Provocations

by Camille Paglia

  In 1966, Friedan co-founded the National Organization for Women (NOW), the first group devoted to political action for women’s rights in over four decades. However, younger feminists, some of them lesbian, brought a more confrontational political style from the civil rights and antiwar movements of the 1960s. By 1970, Friedan was alienated from NOW, which in her view had become anti-man, anti-marriage, and anti-family, as well as too focused on lesbianism (which she called “the lavender menace”), all of which she correctly prophesied would drive mainstream women away from feminism. The manifesto of radical feminism was The Dialectic of Sex (1970) by Shulamith Firestone, who used terminology drawn from Marx and Freud to call for cybernetic reproduction to replace pregnancy and for collectives to raise children, thus abolishing traditional family structure.

  Two major public issues caused an uproar around the newly reborn women’s movement. In 1972, the U.S. Congress, urged by NOW, passed an Equal Rights Amendment, banning discrimination by federal or state law “on account of sex.” Within a year, the ERA was ratified by 30 of the required 38 states. However, a “STOP ERA” movement was launched by a conservative mother and lawyer, Phyllis Schlafly, who argued that the amendment would harm women in key areas, such as alimony, child custody, and the military draft (from which women are exempt). By 1982, the official time limit, already extended for four years by Congress, had expired, and the ERA was dead. Furthermore, Schlafly’s vigorous campaign had mobilized conservatives nationwide (including evangelical Christians), leading to a huge revival of conservative ideology and activism, which continues today.

  The second uproar was about abortion. In 1973, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled, on privacy grounds, that a Texas law outlawing abortion was unconstitutional. Before this, individual states had the right to determine their own abortion laws. Now abortion (in the first three months of pregnancy) became a nationwide right. This case of Roe v. Wade would inflame passions in the U.S. for the next half-century. It pit the Catholic Church and evangelical Christians against feminism and turned abortion into the number one issue still motivating liberal voters during U.S. presidential campaigns (because the president appoints justices to the Supreme Court, which can overturn Roe v. Wade). Planned Parenthood Federation, vilified and picketed by conservatives, controversially receives government funding to offer family planning and abortion services to women, some of whom lack medical insurance. The ancestor of Planned Parenthood was the American Birth Control League, founded in 1921 by Margaret Sanger, who had been arrested and put on trial after she opened a birth control clinic in Brooklyn in 1916.

  Since the late 1980s, the dominant approach in feminist theory, in both the U.S. and abroad, has been derived from the post-structuralism of Michel Foucault and his disciple Judith Butler, an American academic. The premise of this system, with its contorted jargon, is that gender is an illusion of language, through which all of reality is refracted. We can know nothing about ourselves or the world except through language, which is inherently slippery. The body itself does not exist except as a passive object of shadowy social control. Gender is always in flux in an ahistorical arena of subjective performance. It is difficult to understand how feminism is aided by a theoretical system so divorced from the problems and practicalities faced by most women in everyday life. The refusal by post-structuralist feminists to study, respect, or even acknowledge nature and biology will inevitably limit the reach of their self-referential discourse to a narrow elite.

  Today, the major issues facing feminism are these: is woman a victim, mutilated by the horrors of history, or is she a capable and resilient agent, responsible for her own actions and desires? To what degree should the state act to further the crucial advance of women in society? Are legally enforced quotas and other preferential remedies authentically progressive, or are they reactionary, paternalistic, and infantilizing? Should women, having escaped control by fathers and husbands, now transfer that humiliating dependency onto the labyrinthine bureaucracy of the state? Or should women, as a testament to their own strength and courage, value freedom above all, despite its pain and risk?

  * [Preface for Gunter Axt, Histórias de Vida: Mulheres do Direito, mulheres no Ministério Público, vol. iii (Life stories: Women of law, women in public ministry), seventeen interviews with women serving as independent public prosecutors in Brazil (Florianópolis, Brazil, 2015).]

