Free Women, Free Men

by Camille Paglia

  As this book began to veer astray, I felt that Lindemann’s mind was like a sleek yacht built for exhilarating grace and speed but commandeered by moldy tyrants for mundane use as a sluggish freighter. Her book is woefully burdened by the ugly junk she is forced to carry in this uncertain climate, where teaching jobs are so scarce. The very first paragraph of her acknowledgments shows what has happened to this and countless other academic books: Lindemann effusively thanks a Princeton professor “for giving me the idea that Bourdieu may have had something to say about pro-dommes’ claims to artistic purity.” Well, the dull Pierre Bourdieu, another pumped-up idol forced on American undergraduates these days, had little useful to say about that or anything else about art, beyond his parochial grounding in French literature and culture. (No, Bourdieu did not discover the class-based origin of taste: that was established long ago by others, above all the Marxist scholar Arnold Hauser in his magisterial 1951 study, The Social History of Art.) The leaden Bourdieu chapters bring Lindemann’s momentum to a humiliating halt and effectively destroy the reach of this valuable book beyond the dusty corridors of academe.

  Lindemann stays cautiously neutral about the acrimonious, long-running debate among feminists over whether sadomasochism is progressive or reactionary. But she so distracts herself with paying due homage to academic shibboleths that she doesn’t pursue her own leads—as when a San Francisco pro-domme describes what she does as “performance art.” Lindemann should have investigated the genre of performance art as it developed from the 1960s and ’70s on (thanks to Joseph Beuys, Yoko Ono, Eleanor Antin, and Bowie), which would have given her a superb cultural analogue. She notes pro-dommes’ ability to “create environments” and separately draws a very striking parallel to the Stanislavski theory of actors’ total identification with their characters. But neither of these exciting ideas is fleshed out.

  Buried in a footnote at the back is a glimmer of what could have made a sensational book: Lindemann says that pro-dominance “may have more in common with other theatrical pursuits than with prostitution.” “I was recently struck to find, during a visit to the Barnard College library,” she writes, “that the books about strippers were sandwiched between texts relating to pantomime and vaudeville, while the texts about prostitutes inhabited a different aisle.” Yes, modern burlesque was in fact born in the 1930s and ’40s in vaudeville houses that had gone seedy because of competition from movies. Lindemann was poised to place pro-dommes’ work into theater history—a tremendous advance that did not happen.

  The lamentable gaps in the elite education that Lindemann received at Princeton and Columbia are exposed in her two-page “Appendix C: Historical Context,” which is an unmitigated disaster. Two millennia since ancient Rome are surveyed in the blink of an eye, and we are confidently told, on the basis of no evidence, that the professional dominatrix is “a fundamentally postmodern social invention.” Sade and Leopold von Sacher-Masoch (author of the 1870 SM novel Venus in Furs) are mentioned in passing, but only via an academic book published less than a decade ago. There is no reference to the immense prostitution industry in nineteenth-century Paris, where flagellation was called “le vice anglais” (the English vice) because of its popularity among brothel-haunting Englishmen abroad.

  All three books under review betray a dismaying lack of general cultural knowledge—most crucially of so central a work as Pauline Réage’s infamous novel of sadomasochistic fantasy, Story of O, which was published in 1954 and made into a moody 1975 movie with a groundbreaking Euro-synth score by Pierre Bachelet. The long list of items missing from the research backgrounds and thought processes of these books is topped by Luis Buñuel’s classic film Belle de Jour (1967), in which Catherine Deneuve dreamily plays a bored, affluent Parisian wife moonlighting in a fetish brothel. Today’s formalized scenarios of bondage and sadomasochism belong to a tradition, but poststructuralism, with its compulsive fragmentations and dematerializations, is incapable of recognizing cultural transmission over time.

  These three authors have not been trained to be alert to historical content or implications. For example, they never notice the medieval connotations of the word “dungeon” or reflect on the Victorian associations of corsets and French maids (lauded even by Oscar Wilde’s Lady Bracknell). It never dawns on Weiss to ask why a San Francisco slave auction is called a “Byzantine Bazaar,” nor does Newmahr wonder why the lumber to which she is cuffed for flogging is called a “St. Andrew’s cross.”

