Provocations
Page 1
ALSO BY CAMILLE PAGLIA
Free Women, Free Men: Sex, Gender, Feminism
Glittering Images: A Journey Through Art from Egypt to Star Wars
Break, Blow, Burn: Camille Paglia Reads Forty-three of the World’s Best Poems
The Birds
Vamps & Tramps: New Essays
Sex, Art, and American Culture: Essays
Sexual Personae: Art & Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson
Compilation copyright © 2018 by Camille Paglia
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.
Pantheon Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
Information on previous publication, permissions acknowledgments, and illustration credits appears on pages 703–713.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Name: Paglia, Camille, [date] author.
Title: Provocations : collected essays / Camille Paglia.
Description: New York : Pantheon, 2018. Includes index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018005846. ISBN 9781524746896 (hardcover). ISBN 9781524747619 (ebook).
Subjects: LCSH: Popular culture—United States—History—20th century. United States—Intellectual life—21st century. Arts, American—21st century. BISAC: SOCIAL SCIENCE / Women’s Studies. SOCIAL SCIENCE / Feminism & Feminist Theory. SOCIAL SCIENCE / Essays.
Classification: LCC E169.12 .P325 2018 | DDC 306.0973/0904—dc23 | LC record available at lccn.loc.gov/2018005846
Ebook ISBN 9781524747619
www.pantheonbooks.com
Cover design by Janet Hansen
v5.3.2
ep
Contents
Cover
Also by Camille Paglia
Title Page
Copyright
Introduction
POPULAR CULTURE
Chapter 1: The Grandeur of Old Hollywood
Chapter 2: Art of Song Lyric
Chapter 3: On Rihanna
Chapter 4: The Death of Prince
Chapter 5: Theater of Gender: David Bowie at the Climax of the Sexual Revolution
Chapter 6: Punk Rock
Chapter 7: Living with Music: A Playlist
Chapter 8: Oscar Style
Chapter 9: A Love Letter to Joan Rivers
Chapter 10: Rock Around the Clock
Chapter 11: The Guardian Questionnaire
Chapter 12: The Death of Gianni Versace
Chapter 13: The Italian Way of Death
FILM
Chapter 14: Women and Magic in Alfred Hitchcock
Chapter 15: The Waning of European Art Film
Chapter 16: The Decline of Film Criticism
Chapter 17: Movie Music
Chapter 18: Homer on Film: A Voyage Through The Odyssey, Ulysses, Helen of Troy, and Contempt
SEX, GENDER, WOMEN
Chapter 19: Sex Quest in Tom of Finland
Chapter 20: Women and Law
Chapter 21: On Jewish-American Feminists
Chapter 22: Portrayals of Middle Eastern Women in Western Culture
Chapter 23: On Ayn Rand
Chapter 24: The Death of Helen Gurley Brown
Chapter 25: Legends of Diana
Chapter 26: Deconstructing the Demise of Martha Stewart
Chapter 27: Feminism and Transgenderism
Chapter 28: Movies, Art, and Sex War
LITERATURE
Chapter 29: The Unbridled Lust for Blurbs
Chapter 30: Teaching Shakespeare to Actors
Chapter 31: Scholars Talk Writing: Camille Paglia
Chapter 32: Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra
Chapter 33: Tennessee Williams and A Streetcar Named Desire
Chapter 34: Dance of the Senses: Natural Vision and Psychotic Mysticism in Theodore Roethke
Chapter 35: Final Cut: The Selection Process for Break, Blow, Burn
Chapter 36: Western Love Poetry
Chapter 37: “Stay, Illusion”: Ambiguity in Shakespeare’s Hamlet
Chapter 38: Columbia Journal Interview: Writing
Chapter 39: The Death of Norman Mailer
Chapter 40: Dispatches from the New Frontier: Writing for the Internet
ART
Chapter 41: On Andy Warhol
Chapter 42: Millennium Masterworks: The Mona Lisa
Chapter 43: Picasso’s Girl Before a Mirror
Chapter 44: More Mush from the NEA
Chapter 45: Dance: The Most Fragile of the Arts
Chapter 46: Controversy at the Brooklyn Museum
Chapter 47: The Magic of Images: Word and Picture in a Media Age
EDUCATION
Chapter 48: Free Speech and the Modern Campus
Chapter 49: On Canons
Chapter 50: The Right Kind of Multiculturalism
Chapter 51: Cant and Fad in Classics: Review of Victor Davis Hanson and John Heath, Who Killed Homer?
