In this mechanized technological world of steel and glass, the fires of sex have to be stoked. This is why pornography must continue to play a central role in our cultural life. Pornography is a pagan arena of beauty, vitality, and brutality, of the archaic vigor of nature. It should break every rule, offend all morality. Pornography represents absolute freedom of imagination, as envisioned by the Romantic poets. In arguing that a hypothetical physical safety on the streets should take precedence over the democratic principle of free speech, MacKinnon aligns herself with the authoritarian Soviet commissars. She would lobotomize the village in order to save it.
An enlightened feminism of the twenty-first century will embrace all sexuality and will turn away from the delusionalism, sanctimony, prudery, and male-bashing of the MacKinnon-Dworkin brigade. Women will never know who they are until they let men be men. Let’s get rid of Infirmary Feminism, with its bedlam of bellyachers, anorexics, bulimics, depressives, rape victims, and incest survivors. Feminism has become a catch-all vegetable drawer where bunches of clingy sob sisters can store their moldy neuroses.
Pornography lets the body live in pagan glory, the lush, disorderly fullness of the flesh. When it defines man as the enemy, feminism is alienating women from their own bodies. MacKinnon never deals with woman as mother, lover, or whore. Snuff films are her puritan hallucinations of hellfire. She traffics in tales of terror, hysterical fantasies of death and dismemberment, which shows that she does not understand the great god Dionysus, with his terrible duality. The demons are within us. MacKinnon and Dworkin, peddling their diseased rhetoric, are in denial, and what they are blocking is life itself, in all its grandeur and messiness. Let’s send a message to the Mad Hatter and her dumpy dormouse to stop trying to run other people’s tea parties.
11
A WHITE LIBERAL WOMEN’S CONFERENCE
The United Nations conference on women will finally be under way next week in Beijing, with Hillary Rodham Clinton scheduled to attend. No matter how chaotic the proceedings or repressive China’s officials, Mrs. Clinton’s presence, along with that of tens of thousands of delegates, observers, and journalists, may already be giving courage to dissidents and could even hasten internal reform.
But what of the content of the conference itself? Is it driven by a radical feminist, “anti-family” agenda, as far-right critics have charged?
To judge by the official U.N. documents, the answer isn’t a simple no. At times, Western feminist ideology does indeed ride roughshod over the concerns of delegates from the Third World.
[The New York Times, September 1, 1995]
The documents include a 149-page “Draft Platform for Action,” the product of more than a year of intense negotiations by the U.N. Commission on the Status of Women, which faced fierce lobbying by conference delegates and special interest groups (like the Women’s Environment and Development Organization, headed by Bella Abzug). Many bracketed passages—dealing with contentious subjects like abortion and sexual orientation, which American delegates are trying to force into the platform—are still in dispute.
Then there is the glossy press kit, consisting of 60 pages of color-coded “fact sheets,” distributed by the U.N. Department of Public Information. It’s difficult to tell who actually wrote it, but the tone is strikingly doctrinaire and strident. Straightforward figures on worldwide illiteracy and life expectancy alternate with lurid headlines like “Male Power, Privilege and Control,” “Prejudiced Before Birth,” and “Occupational Segregation.”
There are absurd statistics: one chart trumpets the long-discredited fabrication that in the United States “one in five adult women has been raped.” Another chart proclaims that 92 million urban women have unsafe drinking water and 133 million lack proper sanitation—without a word about the men who presumably share these privations.
Other statistics show that 75 percent of refugees and “displaced persons” are women and children—again blotting out the men who, dead or imprisoned after fighting for their family and land, did not have the luxury of flight.
Nevertheless, the draft document, despite its mind-numbing, bureaucratic prose, has many admirable passages. Most welcome, after years of dilettantish Marxism among feminist theorists, is its frank endorsement of capitalism: commercial banking, financial management, and investment portfolios are cited as the best means to woman’s economic independence. There are also stirring calls for basic health care, the right to choose one’s spouse, and freedom from physical and sexual abuse and forced prostitution.
Yet the document is a maelstrom of clashing and perhaps irreconcilable ideologies. The delegates at Beijing come from societies at every stage of development. Thus there are surreal switches of perspective, as when harsh matters of survival—bare subsistence levels of food and water—are addressed on one page and computer access to the Internet celebrated on another.
A grotesque, paranoid picture is projected of the historical “domination over and discrimination against women by men” with their “gender-based violence.”
Men are never depicted as devoted friends or loving spouses who sacrifice for women and children. The words “father,” “husband,” and “wife” rarely appear, unlike “mother,” which is ubiquitous. Religion is scarcely mentioned; art exists only for approved social messages.
Human communication is reduced to “gender-stereotypes” and to “demeaning” and “degrading” female images in the media and pornography that are said to cause violence against women. Education curriculums, particularly in science, are “gender-biased,” undermining “girls’ self-esteem.” The main problem is society’s lack of “gender awareness.” What is needed is “gender-sensitive” government intervention, programs for “gender-impact analysis,” “affirmative action,” “centers for women’s studies,” and oversight by international organizations.