  To analyze the challenging extremes of contemporary sexual expression, one would need to begin in the 1790s with Sade, Gothic novels, and the Romantic femme fatale, who becomes the woman with a whip in Swinburne’s poetry and Aubrey Beardsley’s drawings and turns into the vampires and sphinxes of late-nineteenth-century Symbolist art, leading directly to movie vamps from Theda Bara to Sharon Stone. And where is Weimar Berlin in these three books? Christopher Isherwood’s autobiographical The Berlin Stories, set in a doomed playground of sexual experimentation and decadent excess, was transformed into a play, a musical, and a major movie, Cabaret (1972), which has had a profound and enduring cultural influence (as on Madonna’s videos and tours). The brilliant Helmut Newton, born in Weimar Berlin, introduced its sadomasochistic sensibility and fetish regalia to high-fashion photography, starting in the 1960s. Weimar’s sadomasochism and transvestism as portrayed in Luchino Visconti’s film The Damned (1969) helped inspire British glam rock. Nazi sadomasochism was also memorably re-dramatized by Dirk Bogarde and Charlotte Rampling in Liliana Cavani’s The Night Porter (1974).

  Where is the Velvet Underground? The menacing song, “Venus in Furs,” based on Sacher-Masoch’s novel, was a highlight of the group’s debut 1967 album. On tour with the Velvets that same year, Mary Woronov did a dominatrix whip dance with the poet Gerard Malanga in Andy Warhol’s psychedelic multimedia show, the Exploding Plastic Inevitable. Other SM motifs have woven in and out of pop music: a brutal bondage billboard on Los Angeles’s Sunset Strip for the Rolling Stones’ 1976 album, Black and Blue, was taken down after fierce feminist protests; dominatrix gear and attitude were affected onstage by Grace Jones, Prince, Pat Benatar, and heavy-metal “hair” groups like Mötley Crüe.

  I was very disappointed to see Xaviera Hollander go unmentioned. That vivacious Dutch madame’s feisty memoir, The Happy Hooker (1971), detailing her bondage and fetish services, sold 15 million copies worldwide. But there is no excuse whatever for the absence in these books of Tom of Finland, whose prolific drawings of priapic musclemen formed the aesthetic of gay leathermen following World War Two. And the most shocking omission of them all: Tom’s devotee Robert Mapplethorpe, whose luminous homoerotic photos of the sadomasochistic underworld sparked a national crisis over arts funding in the 1980s. Yet our three authors and their army of advisers found plenty of time to parse the meanderings of every minor gender theorist who stirred in the past 20 years.

  These books never manage to explain sadomasochism or sexual fantasies of any kind. In addition to its rejection of biology, poststructuralism has no psychology, because without a concept of the coherent, independent individual (rather than a mass of ironically dissolving subjectivities), there is no self to see. One of the numerous flaws in Foucault’s system (as I argued in my attack on poststructuralism, “Junk Bonds and Corporate Raiders,” published in Arion in 1991) is his inability to understand symbolic thought—which is why poststructuralism is such a clumsy tool for approaching art. But without a grasp of symbolism, one cannot understand the dream process, poetic imagination, or the ritual theater of sadomasochism, with its symbolic psychodramas. Freud’s analysis of guilt and repression, as well as his theory of “family romance,” remains indispensable, in my view, for understanding sex in the modern Western world. Surely current SM paradigms carry some psychological baggage from childhood, imprinted by parents as our first, dimly felt authority figures.

  The mystery of sadomasochism was one of the chief issues I investigated in Sexual Personae (Yale University Pre
ss, 1990). My interest in the subject began with my childhood puzzlement over lurid scenes of martyrdom in Catholic iconography, notably a polychrome plaster statue in my baptismal church of a pretty St. Sebastian pierced by arrows. I traced the theme everywhere from flagellation in ancient fertility cults through Michelangelo’s neoplatonic bondage fantasy, Dying Slave, to the surreal poems of Emily Dickinson, whom I called “Amherst’s Madame de Sade.” I speak simply as a student of sexuality: I have had no direct contact of any kind with sadomasochism—except that I once had an author photo taken in front of a purple velvet curtain in the waiting room of a dungeon in a midtown Manhattan office building (which may be the very one where Lindemann’s book begins).

