Provocations

by Camille Paglia

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  Paglia, interviewer, “Interview: Donna Mills,” Interview magazine, November 2002. Paglia tells Mills: “When the history of feminism is rewritten accurately, Joan Collins’ performance as Alexis Carrington on Dynasty and yours as Abby Cunningham on Knots Landing will be seen as the pivotal roles in popular culture that had a revolutionary impact on women’s behavior and self-image. You showed women around the world how to integrate power in the workplace with female sexual power. Joan’s persona is very European, but you’re the one who created the realistic American version.” Mills’ sleek, chic, short-skirted power suit became standard business dress for professional women for twenty years.

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  Paglia, “A Rock Meets a Hard Place,” Golf Digest, April 2003. Controversy over women being barred from membership at Augusta, home of the Masters Tournament. “Two stubbornly insular groups faced off in the clash between Augusta National Golf Club and the National Council of Women’s Organizations, each with its own rigid preconceptions and an unassailable faith in its own moral superiority.”

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  Paglia, “How Far Will Good Intentions Take Hillary?,” review of Hillary Clinton’s Living History, The Times (U.K.), June 13, 2003. “Hillary seems to believe that good intentions excuse all….Among other blind spots is the vexed issue of Bill’s alleged indiscretions, which Hillary dismisses as agitprop by diabolical foes jealous of her husband’s Christlike aspiration to transform earthly life….The book is at its best when Hillary is rueful or self-satirizing….Despite, or perhaps because of, the book’s omissions and shadings of fact, Hillary does emerge from it as a credible presidential candidate.”

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  Emily Nussbaum, “Misogyny Plus Girl Power: Original-Recipe Angels,” The New York Times, June 29, 2003. Review of TV Land documentary on Charlie’s Angels: “The presentation is unrepentantly rah-rah, with Camille Paglia popping up to remark that ‘All of the feminist nags in the world are never going to make that particular show go away.’ ”

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  Debbie Stoller, “Fruit for Thought,” interview with Paglia, BUST magazine, Summer 2003. Stoller asks why, except for Paglia, “feminists haven’t had very much to say about gay men.” Paglia replies: “Part of the reason is that there was such a parting of the ways in the ’70s. Stonewall was enormously liberating in 1969, but the sense of community—of shared adventure and conflict—that lesbians and gay men had had up to that point was gone. By the mid-’70s, the number of men’s bars exploded, and when open sex began in the back rooms, the doors of the gay men’s bars closed in lesbians’ faces. Not a lot of lesbians wanted to be there anyway. Feminism—which I was totally committed to from the start—headed off in this rabid anti-art, anti-pop direction. It left me marooned and isolated….To me it was a real social cataclysm. I think it was culturally impoverishing in many ways that have yet to be assessed….Feminism was navel-gazing with consciousness-raising sessions, trying to plumb the depths of personal victimization. And it was also starry-eyed—looking up at some grand theoretical system about all of history being nothing but male-dominated oppression. So I think that caused a split. Gay men were off partying where disco music was developing out of black culture, while you got awful, sappy music at women’s bars. I saw disco as a tremendous cosmic vision of the world—a major form in music history that was absolutely entwined with the sexual revolution. But it was gay men who were pushing that forward, not lesbians. Feminist women were becoming Stalinists, cultural reactionaries. That’s where the division started.”

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  “Matt Drudge Gets Personal with Camille Paglia,” dialogue about the Drudge Report by Drudge, Paglia, and editor Maer Roshan, Radar, Summer 2003. Paglia to Drudge: “There’s something retro about your persona. It’s like the pre–World War Two generation of reporters—those unpretentious, working-class guys who hung around saloons and used rough language. Now they’ve all been replaced with these effete Ivy League elitists who swarm over the current media. Nerds—utterly dull and insipid….Your fascination with weather and nature is really interesting to me. You have this sublime mix. There will be all these sordid, squalid tabloid stories—a sex scandal or some hideous crime—and then all of a sudden you’ll insert a huge image of a hurricane heading across the Atlantic toward Florida.”

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  Paglia, interview, in Elizabeth G. Messina, In Our Own Voices: Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Italian and Italian-American Women (2003).