A Guatemalan delegate sent an open letter to conference organizers on behalf of Central and South American delegates, protesting the document’s heavy use of the word “gender” and demanding to know what it meant. The word is standard academic jargon for socially constructed sex roles, and the delegates were offended by its implicit denial of biological sex differences. The outcome? A 14-member committee was appointed to investigate the matter, but the language stayed.
The Beijing conference offers a superb opportunity for feminism to get back on track and to make the progressive principle of equal rights under the law its paramount concern. Much of the turmoil over the platform reflected the healthy competition of ideas in any broad political movement.
But American feminists must go to Beijing to learn, not to preach and convert. They should leave their clichéd rhetoric and male-bashing propaganda at home. A genuine multiculturalism would recognize that delegates from the Third World have a right to define women’s lives in their own terms.
12
LOOSE CANONS
WHY HAS THERE NEVER BEEN A FEMALE SHAKESPEARE? CAMILLE PAGLIA TESTS THE THEORY THAT WOMEN CAN’T WRITE POETRY
REVIEW OF GERMAINE GREER, SLIP-SHOD SIBYLS
On March 12, 1975 I made a pilgrimage to see the celebrated Germaine Greer, who was lecturing at the State University of New York at Albany, an hour’s drive from where I was teaching in Vermont. Five years earlier, Greer’s first book, The Female Eunuch, a scathing exposé of sexual images in popular culture, had electrified the nascent women’s liberation movement, and she herself, with her flamboyant clothing and bold, bawdy manner, had made an enormous splash in the American media. Greer seemed to embody the brash, mercurial spirit of a whole new generation.
[The Observer Review (London), October 8, 1995]
But the reserved, steely author who spoke to the packed hall in Albany was quite another person. All trace of humor or physicality was gone. Greer’s tenacious subject was now the deplorable economic condition of women in Pakistan. During the question period, I nervously raised my hand from the crowd and asked if Greer, a former English professor, would be writing on litera
ry subjects again soon. Her reply was stern and swift: “There are far more important things in the world than literature!”
As a proponent of Wildean aestheticism who believed, and still believes, that art is the highest achievement of humanity, I was stunned by Greer’s defection to the increasingly Stalinist ranks of feminist utilitarians. Since that moment twenty years ago, Greer has published many books—on women painters, human fertility, the menopause, and her vanished father. There have been a collection of essays and three editions of seventeenth-century women’s poetry. Aside from her slim volume on Shakespeare released a decade ago, Greer’s massive new book, Slip-Shod Sibyls, must be considered her first and long overdue major statement on general literary history and criticism.
Greer’s argument here is directed toward those feminists and their sympathizers who want the educational curriculum proportionately adjusted to reflect the contributions of women (or ethnic minorities—a red-hot controversy the book avoids). The claim has constantly been made that history was written by heterosexual white men and that, given the systematic suppression of women, there are unacknowledged female geniuses waiting to be rediscovered and restored to the canon.
This premise of contemporary feminism has been a sentimental illusion from the start. Greer rightly turns her artillery against it, and from a startling new position: she maintains that, at least in English literature, women have never been ignored or stopped from publication. On the contrary, male patrons have been all too eager to get women’s writing into print. In her view, it is coddling and condescending overpraise, not simple obstruction, that has done most damage to women poets. Treated as wondrous “freaks of nature,” they drifted into melodramatic “exhibitionism,” accepted too much intrusive advice from male mentors, and never fully developed their own voices beyond the saccharine.
Hence, Greer asserts, the absence of pre-modern female poets from the curriculum is not entirely due to sexism but rather to a lack of quality in the available material. “Women did this to themselves,” she flatly remarks. It is foolish and counterproductive for feminists to promote mediocre work merely because it is of female provenance. Greer is implicitly acknowledging that a quarter century of feminist scholarship, while reviving a host of minor figures, has failed to find a single major woman writer or artist unknown to or unheralded by the prior critical establishment. Following the Second World War, male Anglo-American academics produced a massive corpus of superb, often reverential writing on Jane Austen, Charlotte and Emily Bronte, George Eliot, Emily Dickinson, Virginia Woolf, and others. Though feminists boasted they would rewrite cultural history, they have yet to make any significant revision of the 5000-year chronology and evolution of Western artistic styles, as traditionally taught.
Greer’s new strategy of critique of feminist theory is most welcome, since for some time it has been apparent that feminism has more to fear from its own ideological excesses than from conservative political opposition. Feminist theory is a lucrative industry guaranteeing academic employment in America, where for every competent feminist book, there are twenty others shot through with inaccuracies, distortions, and propaganda. And this glut has produced no classics: only one modern feminist book—Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, over forty years old—has earned distinction in intellectual history.
As a magnum opus sweeping from Greek antiquity to the present, Slip-Shod Sibyls, in conception, tantalizingly approaches what one could imagine as a worthy sequel to de Beauvoir’s great book. The problem is that Greer has not clarified, perhaps even to herself, who her audience is. Her powerful “Prologue” is addressed to the broadest possible readership and assumes no special insider’s knowledge of feminist factionalism. If the entire book had been executed in this taut, sinewy, aggressive prose, it would have made an international sensation, and we would be toasting, in the desert of poststructuralism and postmodernism, the rebirth of serious literary criticism.
