and dabbing tears], “Oh, I’ll never be that beautiful!” What a ridiculous attitude to take!—the Naomi Wolf attitude. When men look at sports, when they look at football, they don’t go [crying], “Oh, I’ll never be that fast, I’ll never be that strong!” When people look at Michelangelo’s David, do they commit suicide? No. See what I mean? When you see a strong person, a fast person, you go, “Wow! That is fabulous.” When you see a beautiful person: “How beautiful.” That’s what I’m bringing back to feminism. You go, “What a beautiful person, what a beautiful man, what a beautiful woman, what beautiful hair, what beautiful boobs!” Okay, now I’ll be charged with sexual harassment, probably. I won’t even be able to get out of the room!
We should not have to apologize for reveling in beauty. Beauty is an eternal human value. It was not a trick invented by nasty men in a room someplace on Madison Avenue. I say in Sexual Personae that it was invented in Egypt. For 3,000 years at the height of African civilization you had a culture based on beauty. We have two major cultures in the world today, France and Japan, organized around the idea of beauty. It is so provincial, feminism’s problem with beauty. We have got to get over this. Obviously, any addiction—like if you’re addicted to plastic surgery—that’s a problem. Of course it’s a problem. Addiction to anything is a problem. But this blaming anorexia on the media—this is Naomi’s thing—oh please! Anorexia is coming out of these white families, these pushy, perfectionist white families, who all end up with their daughters at Yale. Naomi arrives in England, and “Gee, all the women Rhodes scholars have eating disorders. Gee, it must be … the media!” Maybe it’s that you are a parent-pleasing, teacher-pleasing little kiss-ass! Maybe you’re a yuppie! Maybe you, Miss Yuppie, have figured out the system. Isn’t it interesting that Miss Naomi, the one who has succeeded in the system, the one who has been given the prizes by the system, she who is the princess of the system, she’s the one who’s bitchin’ about it? I’m the one who’s been poor and rejected—shouldn’t I be the one bitching about it? No—because I’m a scholar, okay, and she’s a twit!
The second area where feminism is deficient is in its psychology. Right from the start, Kate Millett banned Freud as a sexist. And so we have this horror that has arisen over the last twenty years of feminism trying to build a sex theory without Freud, one of the greatest masters, one of the great analysts of human personality in history. Now, you don’t have to assent to Freud. I don’t read Freud and go, “Oh, wow, he is the ultimate word on the human race”—that’s not how I read! I follow him, and I go, “This is interesting. Now maybe he needs to be supplemented.” So I’ll supplement from wherever—a little bit from Jung, a little bit from Frazer, whom I very much admire, sometimes from astrology. I mean, I find all kinds of things everywhere. Soap opera—I love soap opera—Lana Turner—I’ll take it from anywhere. I’m very syncretic. I’m very eclectic. But I mean Freud has to be the basis of any psychology. We should be reading him first, not these minor women, and build up from there. All this obsession with “Well, did you read Jeffrey Masson’s thing on the seduction theory?” Oh, please, who cares? All this “Let’s unmask Big Daddy”—this obsession with the weaknesses of big figures. This is infantile. It’s infantile. You read major figures not because everything they say is the gospel truth but because they expand your imagination, they expand your IQ, okay, they open up brain cells you didn’t even know you have.
So we have these two large areas: we have aesthetics missing from contemporary feminism and we have psychology. It’s an incoherent psychology right now. Another thing, I feel, and others might not agree, is that its politics is also naive, a politics which blames all human problems on white male imperialists who have victimized women and people of color. This view of history is coming from people who know nothing about history. Because when you think of the word “imperialist,” if you automatically just think “America,” then you don’t know anything. Because someone who’s studied the history of ancient Egypt knows that imperialism was practically invented in Egypt and in the ancient Near East. If you want to talk about imperialism, let’s talk about Japan or Persia or all kinds of things. It’s not just a white male monopoly.
What we need, you see, is really systematic training in political science and history. It’s obvious there’s a need for this now. There was, following the Sixties, an appetite for history, but the people in academe were not willing to do the work necessary to master history and anthropology and so on. Instead, it was sort of like, “Hey, we need history! Let’s see. Oh—there’s Foucault!” It was sort of like that. It’s sort of like ducks when they’re born—the first thing they see, you know? So if they see a vacuum cleaner, they think it’s their mother. They’ll follow the vacuum cleaner. That’s what happened. Foucault is the vacuum cleaner that everyone followed.
