Free Women, Free Men

by Camille Paglia

  A rich and dynamic popular culture also has overwhelmed the pallid, moralistic messages of academic feminism. For example, Madonna’s embrace of pornographic scenarios and glamorous high fashion has subverted not “patriarchal hegemonic categories” (as tone-deaf humanities professors still like to say) but puritanical, MacKinnon-style feminism (which by this point is close to comatose). Since Madonna, younger women no longer feel that makeup and sexy outfits are incompatible with feminism. Progress has been especially striking in the gay world: the “lipstick lesbians” of the early 1990s, who first emerged on the West Coast, broke the stereotype of the dour, preachy, overall-clad, granola-eating lesbian feminist. The cover of Hot, Throbbing Dykes to Watch Out For, the latest book by Alison Bechdel, a lesbian syndicated cartoonist, says it all: the erotica shelves of a feminist bookstore are shown bulging with titles perused by eager shoppers, while the small section labeled “Feminist Theory” is nearly bare and filled with cobwebs.

  We are left, then, with the duty to restructure gender studies to bring the field into line with recent cultural changes and the educational needs of the next century. It is an unhappy fact that women’s studies programs sprang into existence without the most elementary intellectual or scholarly oversight. Furthermore, many of them have been conducted as autocratic fiefdoms, insulated from critique on their own campuses and connected to each other nationally by a network of self-interested operatives who control hiring, grants, and publications.

  Reasonable, well-intentioned feminists do exist on campus, but they cannot pretend that they are typical or that, before I launched my attack in 1990 in my book Sexual Personae and in the media, they dared to speak publicly about their discontent. Those who believe academic feminists are tolerant and open to dissent have never challenged the thought police, as both the philosopher Christina Hoff Sommers and I have done, walking into hostile mob scenes that no sane person would think possible on an American campus. Sommers’s 1994 book Who Stole Feminism? How Women Have Betrayed Women has been subjected to malicious and baseless attack by politically correct academics.

  What should be the credentials for an instructor of women’s studies? Faculty members and administrators have been utterly cowardly in their refusal to confront this question. Because women’s studies as an academic entity was a product of the 1970s, its senior practitioners reflect the already hardened, male-bashing ideology of that period, with its disrespect for science as well as great art. Those whose feminism predates the 1970s have been out of sync with and often ostracized by academic feminism from the start. Critics who claim that I am anti-feminist, for example, ignore the fact that my own feminism goes back to my letter published by Newsweek in July 1963, demanding “equal opportunity for American women.”

  A foundation in basic science should be required of anyone teaching gender issues to undergraduates. Familiarity with traditional, rigorous research techniques in history, sociology, and anthropology is also necessary; the literary training of many of today’s academic feminists is simply not enough. Postmodernism, a glitzy, game-playing style promulgated by incestuous humanities centers and that rubbish factory, Routledge, is a terrible preparation for gender studies, which requires patient, accurate observation of ordinary life.

  A first step that colleges and universities can take to reduce cronyism and insure accountability is to insist that gender studies courses honestly represent all sides in the debate. If dissident feminists and conservative critics of feminism are not included in the readings, students are getting indoctrination, not education.

  Second, gender studies must break out of the ghetto of academic publishing. Faculty members should consider assigning the kind of general-release books whose sales in the many millions indicate that they have struck a chord with the mass audience: Deborah Tannen’s You Just Don’t Understand: Women and Men in Conversation; John Gray’s Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus; and even the comedian Tim Allen’s Don’t Stand Too Close to a Naked Man.

  These popular books, with their quirky humor, draw upon the wisdom of actual experience to present a picture of sexual relations far more persuasive than anything current academic theorists have yet produced.

  16

  GRIDIRON FEMINISM

  This week, after being written off for dead in a month-long flurry of grumpy magazine articles, the National Football League stormed back and retook center stage.

  On Sunday, the Philadelphia Eagles left their execrable preseason and lackluster opener behind in a stunning upset of the reigning Super Bowl champions, the Green Bay Packers. Then on Monday night, the tenacious Kansas City Chiefs outmuscled the dangerous Oakland Raiders, the street fighters of the league.

  These two scrappy, physical games—both decided in the final, thrilling seconds of play—demonstrate that football is still America’s premier sport. While the game may never regain the mass popularity it enjoyed in the 1970s, neither baseball, basketball, soccer, nor ice hockey shows any sign of displacing football from the national psyche.

  [The Wall Street Journal, September 12, 1997]

  In recent years, there have been escalating attacks from bleeding-heart liberals and politically correct feminists, who condemn football for its inculcation of violence and misogyny, allegedly encouraging a climate of date rape and domestic violence. Football has also been targeted by campus special-interest groups who object to its devouring of the lion’s share of athletic department budgets, to the detriment of women’s sports (none of which consistently draw football’s massive, ticket-buying crowds of both sexes).

  I would argue instead not only that football is congruent with an enlightened feminism but that football is one of the best educational tools for showing women how to advance in the “hostile workplace”—which current sexual harassment regulations try to control through intrusive, after-the-fact legal remedies.