  21

  ON JEWISH-AMERICAN FEMINISTS*

  ADAM KIRSCH: You are always alert to the ethnic and class issues within white feminism; you credit your Italian background with giving you a different perspective on sex and gender from, say, Catharine MacKinnon. In this vein, why do you think so many of the prominent American feminists of the last fifty years have been Jewish women—including many of the people you argue with and about, from Betty Friedan to Gloria Steinem to Naomi Wolf? Is there something about Jewishness that is conducive to feminism?

  CAMILLE PAGLIA: Second-wave feminism, to which Betty Friedan gave birth with her co-founding of the National Organization for Women in 1966, was strongly powered by a fiery social activism whose roots can be traced to the unionizing movement of the early twentieth century. One of the classic protest songs in my “Art of Song Lyric” course is “The Death of Harry Simms,” about the 1932 shooting of 20-year-old Jewish labor leader Harry Simms Hersh in the battle for unionization of the Kentucky coal mines. I have described my principal mentors, poet Milton Kessler in college and critic Harold Bloom in graduate school, as more like visionary rabbis than professors. I have repeatedly acknowledged my debt to Jewish-American culture. For example, in my long 1991 attack on post-structuralism, “Junk Bonds and Corporate Raiders,” I wrote: “It was from Jews (beginning at T. Aaron Levy Junior High School) that I learned how to analyze politics, law, business, and medicine, how to decipher the power dynamics of family relationships, and how to plan pragmatic strategies of social activism.”

  In response to your question, I don’t think it’s so much the conduciveness of Jewishness to feminism as it is the readiness and ability of Jewish-American women to aggressively speak out and confront, without fear of loss of “respectability,” as it was defined and enforced by the WASP establishment code that once governed U.S. business, politics, and education. The Jewish marriage contract is unusual in guaranteeing women’s rights, suggesting the power that Jewish women have always wielded in the home and family. When I was growing up in Syracuse in the stiflingly conformist late 1950s and early 1960s, I was highly impressed by the bold and even abrasive vocal style (then called “the Jewish seagull”) that was often employed by Jewish women, and there can be no doubt that I imitated and absorbed it. By the early 1990s, I was being called “the academic Joan Rivers”—Rivers hugely influenced me, including my onstage style.

  Beyond that, Jewish-Americans, with their Torah-inspired zeal for legal studies, regularly challenged the status quo in ways that Italian-Americans rarely did. For nearly two millennia, Italians had been scattered in tight-knit tribal villages; even after Italy became a state again in the late nineteenth century, Italians regarded it as a distant sham. None of my immigrant family would dream of challenging the dictatorial authority or mysterious operations of the state, which occupied a nebulous, external realm, unreal in comparison to the intricate unit of the extended family. (Even the dead had infinitely more reality to an Italian family! Recreational cemetery visits were routine.) Nor would Italian-Americans of that era question a doctor’s diagnosis or indeed ask any questions at all in a medical office or hospital. What I got from Jewish-American culture was a revolutionary fervor for political and institutional reform, totally outside the otherwise wonderfully rich legacy of rural Italian tradition. When I was at Harpur College (SUNY Binghamton) in the mid-1960s, all the outspoken student radical leaders were Jews from metropolitan New York. Indeed, one of the most iconic images from that period is the LIFE magazine photograph of Columbia student David Shapiro wearing hip dark glass
es while insolently smoking a cigar at the president’s desk during the student uprising of 1968. Thus the prominent Jewish presence in second-wave feminism must simply be regarded as yet another form of modern Jewish progressivism.

  * [“Camille Paglia on Jews and Feminism: A dialogue with Adam Kirsch about her new collection Free Women, Free Men,” Tablet Magazine, March 9, 2017.]

  22

  PORTRAYALS OF MIDDLE EASTERN WOMEN IN WESTERN CULTURE*

  For three millennia, the relationship between Europe and the Middle East has been marked by periodic alternations between bitter conflict and profound mutual influence. Academic theory of the past half-century has blamed modern Western imperialism and colonialism for generating belittling stereotypes of “Orientalism”: Europe, assuming a dominant interpretative position, aligned itself with reason, morality, and civilization, while identifying the Middle East with mystery, duplicity, and barbarism. Particularly compromised have been the image and reputation of Middle Eastern women, who have been persistently portrayed in strangely contradictory terms as the silent, submissive wife, veiled from head to foot, or as the belly dancer or odalisque, sensual and half naked.