  In researching sadomasochism, I did not begin with a priori assumptions or with the desire to placate academic moguls. I let the evidence suggest the theories. My conclusion, after wide reading in anthropology and psychology, was that sadomasochism is an archaic ritual form that descends from prehistoric nature cults and that erupts in sophisticated “late” phases of culture, when a civilization has become too large and diffuse and is starting to weaken or decline. I state in Sexual Personae that “sex is a far darker power than feminism has admitted,” and that its “primitive urges” have never been fully tamed: “My theory is that whenever sexual freedom is sought or achieved, sadomasochism will not be far behind.”

  Sadomasochism’s punitive hierarchical structure is ultimately a religious longing for order, marked by ceremonies of penance and absolution. Its rhythmic abuse of the body, which can indeed become pathological if pushed to excess, is paradoxically a reinvigoration, a trancelike magical realignment with natural energies. Hence the symbolic use of leather—primitive animal hide—for whips and fetish clothing. By redefining the boundaries of the body, SM limits and disciplines the overexpanded consciousness of “late” phases, which are plagued by free-floating doubts and anxieties.

  What is to be done about the low scholarly standards in the analysis of sex? A map of reform is desperately needed. Current discourse in gender theory is amateurishly shot through with the logical fallacy of the appeal to authority, as if we have been flung back to medieval theology. For all their putative leftism, gender theorists routinely mimic and flatter academic power with the unctuous obsequiousness of flunkies in the Vatican Curia.

  First of all, every gender studies curriculum must build biology into its program; without knowledge of biology, gender studies slides into propaganda. Second, the study of ancient tribal and agrarian cultures is crucial to end the present narrow focus on modern capitalist society. Third, the cynical disdain for religion that permeates high-level academe must end. (I am speaking as an atheist.) It is precisely the blindness to spiritual quest patterns that has most disabled the three books under review.

  The exhausted poststructuralism pervading American universities is abject philistinism masquerading as advanced thought. Everywhere, young scholars labor in bondage to a corrupt and incestuous academic establishment. But these “mind-forg’d manacles” (in William Blake’s phrase) can be broken in an instant. All it takes is the will to be free.

  25

  GENDER ROLES: NATURE OR NURTURE

  CAMILLE PAGLIA V. JANE FLAX

  CAMILLE PAGLIA, OPENING STATEMENT: Nature or nurture? The question informs many pressing issues of our time—from the origins of criminality to the legitimacy of intelligence tests to definitions of gender. The quarrel over nature and nurture can be traced to Romanticism in the late eighteenth century, when Jean-Jacques Rousseau and his follower, the poet William Wordsworth, defined nature as good and society as bad, the source of oppressive fictions that cloud our thought and distort our behavior. Rousseau is ultimately responsible for the approach still current among postmodernists and poststructuralists today, who believe that we are born blank slates and that prejudices, including normative gender assumptions, are “inscribed” upon us by social pressures conveyed through arbitrary and slippery verbal constructs.

  [Janus Forum Debate, Political Theory Institute, American University, Washington, D.C., October 8, 2013]

  My own thinking on this issue of innate versus learned traits is heavily indebted to Romanticism. But I take the Late Romantic view, associated with mid-to late-nineteenth-century Decadents like Charles Baudelaire and Oscar Wilde, who saw nature as a beautiful but tyrannically mechanical force that we are obligated to resist and defy through the ever-evolving permutations of culture. The precursor in this strain of perverse Romanticism was not Rousseau but the Marquis de Sade, whose voluminous writings had vast influence, including on Nietzsche, whom Michel Foucault, the deity of poststructuralism, claimed as his model.

  I have argued, as in my first book, Sexual Personae, which was an expansion of my doctoral dissertation, that the historical and mythological identification of woman with nature is true—based on biological facts that we may find unpalatable in these emancipated times but that cannot be wished away or amended as of yet by science. But arriving at that highly controversial position was the result of a long process of observation, investigation, and reflection. Indeed, during my adolescence in upstate New York, I had angrily held a completely opposite point of view, which I was eventually forced to relinquish after the extensive research I did into both biology and anthropology for my dissertation.