  Football is a living encyclopedia of military strategy, the intricate patterns of offense and defense in the art of warfare first systematized in the Greco-Roman era. Ambitious young women who hope to rise in politics or business should be taking military-history courses rather than women’s studies, which locks them in juvenile attitudes of self-pity and resentment of men.

  Football, which I call the religion of my brand of Amazon feminism, contains abundant inspiration and instruction for daily life. Ideally, all sports teams should be sexually integrated and merit-based from grade school on, though few girls will have the brawn to succeed in football beyond the collegiate level.

  Simply as a spectator sport, however, football is an American art form, a blend of practical, bone-crushing action with mental ingenuity and foxy foresight worthy of chess. Though domed stadiums and the abomination of synthetic AstroTurf (laid over injury-producing concrete) are used in many professional and some university venues, most football games are still played on grass in the open air, subject to the unpredictable elements.

  Unlike baseball, with its sentimental pastoral fantasies, football does not wimp out at the first drop of rain. Like an army on the march, football forges ahead through downpours and snowstorms. It has a courageous, truthful view of savage pagan nature.

  The raw material world is one of football’s major themes. With its muscular masses, brute collisions, and soaring trajectories, football is a crash course in basic physics. Each play is a gamble with grave risks. Any punishing hit or pileup can permanently maim or cripple. Bloodshed is a constant.

  Football is an imperialistic Western drama of the mapped grid and the tyrannical clock. It’s all about masculine territory—winning it, losing it, shooting like lightning over it, or having your face shoved in the mud when you don’t. Even at its best, football sadomasochistically rockets back and forth between humiliation and triumph: each gain of a yard means a defender’s defeat.

  Football’s elaborate, expensive equipment is its Homeric armaments, and its jumble of combatants on the field resembles the chaotic clash of warriors described by the Iliad before the walls of Troy. Foot
ball grinds through supplies and resources, just as it eats up men. Its huge, specialized squads and staffs of trainers and coordinators are battalions necessary to cope with the inevitable attrition of players during practice sessions and actual engagement.

  Poststructuralism, that stale teething biscuit of the nattering nerds of trendy academe, cannot rival the dazzling analytic complexity of football. The massive playbooks that each professional team annually constructs and masters are continually revised in action. While coaches scrutinize opponents from the sidelines or a skybox, quarterbacks and runners must “read” the defense and make instantaneous adjustments, with a score of grappling men in wild motion around them. Football demands a militant hard body and a poetically fluid mind.

  Television is doing an increasingly bad job of packaging football. The halftime highlights of ABC’s Monday Night Football, for example, which used to be a gorgeous compendium of informative clips from the weekend’s games, are now a stupid, jittery collage of MTV clichés. Only ex-coach John Madden among the play-by-play commentators still makes a serious effort to teach interested spectators the subtle mechanics of the game. The crucial role of the defense is particularly ignored these days.

  I have learned an enormous amount from watching football since childhood and have usefully applied those lessons in my war against the feminist and academic establishment. I block and tackle with pleasure and love in particular to run “misdirection” plays on feminist leaders—who must be baseball fans, since they still haven’t caught on.

  If I could be reborn as a football player, I would choose the position of tight end—the big guy who catches the ball over his shoulder and tramples over defenders at the goal line. Or free safety—who roams at will in the open field, shrewdly hangs back as a play develops, then pounces out of nowhere to smash a fleet, franchise runner to the ground.

  As the Pentagon has become infested with gender-equity propaganda, disastrously compromising military readiness, only football retains the old heroic values of excellence, fortitude, and valor. “Suck it up!” gleefully hoot the announcers from the broadcast booth. To toughen up our future female leaders, we need to turn them on to football.

  Football will keep us strong!

  17

  THE MODERN BATTLE OF THE SEXES

  As the millennium approaches, we can look back on 200 years of women’s advance in society after the industrial revolution. Women all over the world are moving, country by country, into positions of power in business and politics. That progress is inevitable and unstoppable. However, as we survey personal relationships, it is clear that the sexual weather is cloudy and stormy. There is an atmosphere of tension, of suspicion, of mutual recrimination between the sexes which feminism has not helped but in fact materially worsened. How did we get to this point? What prognosis is there for the future?

  Modern feminism is one of the great progressive movements inspired by the American and French Revolutions. Analogous to the movement to abolish slavery as well as child labor, it is a goal that is still not accepted everywhere in the world but that has emerged from European concepts of natural rights and civil liberties.