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  Paglia, column, in conversation with Ingrid Sischy, “Daring Duos and Daring Doers,” special issue, Interview magazine, October 2003. IS: “This month let’s start by your telling me what you think of when you hear the word ‘daring.’ ” CP: “The first thing that comes to mind is my earliest role models—Katharine Hepburn and Amelia Earhart. In my teens, I thought Earhart embodied everything that women had been denied. In 1932, she became the first woman to fly solo across the treacherous Atlantic. Her airplane was flimsy, and navigation equipment was primitive. In exactly the same year, Hepburn made a huge splash on Broadway playing an Amazon in The Warrior’s Husband. She entered by bounding downstairs onstage with a dead stag over her shoulder! Hepburn’s athletic physicality broke every rule in terms of women’s body language, which had been genteel and contained. Men, of course, wrote the book on daring. Testosterone goes up and down, but when it’s really pumping, it pushes them to test limits and put their bodies on the line. Guys are constantly doing crazy things to form their identity—falling to their deaths while walking on a balcony railing when they’re drunk, or lying down in the middle of a highway while trucks race by. How many women do that?”

  IS: “Some people might call that behavior stupid rather than daring.” CP: “Exactly—that’s the whole point! Stupidity and daring are intertwined. The species moves forward and outward through acts of profound stupidity, which can be inseparable from genius. One of the most notorious sentences in my book, Sexual Personae, is, ‘There is no female Mozart because there is no female Jack the Ripper.’ Women track in the sensible middle, while men veer to radical extremes.”

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  Editor-in-Chief Kerry Lauerman, interview, “Camille Speaks!: Paglia returns to cast a withering eye on Clark (‘what a phony!’), Kerry (‘the hair!’), Madonna (‘a monster’), bloggers—and the ‘delusional narcissists’ in the White House who led an out-of-his-depth president into a disastrous war,” Salon.com, October 29, 2003. “The last time we spoke with Paglia, in February, at the onset of war, she spoke of ‘a terrible sense of foreboding’ about what would come next. We pick up the conversation from there.”

  KL: You talked the last time about being “extremely upset about our rush to war.” Has it played out as you would have predicted?

  CP: How to start! This Iraq adventure is a political, cultural, and moral disaster for the United States. Every sign was there to read, but the Bush administration is run by blinkered people who are driven by ideology and who do not feel the largeness of the world and its multiplicity of religions, ethnicities, and customs. Despite the multicultural ambitions of higher education in the last 25 years, there has been a massive failure in public education. Media negligence also played a huge role in this cataclysm.

  Throughout all of last year, as the war drums were beating, the media did not do its job in informing the American people about the complexities of Mideastern history or of the assumptions of world Islam. For example, it should have laid out the dark saga of foolish decision-making by the European powers as they cut up the Ottoman Empire after World War One and unleashed the territorial disputes and animosities that still plague us. With more historical perspective during the debate over Iraq, I don’t think the polls would have been as high as they were.

  I also blame the media for failing to inform the American people about the ancient history of Mesopotamia and of the vision of Saddam Hussein—who was just a Podunk tyrant who was no t
hreat to the continental U.S.—to revive the greatness of Babylon. If that had been understood, maybe more people would have suspected that all that bluster about stockpiled weapons of mass destruction was hot air. Of course it was in Saddam’s regional interest as a macho man to imply that he had this mountain of armaments, that he could strike the West at any moment. The Egyptian pharaohs were always pounding their chests and boasting in exactly the same way. U.S. intelligence was so naïve to have fallen for that, hook, line, and sinker!

  Another sin by the media was their failure to publicize the immense archaeological and artistic past of Iraq, to show America that Iraq wasn’t just this desert wasteland over a big puddle of oil. Few people realized that until the National Museum was looted after American troops seized Baghdad. Then came—the utter hypocrisy!—tear-stained, hand-wringing articles by those big blowhards at the New York Times: “Oh, the Bush administration are such awful vandals!” Well, where the hell were all of you last year? Why didn’t you show the architecture and artifacts of ancient Mesopotamia or Islamic Baghdad under the caliphate? The American people were led to believe that Baghdad was just a bunch of Bedouin tents huddled in the middle of the desert. As I said the last time I spoke with Salon, I also blame the Democratic senators—