Chapter 52: Intolerance and Diversity in Three Cities: Ancient Babylon, Renaissance Venice, and Nineteenth-Century Philadelphia
Chapter 53: On Genius
Chapter 54: The Mighty River of Classics: Tradition and Innovation in Modern Education
Chapter 55: The North American Intellectual Tradition
Chapter 56: Erich Neumann: Theorist of the Great Mother
Chapter 57: Slippery Scholarship: Review of John Boswell, Same-Sex Unions in Premodern Europe
Chapter 58: Making the Grade: The Gay Studies Ghetto
Chapter 59: Gay Ideology in Public Schools
Chapter 60: The Death of Claude Lévi-Strauss
Chapter 61: The Columbine High School Massacre
Chapter 62: Vocational Education and Revalorization of the Trades
POLITICS
Chapter 63: No to the Invasion of Iraq
Chapter 64: Language and the Left
Chapter 65: Camp Insensitivity
Chapter 66: Bill Clinton: The Hormonal President
Chapter 67: Sarah Palin: Country Woman
Chapter 68: Donald Trump: Viking Dragon
RELIGION
Chapter 69: Jesus and the Bible
Chapter 70: That Old-Time Religion
Chapter 71: Cults and Cosmic Consciousness: Religious Vision in the American 1960s
Chapter 72: Religion and the Arts in America
Chapter 73: Resolved: Religion Belongs in the Curriculum
Chapter 74: St. Teresa of Avila
APPENDICES
A Media Chronicle
Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Previous Publication Information
Permissions Acknowledgments
Illustration Credits
About the Author
INTRODUCTION
This boo
k is not for everyone.
It is not for those who believe that they and their friends, allies, political parties, or churches have found the absolute truth about mankind, present or future.
It is not for those who believe that language must be policed to serve what they view as a higher social good, nor is it for those who grant to government and its proxies on college campuses the right to require and enforce “correct” thinking.
It is not for those who believe that art is a servant of political agendas or philanthropic goals or that it contains hidden coercive messages that must be exposed and destroyed.
It is not for those who see women as victims and men as the enemy or who think that women are incapable of asserting their rights and human dignity everywhere, including the workplace, without the intervention and protection of authority figures deputized by the power of the state.
It is not for those who see human behavior as wholly formed by oppressive social forces and who deny the shadowy influence of evolution and biology on desire, fantasy, and anarchic impulse, from love to crime.
This book is instead for those who elevate free thought and free speech over all other values, including material considerations of wealth, status, or physical well-being.
It is for those who see art and the contemplation of art as a medium of intuition and revelation, a web work of meaning that should be enhanced and celebrated and not demeaned by teachers who cynically deny the possibility of meaning.
It is for those who see women as men’s equals who, in their just and necessary demand for equality before the law, do not plead for special protections for women as a weaker sex.
It is for those who see nature as a vast and sublime force which mankind is too puny to control or alter and which fatefully shapes us as individuals and as a species.
It is for those who see life in spiritual terms as a quest for enlightenment, a dynamic process of ceaseless observation, reflection, and self-education.
A premise of this book, following the great cultural revolution of the 1960s, which was thwarted by the reactionary and elitist forces of academic postmodernism, is that higher consciousness transcends all distinctions of race, class, and gender. Sixties multiculturalism was energized by a convergence of influences from world religions—both Buddhism (a legacy of the Beat writers) and Hinduism, which suffused popular music. Standard interpretation of the radical 1960s in exclusively political terms is a common but major error that I address in detail in an essay collected here, “Cults and Cosmic Consciousness: Religious Vision in the American 1960s.”
Although I am an atheist, I have immense admiration and respect for religion as a comprehensive symbol-system, far more profound in its poetry, insight, and metaphysical sweep than anything currently offered by secular humanism. In my Cornerstone Arts Lecture at Colorado College, “Religion and the Arts in America” (also collected here), I demonstrate how central religion has been to American culture and how its emotionally expressive and multiracial gospel tradition remains the principal reason for America’s continued world dominance in commercial popular music.
I have argued for decades that true multiculturalism would be achieved in education not by splintering the curriculum into politicized fiefdoms but by making comparative religion the core curriculum of world education. An early piece on this subject (published in my first essay collection, Sex, Art, and American Culture in 1992) was “East and West: An Experiment in Multiculturalism,” a chronicle of an interdisciplinary humanities course that I co-taught with artist and social activist Lily Yeh at the University of the Arts. In the present volume, the same theme is addressed in my opening statement for a 2017 debate at the Yale Political Union, “Resolved: Religion Belongs in the Curriculum.”