Take this magnificent sally from the book’s first page:
The fact of their sex certainly prevented middle-class women from acquiring the same kind of education as was available to men of the same class, but the usefulness of that education to the poet is far from obvious. No male poet becomes great by merely following the rules. If we ask ourselves why we have no female Blake, for example, we will have to probe deeper, beyond questions of literacy or privilege or patronage or support or even recognition. Homer and Milton were blind; can we claim that being female is a worse handicap than being blind?
In crisp passages like these, we see operating a learned, fastidious mind vastly superior to that of the pedestrian lot of women’s studies professors—or to that of the woozy slatterns and twittering triflers who have provoked Greer lately in the London media.
But Slip-Shod Sibyls has too many shifting targets, which finally limit the probable reach of the book. At times, Greer seems to be skirmishing with a handful of British literary feminists, unnamed but clearly very middlebrow and very dull. As a consequence, she neglects to lay out, and mark her battle lines in, the larger field of contemporary cultural conflict. She shows little awareness of or interest in the life-and-death quarrels that have raged for twenty years about narrative, textuality, authorship, identity, commodification, and so on. Certainly, as a master of the cut direct, she is fully capable of skewering sterile academic fads with a tossed-off phrase, but she has not taken the time to do so.
The body of the book opens with a fascinating if somewhat chaotic meditation on the image of the Muse, which has relegated woman to the role of inspirer rather than creator. One wishes both Homer’s Muse and Robert Graves’s eerie White Goddess were more fairly dealt with, but Greer’s jetting down the centuries to Sylvia Plath is exhilarating. In subsequent chapters, Greer surveys the emergence of the “poetess,” nursery rhymes, hymn-writing, pederasty, fraternal incest, and death by henbane.
The strongest critical writing in the book is on Shakespeare’s comedies (oddly off the main topic), a grisly war poem by the Duchess of Newcastle, and Christina Rossetti’s “Goblin Market”—whose repressed infantile sensuality Greer intricately and vividly reveals. The chapter on Sappho (where I am politely criticized, though evidently because Greer has missed my discussions of ancient poetry in The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics and elsewhere) repeatedly underestimates how much about classical literature can in fact be reasonably inferred from the enormous mass of contextual evidence, and then overestimates the credulity of modern scholars to romantic myths about Sappho.
In other chapters, Greer’s instincts as an editor seem at cross-purposes with the needs of her present exposition. Several seventeenth-century writers—Katherine Philips, Aphra Behn, and Anne Wharton—are treated in a plodding, bibliographic manner, but the low point of the book is an excruciating 100-page chapter on the mundane Letitia Landon that leaves one gasping for air. These chapters contain far too much lengthy quotation, plot summary, and minute textual variations that properly belong in an appendix.
The book’s signal failure is its astonishing omission of Emily Dickinson, with whom Greer is so little familiar that she praises Charlotte Mew for lines that are a blatant Dickinson pastiche. The material is too cursory on contemporary woman poets, who, even when praised, are portrayed as hysterics pushed into suicidal self-dramatization by men. Greer’s natural period is the seventeenth century, with its trumpet-like formal oratory; she seems uneasy with the lurid, sinuous, Whitman-influenced arias of the American Confessional school.
Ultimately, the author is the most interesting person in this book. When the history of modern women is written, Germaine Greer will be seen as one who, like Jane Austen, permanently redefined female intellect. Following her swift, swerving, sometimes reckless train of thought is like watching a champion slalom racer, jabbing the snow and hurtling past the trembling markers. As the world’s premier woman of letters, she is a living legend. Her new book is a pivotal contribution to the now thriving reform movement within feminism.
/> 13
MEN’S SPORTS VANISHING
A misguided interpretation of feminism is destroying men’s sports on campuses across the nation. Colgate University dropped baseball, Notre Dame University ended wrestling, and San Francisco State University canceled football. UCLA even dropped the swimming and diving program that won 16 Olympic gold medals.
Title IX, a 1972 amendment to the 1964 Civil Rights Act, has been distorted by cowardly and self-serving university administrators who are scapegoating men’s athletics instead of fighting for principle against intrusive Washington bureaucrats.
As originally conceived, Title IX was necessary to pressure slow-moving universities to expand athletic opportunities for female students. Men’s sports were lavishly funded, while women had few varsity programs. Poor equipment, part-time coaches, and no locker rooms, weight training, or transportation budget—women’s sports were separate and definitely unequal.
[USA Today, April 9, 1996]
But just as happened with affirmative action, a nobly intentioned government mandate turned into a clumsy, brutal quota system. The Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights has threatened withdrawal of federal funds from institutions that fail to demonstrate an ambiguously defined gender equity in athletics.
As the courts have interpreted it, notably in a successful 1991 lawsuit by female athletes against Brown University (which has appealed), allocations for sports must absurdly follow the exact proportion of males to females in the general undergraduate population, even though the number of men wanting to join teams far exceeds that of women.
Free Women, Free Men Page 11