  The proliferation of misunderstandings between Europe and the Middle East can be traced all the way back to antiquity, long before the birth of Islam. With its ambivalent, sometimes voyeuristic attraction to the “exotic,” Western culture has wavered in confusion between dual fantasies of the Middle East, both of which had some basis in historical reality. The first is grounded in the ascetic conservatism of the nomadic Bedouin tribes, whose pastoral, polygamous lifestyle replicated that of the Hebrew patriarchs of the Judeo-Christian Old Testament. The second arose from the lavish luxury and decadence of the great pagan empires, which boasted highly sophisticated cities like Babylon, Persepolis, Alexandria, Antioch, and Constantinople. Imperialism is no recent invention.

  In its reformist focus on expanding career opportunities and improving workplace conditions and access to political power for women, second-wave feminism has embraced an economic materialism and rigid secularism that cannot always be easily reconciled with other complex value-systems in the non-Western world. Today, many talented and ambitious professional women of the Middle East are actively searching for their own unique balance between modernity and tradition, which may often include religious faith as well as strong family ties. Western feminists, in their well-intentioned zeal to help and to “liberate,” must proceed with caution and respect and must not permit their utilitarian social agenda to become yet another arrogant imperialism, imposing relatively recent liberal assumptions as if they were eternal human universals.

  Women in Egypt seem to have enjoyed a higher status, including property rights, than most women elsewhere in the ancient world. In the Old Kingdom, as demonstrated by the vivid painted-limestone tomb effigies of Prince Rahotep seated with his wife Nofret (Fourth Dynasty), royal men and women were depicted as equal in size and therefore symbolically equal in importance—as would strikingly not be the case in later Egyptian art. Several extraordinary royal women appeared during the Eighteenth Dynasty of the New Kingdom whose names were erased from history until they were rediscovered by modern archaeology: Queen Hatshepsut, who seized power and ruled as pharaoh, with a male headdress and ceremonial beard; Queen Tiye, strong-willed mother of the rebel monotheist pharaoh, Akhenaten; and Queen Nefertiti, Akhenaten’s elegant wife, who may well have exercised political power in place of her sickly and reclusive husband, a dreamy idealist who was more a poet than a warrior.

  The most famous or rather notorious Middle Eastern queen remains Cleopatra, whose ancestry was mainly Macedonian Greek: she was the last ruler of the Ptolemy dynasty installed in Egypt by Alexander the Great nearly 300 years earlier. Although evidently not particularly beautiful, she was a shrewd diplomat and witty conversationalist who knew many languages. Two Roman leaders of quite different personality and temperament fell in love with Cleopatra: the intellectual, puritanical Julius Caesar and the convivial, hedonistic Mark Antony. A year after their humiliating defeat by Octavian Caesar (the future emperor Augustus) at a naval battle off the Greek coast at Actium, Mark Antony and Cleopatra committed suicide in Egypt. Had Cleopatra won that battle, the balance of power in the Mediterranean might have shifted from Europe to the Middle East for the next 500 years.

  Patricians of the old Roman Republic, with their strict code of modesty, simplicity, and gravitas, denounced the luxury and sensuality of the Middle East, typified by the elaborate jewelry, cosmetics, and transparent, body-revealing linen garments of Egyptian aristocrats like Cleopatra and her court. In Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra (based on Plutarch), Cleopatra is dismissed by conservative Romans as a whore. In the Aeneid, which he began to write shortly after her death, Vergil portrayed Cleopatra as the tragic Dido, a historical figure who was queen of Tyre, a wealthy port city of Phoenicia (modern Lebanon). Dido led a migration to North Africa, where she founded the great city of Carthage (modern Tunisia), destined to be Rome’s mortal enemy during the Punic Wars. Vergil presents Dido as a commanding and confident presence, a visionary architect as well as a queen.