Provocations covers the two and a half decades since my last general essay collection, Vamps & Tramps, in 1994. Some of my articles and lectures on sex, gender, and feminism were published separately a year ago in Free Women, Free Men. The latter volume contains my 1991 New York Newsday op-ed on date-rape that caused prolonged controversy as the first public protest against an escalating hysteria around that issue on college campuses and in the media. I continue to espouse my code of “street-smart feminism,” which frankly acknowledges the risks and dangers of life and encourages women to remain eternally vigilant and alert and to accept responsibility for their choices and adventures.
However, as the generations pass since the sexual revolution launched in 1960 by the release of the first birth-control pill, discourse about sex has become progressively more ideological, rigid, and banal. The feminist rejection of Freud as sexist has eliminated basic tools of psychological analysis once standard in cultural criticism. Few young adults with elite school degrees today appear to realize how romantic attractions and interactions often repeat patterns rooted in early family life. Nor do they seem to have heard of the complex principle of ambivalence, which produces mixed messages that can disastrously complicate social encounters.
In my first book, Sexual Personae (1990), I wrote extensively about the tormented fragility of male sexual identity—which most feminist theory, with its bitterly anti-male premises, seems incapable of recognizing. Too often, women fail to realize how much power they have over men, whose ambition and achievement in the public realm are often wedded to remorseless anxiety and insecurity. Canonical feminist theory has also missed the emotional and conceptual symbolism in sexual behavior—as in the infantile penile displays of entertainment industry moguls who appear to have routinely chosen as targets women who would show embarrassment, confusion, or fear and not those who would laugh, scold, or whack that tender member with the nearest shoe, purse, hairbrush, or lamp. Interpreting such pathetically squalid scenes in exclusively political rather than psychological terms does not help women to make their way through the minefield of a professional world that will always be stressful, competitive, and uncertain for aspirants of both sexes.
The masculine dream of sexual freedom is writ large in the drawings of Tom of Finland, who heavily influenced gay male iconography after World War Two and directly inspired photographer Robert Mapplethorpe (whom I defended in Sex, Art, and American Culture). My essay, “Sex Quest in Tom of Finland,” which was written for the massive Taschen edition of Tom’s collected works, stresses the pagan energy, vitality, and humor of Tom’s pornographic all-male world, with its panoply of archetypes borrowed from Hollywood and Nazi-era Finland.
The initial theme of my work, however, was not masculinity but androgyny, the subject of my doctoral dissertation at Yale. (Its title was Sexual Personae: The Androgyne in Literature and Art.) When the prospectus for my thesis was accepted in 1971, it was the only dissertation on sex at the Yale Graduate School. While completing its writing at my first teaching job at Bennington College, I was electrified by David Bowie in his Ziggy Stardust phase, which seemed to encapsulate everything that I had been thinking about gender. Forty years later, Bowie would put Sexual Personae on a list of his 100 favorite books. It did not surprise me: that great artist was sensing himself mirrored back from my pages. It was a tremendous honor to be invited by London’s Victoria & Albert Museum to write the article on gender for the catalog of its mammoth 2013 exhibition of Bowie costumes, which then toured the world. That essay, “Theater of Gender: David Bowie at the Climax of the Sexual Revolution,” is reprinted here.
As I have often said, my own protest against gender norms began in childhood with my flagrantly dissident Halloween costumes: Robin Hood at age five; a toreador at six; a Roman soldier at seven; Napoleon at eight; Hamlet at nine. (A photo of me as Napoleon appears elsewhere in this book.) From college on, I adopted the gender-bending styles of Mod London, which were effectively transvestite. However, despite my lifelong transgender identification, I do not accept most of the current transgender agenda, which denies biological sex differences, dictates pronouns, and recklessly promotes medical and surgical interventions. An e
xcerpt from an interview with The Weekly Standard, where I condemn the use of puberty blockers on children as a violation of human rights, is collected here. When Sexual Personae was released, I called it “the biggest sex change in history.” Gore Vidal rightly said that the voice of Sexual Personae was the voice of his transsexual heroine, Myra Breckinridge. Aggressive, implacable, and scathingly satirical, that voice is a transgender construction, using the materials of language and mind. To questioning young people drawn to the siren song of hormones and surgery, I say: Stay fluid! Stay free!
It is surely my sexually dual perspective that has allowed me to understand and sympathize with Alfred Hitchcock’s awed and quasi-mystical view of women, which so many other feminists have reductively condemned as “misogynous.” I defended Hitchcock in my British Film Institute book on The Birds (1998), as well as in essays such as “Women and Magic in Alfred Hitchcock,” written for the BFI’s 2012 Hitchcock retrospective and collected here. Other pieces on film in this book celebrate movie music and lament the waning of European art film as well as the decline of film criticism.