  [Third lecture in Sounding the Century (a six-part series), Queen Elizabeth Hall, London, December 1, 1997. Broadcast by BBC Radio 3, March 7, 1998]

  Mary Wollstonecraft’s 1792 polemical essay, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, is rightly regarded as the first manifesto of the modern women’s movement, though it had little discernible effect at the time. It was directly inspired by the radicalism of the French Revolution, which had promised sexual equality but failed to deliver it and whose excesses in turn disillusioned a whole generation of Romantic idealists. Today’s organized women’s movement has its roots in the nineteenth-century drive for woman suffrage, the right to vote and thus fully participate in the political process. This was a long struggle that was not fully supported even by all women, some of whom felt that women would lose their femininity or their position of moral superiority within the home if they were to enter the rough arena of masculine politics. In America, it was surprisingly the Western frontier states that were the first to give women the right to vote, in the closing decades of the nineteenth century. In a rural or pioneer environment, it was easier to see women as the pragmatic equals of men, due to the dawn-to-dusk physical labor required. Having lived as a child for an eventful year on a working farm, I witnessed with admiration the extraordinary energy and brute muscular power and boldness of country women in action. It was ironically in the more sophisticated, cosmopolitan Northeastern states, the crucible of American democracy, that there was most resistance to giving women the right to vote—because of the glaring differential between the sexual personae of the middle-class man and the middle-class woman, with her delicacy and refinement. In the United States, it took the 19th Amendment to the Constitution, ratified in 1920, to guarantee women the right to vote from coast to coast.

  For me, that first moment after the winning of suffrage, in the 1920s and 1930s, is indeed the classic moment for women in the twentieth century. From Marlene Dietrich and Coco Chanel to Dorothy Parker and Eleanor Roosevelt, there was an enormous number of women who came into the public eye and who showed with class and style what it was to be a modern woman, free of the shackles of the past. The women of that generation accepted the achievements of the men of the past and simply wanted to show that women could perform at that level. There was resistance to everything that held women back but not the kind of wholesale male-bashing or derisive denigration of men that would later become so entrenched a feature of the second wave of feminism that continues at present.

  A fundamental argument in early feminism is still causing acrimony today. I am an equity feminist—that is, I believe in equality of the sexes before the law and the removal of all obstacles to women’s advance in society. However, I oppose special protections for women, which had been sought from the start by some leading feminists. What has been conveniently swept under the rug is that even the noblest of woman suffrage leaders, Susan B. Anthony, was also active in the temperance movement—that is, the crusade to ban alcohol sales in the United States. This was seen as a woman’s issue, because working-class men were thought to waste their take-home pay on drink and because alcoholism was regarded as a major cause of wife battering and child abuse and therefore the decay of family life. This conservative, puritanical element is very strongly rooted in American culture, dating from the founding of New England by Puritan refugees and the Pilgrim forefathers who are still endlessly pictured and honored at our national holiday of Thanksgiving.

  The temperance cause would indeed succeed with the ratification in 1919 of the 18th Amendment to the Constitution, which led to fourteen years of Prohibition in the United States. The banning of alcohol sales produced a flourishing underground economy—bootlegging and rum-running on a huge scale. It facilitated the creation of an international crime syndicate that would eventually shift over into the drug trade. We are still paying the price today for that foolish attempt by the American government to intrude into people’s private lives. And cultural histories must begin to honestly acknowledge the lamentable role that organized feminism played in that misjudgment.

  The temperance debate would be replayed again a century later in feminism by the school of thought represented by Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin. The argument would no longer be about alcohol but pornography. Feminism has been split by this issue. From the mid-1970s to the late 1980s, the anti-pornography wing was at its most powerful. MacKinnon and Dworkin translated their opposition to pornography into successful enactment of local legislation in two American communities. These laws, which banned the sale of pornography, including mainstream men’s magazines like Playboy and Penthouse, were later thrown out as unconstitutional by higher courts. MacKinnon and Dworkin believe that pornography is by definition “anti-woman” and that it leads directly to abuse, rape, and murder. But their claim of a cause and effect relationship between pornography
and rape has never been substantiated, despite innumerable studies. There is no solid evidence, aside from scattered copycat incidents, often by adolescents, that atrocities in art, literature, and popular culture lead directly to crime. Nothing, in my view, legitimizes an infringement of the civil liberties of ordinary citizens who have the right to determine what they privately read or view.

  I represent the pro-sex wing of feminism that has turned the tide and that is close to winning the culture wars of the past fifteen years. MacKinnon and Dworkin were still dominant early in this decade. Indeed, when I made my first book tours of Britain in 1992 and 1994, Dworkin was treated as a deity by many women journalists and writers. The reform wing to which I belong has since grown massively in size, and we have the momentum. And I think that a younger generation of women are no longer in sympathy with the censorious, anti-pleasure wing of feminism. They have been heavily influenced by popular culture. Madonna in particular played a pivotal role in showing that it is possible for young women to be ambitious, creative, talented, and assertive, and yet dress in a sexy, fashionable manner. The Spice Girls have certainly taken up Madonna’s mission, now that she has flagged, and are carrying it again around the world. Indeed, I take particular pleasure in the fact that in the song “The Lady Is a Vamp,” from their latest album, the Spice Girls are wonderfully illustrating the thesis of my book, Vamps & Tramps, where I argued that white middle-class women, stuck in the sterile, sanitized office world, need to recover the outlaw vamp in themselves.