  I had been raised as a baby-boomer during the stiflingly conformist 1950s, when gender roles were rigidly polarized. Men were men, and women were women, with a draconian dress code and rules of conduct for each gender. Much later, I became more sympathetic to the longing for a comforting stability on the part of our parents’ generation, who had endured the traumatic stresses and sacrifices of the Depression and World War Two. But the options for girls in the 1950s were very limited. They were expected to date and become wives and mothers, and there were few suitable careers for women aside from that of secretary, public-school teacher, or Roman Catholic nun. The atmosphere was claustrophobic for any girl with ambition or a spirit of competition, which was viewed as grossly unfeminine.

  A biological paradigm certainly shaped those attitudes. For example, girls were constantly given dolls—on the assumption that girls needed and welcomed exercise of their innate nurturing instincts. I myself regarded this shower of dolls as a plague or infestation. I wanted swords and spears and knights in armor! And I telegraphed my rebellion by a series of transgender Halloween costumes that were highly eccentric for children in the 1950s.

  Biological assumptions were enforced at school. Girls were discouraged from taking drum lessons in music class on the presumption that they did not have the strength to wield the sticks or carry a snare drum across the football field. (Thus I was stuck with the clarinet, which I played very badly for eight years in the school band until graduation.) In gym class, girls were thought to be too fragile for extreme exercise. Hence we were not allowed to play full-court basketball but had to stop (with great difficulty) at the center line and pass off the ball to another player on the other side. So if, as a guard, I stole the ball at one end of the court, I couldn’t bomb down to the other end to make a basket. These paternalistic protections were infuriating.

  Biological doctrine was explicit in an incident at my elementary school, when we fifth-grade girls got in a rumble with the sixth-grade girls at recess (from which I emerged in defeat with a chipped tooth). In grounding me for two weeks, my classroom teacher sternly reprimanded me for having punched another girl in the stomach, a grave and dangerous offense because, I was told, I could have damaged her delicate reproductive organs—a claim which, over time, seemed medically questionable.

  Rescue from this gender hell came through research—my mantra! In 1961, just before entering high school, I saw an article about Amelia Earhart in the local newspaper, which propelled me into an obsessive three-year project delving into her life and times. Exploring the old volumes of decaying newspapers and magazines in the sooty basement of the Syracuse public library, I discovered an entirely different era, th
e 1920s and ’30s, when first-wave feminism had inspired an extraordinary series of women achievers in the public realm—from Earhart herself to Dorothy Parker, Dorothy Thompson, Lillian Hellman, Margaret Bourke-White, Clare Boothe Luce, and Katharine Hepburn, whom I had already spotted on then-neglected old movies on late-night TV. It was a revelation. It seemed to prove that standards of gender are mutable and dependent on social conditions. Later, I would understand more about the larger forces at work in that period, above all a rebellion against authority that energized the impudent Jazz Age after the institutional failures that led to the catastrophe of the First World War. The adventurous careerism of those singular women was in many cases a calculated reversal of Victorian conventions, which had exalted prudery and propriety and sanctified motherhood.

  However, throughout the early to mid-1960s, I was simultaneously observing the complex process of puberty in myself and my friends, both male and female, and also the operations of pregnancy, childbirth, and infant care among my extended family and others. There seemed to me significant, troubling, and even intractable issues in human physiology over which we have little or no control. Hence the relationship between nature and nurture was becoming increasingly problematic to me. My earlier dismissive attitude toward biology was proving untenable.

  By the time second-wave feminism began in 1966, with Betty Friedan’s co-founding of the National Organization for Women, I found myself, as a college student, already out of sync with the views of most feminists. The situation worsened in graduate school, where, at a 1970 feminist conference held at the Yale Law School, I had a disillusioning close encounter with the celebrity feminists Kate Millett and Rita Mae Brown. Any appeal to biology was denounced as reactionary heresy. Passions ran high: in 1973, as a young teacher in Vermont, I nearly came to blows with a table of early academic feminists in Albany when I casually alluded to a hormonal element in sex differences. They unanimously declared that I had been “brainwashed” and hoodwinked by generations of sexist male scientists. Hormones, in their view, played no role whatever in human life. It was not simply that they were questioning hormones’ level of impact on personality and behavior; they were surreally denying the very existence of hormones. I felt as if I had fallen down a rabbit hole in Alice in Wonderland.