All I can say is thank God, by the time Lacan and Foucault appeared on the cultural landscape, I had already done all my preparations. I had been reading very deeply not only in college but especially during graduate school in the Yale library, so by the time they arrived I was intellectually prepared to see how specious they are. And therefore it never affected me. And now, of course, there are people who spent twenty years of their lives on these characters, and now, of course, they’re a little irritated when someone says, “Oh, that was a waste.” It’s sort of like a period where people were told, because they had no taste of their own, that they should furnish their house in zebra Naugahyde furniture. So they went heavily into this, okay, their whole house is furnished in it. Then suddenly, twenty years down the road, someone like me appears and says, “Guess what—that’s out now. Not only that, but it was in terrible taste to begin with.” So you can see why they’re mad at me. They’re mad because they’re stuck with that furniture! They have twenty years of furniture!
But time for something new. I think, you know, that there’s something happening. I can really feel it. Like for twenty years, no one would listen to me. I just hit a wall. No one heard what I was saying, no one understood anything about what my book was doing, people just looked at me with blank faces. And suddenly people are listening. It’s not me that’s changed. The culture is changing. Something is happening. It’s a twenty-year astrological cycle that’s happening. I was very moved, a few months ago—Arsenio had on the Fifth Dimension, reunited! The Fifth Dimension, which had quarreled, the catfights, all that, they had reunited, and they were singing “Aquarius” on Arsenio! I was very moved! I said, “Something is happening. The Sixties are coming back.” Some of the lines of that song I really identify with: “The mind’s true liberation.” This is what I stand for: “The mind’s true liberation.”
And unfortunately what’s happening today, with this kind of very sanctimonious and sermonizing talk about sex that’s coming out of the rape counselors and so on, people do not realize, with all their good intentions, how oppressive this is to sex, what a disaster this is to the mind,
what a disaster this is to the spirit, to allow the rape counselors to take over the cultural stage. Now the work that they do is good, and it’s wonderful that they’re there. But we cannot have this scenario being projected of male rapaciousness and brutality and female victim-age. We have got to make women realize they are responsible, that sexuality is something that belongs to them. They have an enormous power in their sexuality. It’s up to them to use it correctly and to be wise about where they go and what they do. And I’m accused of being “anti-woman” because of this attitude? Because I’m bringing common sense back to the rape discourse?
Now when people say to me, “Oh, you’re always talking about feminists as if they’re monolithic. We’re not monolithic. We’re very pluralistic. We have so many different views.” No, excuse me: the date-rape issue shows that I am correct. Because there is one voice speaking about date rape from coast to coast, one voice, one stupid, shrewish, puritanical, sermonizing, hysterical voice. And where are all these sophisticated feminists supposedly out there? Where are they? Totally impotent, locked in their little burrows wherever they are, whether they’re in the East Village or Harvard. Wherever they are, they’re impotent. There’s not one voice raised to bring some sense into this hysteria. Now, I am an experienced teacher. I sympathize with the problems of freshmen, and so I believe that date-rape awareness is an excellent thing to do when students arrive, not only for the men, to warn the men that breaches of civilized behavior will not be tolerated, but also to warn the women. …
The idea that feminism is the first group that ever denounced rape is a gross libel to men. Throughout history, rape has been condemned by honorable men. Honorable men do not murder; honorable men do not steal; honorable men do not rape. It goes all the way back through history. Tarquin’s rape of Lucretia caused the fall of the tyrants and the beginning of the Roman Republic. This idea that somehow suddenly feminism miraculously found out that women were being exploited and raped through history is ridiculous. We have got to remove things like rape from the women’s studies context and pull it back into ethics. It belongs in ethics. We have to ask how should everyone—not just men—how should everyone be trained as a child to behave in society. We must put it in a general philosophical context. This idea of focusing in, suddenly, at the freshman year of college—it’s too late! Guess what—you’re not going to convert anyone with a few films on date-rape education, a few demonstrations, and a few pamphlets being passed out. You’re not going to change anyone’s mind. Look—ethics has always condemned such abuses. You do not have this endless series of atrocities through history. Men have also protected women. Men have given women sustenance. Men have provided for women. Men have died to defend the country for women. We must look back and acknowledge what men have done for women.
Men’s creation of the technological world of today has made me possible. I remember my paternal grandmother on the back porch in Endicott, scrubbing the clothes on a washboard. She had nine children. I remember that. I, her granddaughter, could have the leisure to write this book, thanks to the technological world and modern capitalism, which has such a bad rep. Look around the world, okay, and see what the reality is. Oh, I thank God I was born an American, I thank God. When I got to Europe—I feel the smog of convention hanging everywhere in Europe, even in England, which is a very free-speaking and free-thinking country. In America, woman is at her freest. Never in history have women been freer than they are here. And this idea, this bitching, bitching, kvetching about capitalism and America and men, this whining—it’s infantile, it’s an adolescent condition, it’s bad for women. It’s very, very bad to convince young women that they have been victims and that their heritage is nothing but victimization. This is another perversion.
8
THE STRANGE CASE OF CLARENCE THOMAS AND ANITA HILL
Anita Hill is no feminist heroine. A week ago, in the tense climax of the Senate Judiciary Committee’s hearings into the nomination of Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court, the important issue of sexual harassment, one of the solid innovations of contemporary feminism, was used and abused for political purposes.