  Like the Romans, the Greeks opposed their own ethic of masculine discipline, embodied in competitive athletics and war to that of the “effeminate,” overly emotional men of the Middle East, who wore jewelry, fine fabrics, perfume, and eye makeup (kohl, used in desert climates to reduce sun glare and prevent infection). As early as the Iliad, Homer’s rugged Mycenaean Greeks disdain the Trojan prince Paris, Helen’s lover and abductor, as a pampered dandy who shrinks from hand-to-hand combat and slays from a distance with bow and arrow. Troy (whose ruins have been found in Hissarlik near the Dardanelles strait in northwestern Turkey) was already perceived as a more pleasure-oriented Middle Eastern capital. The East-West distinction can even be seen in the formal modes of Greek music: in his Republic, Plato wants to banish the soft, relaxed, and seductive Lydian mode from his ideal state, whose anthem should properly be the vigorous, stirring Dorian mode, implicitly masculine. The Dorians were warlike peoples who had descended with iron swords into the Greek peninsula from the north at the end of the Bronze Age; the kingdom of Lydia, in contrast, occupied the western third of ancient Anatolia (modern Turkey in Asia Minor).

  In their civic mythology, the Athenians preserved the legend of an army of masculine women archers, the Amazons, invading and attacking Athens from the east. The story appears again in Shakespeare’s classic comedy, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, where the hero Theseus, duke of Athens, is marrying his former enemy, Hippolyta, queen of the Amazons. Scholars have identified Scythia, a region bordering the Black Sea in Southern Russia, as the probable homeland of the Amazons. That the Greeks perceived women from the East as being fiercer and more intimidating or dangerous than European women is suggested by the legend of the sorceress Medea, who helps the Greek hero Jason steal the Golden Fleece and who later kills their children in romantic revenge. Colchis, Medea’s native land, is located on the Black Sea in modern Georgia, at the Eurasian borderline. Possibly related to the myth of the Golden Fleece may be the stupendous use of heavy gold in Scythian art, as recovered by archaeologists from burial mounds.

  Greece was again invaded and nearly conquered by the East during the Persian Wars (492–49 B.C.), the most sustained and pivotal confrontation between East and West until the medieval Crusades. The victory of the small but determined Greek forces against the overwhelmingly larger armies of Darius and Xerxes, emperors of Persia (modern Iraq and Iran), triggered an enormous surge of pride that produced the Golden Age of Athenian culture. Aeschylus’ The Persians (472 B.C.), the oldest play surviving from antiquity, takes place at the Persian court in Susa and consists of a series of laments for the humiliating defeat of the Persian grand armada, whose massive, three-tiered ships were crushed in the straits of Salamis and whose expert archers were helpless against the Greek hoplites with their shields and spears. A central figure is Xer
xes’ mother, Atossa, whose powerful speeches make her the first fully developed Middle Eastern woman character in literature. The historian Herodotus says of Atossa, the daughter of Cyrus the Great, that she suffered from a bleeding lump in her breast; the tumor (extracted by a Greek slave) is considered to be the first documented case of breast cancer in medical history. A crowned head carved of lapis lazuli in the National Museum of Iran in Tehran is sometimes identified as a portrait of Atossa.

  Confined to the gynaeceum (women’s quarters) of their homes, women played virtually no public role except that of priestess during the Golden Age of Periclean Athens. There was only one prominent woman, a foreigner and hetaera (courtesan)—Aspasia, the mistress of Pericles. Highly educated and articulate, she was rumored to have written Pericles’ famous funeral oration during the Peloponnesian War. It is extremely significant that Aspasia came from Miletus, an old city in Ionia in western Anatolia that was mentioned by Homer and that became a center of Pre-Socratic philosophy and early science. Similarly, the lyric poet Sappho, who was hailed as the greatest of all poets throughout the thousand-year Greco-Roman era, lived and worked in a sophisticated literary culture in the city of Mytilene on the island of Lesbos off the Anatolian coast (modern Mitilini, Lesvos, northwest of Izmir). The brilliant examples of Sappho and Aspasia demonstrate that upper-class women on the Middle Eastern coast of the Aegean Sea had far more access to culture and social position than did women on the Greek mainland, even in classical Athens at its height.