In an atrocious public spectacle worthy of the show trials of a totalitarian regime, uncorroborated allegations about verbal exchanges ten years old were paraded on the nation’s television screens. The Judiciary Committee should have thoroughly investigated the charges but conducted the proceedings privately. It was an appalling injustice to both Anita Hill and Clarence Thomas to pit them and their supporters against each other. The Senate turned itself into the Roman Colosseum, with decadent, jaded patricians waving thumbs down over a blood-drenched arena.
[The Philadelphia Inquirer, October 21, 1991]
Five years ago, because of the absence of a sexual harassment policy at my university, I initiated a workshop on the question in my women’s studies class. I collected sexual harassment guidelines and documents from Philadelphia-area universities, distributed them to the class, and guided the formulation of proposals, which we presented to the dean. Such guidelines are crucial not only to warn potential offenders but to help women stand their ground in specific encounters. In our democratic society, however, we must also protect the rights of the accused. Frivolous claims of misconduct do occur.
I listened carefully to Anita Hill’s testimony at the Senate hearings. I found her to be sincere and intelligent. But I reject her claim of sexual harassment. What exactly transpired between her and Clarence Thomas we can never know. That Hill was distressed by references to sex may indeed be the case. But since they were never threatening and never led to pressure for a date, I fail to see how they constitute sexual harassment. Many religious men, as well as women, find conversations about sex or pornography inappropriate and unacceptable. This is not a gender issue. It is our personal responsibility to define what we will and will not tolerate.
The sexual revolution of my Sixties generation broke the ancient codes of decorum that protected respectable ladies from profanation by foul language. We demanded an end to the double standard. What troubles me about the “hostile workplace” category of sexual harassment policy is that women are being returned to their old status of delicate flowers who must be protected from assault by male lechers. It is anti-feminist to ask for special treatment for women.
America is still burdened by its Puritan past, which erupts again and again in public scenarios of sexual inquisition, as in Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter. If Anita Hill was thrown for a loop by sexual banter, that’s her problem. If by the age of twenty-six, as a graduate of the Yale Law School, she could find no convincing way to signal her displeasure and disinterest, that’s her deficiency. We cannot rely on rigid rules and regulations to structure everything in our lives. There is a blurry line between our professional and private selves. We are sexual beings, and as Freud demonstrated, eroticism pervades every aspect of our consciousness.
Hill woodenly related the content of conversations without any reference to their context or tone. The senators never asked about joking, smiles, facial expressions, hers as well as his. Every social encounter is a game being played by two parties. I suspect Hill’s behavior was compliant and, to use her own word about a recent exchange with a Thomas friend, “passive.” Judging by her subsequent cordial behavior toward Thomas, Hill chose to put her career interests above feminist principle. She went along to get along. Hence it is hypocritical of her, ten years later, to invoke feminist principle when she did not have the courage to stand on it before. For feminists to make a heroine out of Hill is to insult all those other women who have taken a bolder, more confrontational course and forfeited career advantage.
In this case, the sexual harassment issue was a smoke screen, cynically exploited to serve another issue, abortion rights. Although I am firmly pro-choice, I think there should be no single-issue litmus test for nominees to the Supreme Court. And the strategy backfired. Thomas, who had seemed bland and evasive for the prior hundred days of the hearings, emerged under fire with vastl
y increased stature. He was passionate, forceful, dignified.
Make no mistake: it was not a White House conspiracy that saved this nomination. It was Clarence Thomas himself. After eight hours of Hill’s testimony, he was driven as low as any man could be. But step by step, with sober, measured phrases, he regained his position and turned the momentum against his accusers. It was one of the most powerful moments I have ever witnessed on television. Giving birth to himself, Thomas reenacted his own credo of the self-made man.
9
THE NURSERY SCHOOL CAMPUS: THE CORRUPTING OF THE HUMANITIES IN THE U.S.
Is there intellectual life in America? At present, the answer is no. Since the decline of the great era of literary journalism, when Edmund Wilson, the Algonquin wits, and the politically engaged Partisan Review writers were active, America has lacked a general literate culture hospitable to ideas. Mary McCarthy went off to Paris, and Susan Sontag, after half-a-dozen promising years, withdrew into French preciosity and irrelevance. When she was attacked for her laudable interest in pop culture, Sontag dropped it like a hot potato and has never since regained the status she enjoyed in the 1960s.
During that decade, a vital artistic and intellectual consciousness was taking shape. Passionate, prophetic voices, heirs to the visionary tradition of Emerson, Whitman, and Hart Crane, spoke in the central works of Allen Ginsberg, Norman O. Brown, and Leslie Fiedler, but they had few successors. The actual achievements of 1960s thinkers were few and limited, and the line of continuity was broken.
Free Women, Free Men Page 9