  KL: A “bunch of weasels,” you called them at the time—

  CP: Yes, and that word “weasel” went out from that interview and caught fire. The New York Post used it by that weekend, and from there it was seized by the right wing, as in the bestselling “Deck of Weasels” playing cards. It’s a great example of the power of Salon: We put “weasel” back into the American vocabulary!…

  We have catastrophically compromised our internal system of defense against terrorism because of this adventure overseas. Our National Guard and reservists are over there—our first responders for emergencies in terrorist attacks here. The failure in upgrading domestic defense was horrendously clear during the Northeastern blackout in August, when 20 million people lost power. It was shocking to see that nearly two years after 9/11, there was still no emergency evacuation plan in New York to get people across the Hudson River to New Jersey. I monitored the TV for six hours from Philadelphia as over 20,000 people, including old people and pregnant women, were stranded in the baking heat on those wharves like sitting ducks. There were only a few tiny boats ferrying them across the river. Two years, and still no emergency plan to call in the military or National Guard? And there’s been no systematic effort to deal with the No. 1 threat to national security—the container ships unloading at our ports….

  As Salon readers know, I am not anti-military. On the contrary, I believe in just wars and would have been proud to serve in the military. But this Iraq adventure was a grotesque misuse of American power unleashed on a Third World nation. What pleasure can we take from a victory where our high-tech arms were blasting poorly armed foot soldiers to oblivion? Most of the Iraqi army weren’t necessarily Saddam fanatics—they were working-class people just trying to make a living. U.S. officials don’t even bother trying to count Iraqi casualties—including civilians—and the American media lets them get away with it. Only American deaths matter; Iraqis are non-persons.

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  Paglia, “Vera Wang’s Fumble,” Philadelphia magazine, December 2003. Criticizes Wang’s “anemic” and “antiseptic” design for the Philadelphia Eagles cheerleaders’ uniforms. “Since when do Philly girls lack pizzazz and va-va-voom?” Rather than “chasing after effete Manhattan chic,” Eagles owners Jeffrey and Christine Lurie should have hired Donatella Versace instead.

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  Paglia, column, in conversation with Ingrid Sischy about child stars, Interview magazine, February 2004.

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  Paglia, “What Makes a Woman Truly Sexy?: The Costume Institute’s latest exhibition, Dangerous Liaisons, reveals those fashions of the 18th century that demonstrate the provocative power of clothes,” Harper’s Bazaar, March 2004.

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  Patricia Leigh Brown, “Go Fish (Or, Deconstruct This),” The New York Times, March 21, 2004. “Theory Trading Cards,” created by a British professor. Playing cards with photos of “21 darlings of literary postmodernism.” Contacted by the Times, Paglia “called the description of her theories on the back of her card ‘careless libel.’ ‘I’m happy to be with Simone de Beauvoir, whose Second Sex is one of the biggest and best books written by women. She was disrespected by Foucault, who ripped off Erving Goffman, an inspirational figure for me.’ ”

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  Paglia, column, in conversation with Ingrid Sischy about “rock-star style,” Interview magazine, annual music issue, August 2004. IS: “What about women rock stars of that era, like Janis Joplin?” CP: “Janis Joplin was an oddity, a Texas blues singer fronting a San Francisco acid-rock band. Her style was eclectic and bizarre, a kind of slatternly, New Orleans hooker look with Moroccan fabrics and backless harem slippers. It was almost Jean Harlowesque—a ripe, womanly thing that was out of sync with contemporary fashion….” IS: “Deborah Harry?” CP: “A brilliant singer! What crystal clarity and perfect emotional pitch. In the ’70s, Blondie turned rock retro….There’s a direct line from Harry to Belinda Carlisle of the Go-Go’s, who also jumped back to the ’50s….Fashion-wise, Belinda Carlisle as a spunky, bratty blonde was the crucial transition between Debbie Harry and Madonna in the ’80s.”

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  Paglia, “Mud and Sweat and Joy and Tears: Playing back the sounds of 1969,” Interview magazine, October 2004. “Rock music split down the middle in 1969.” Surveys the major musical events of 1969: the Woodstock Music Festival, the Beatles’ last performance, Led Zeppelin’s first album, Bob Dylan’s Nashville Skyline, the Allman Brothers’ debut album, David Bowie’s “Space Oddity.”

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  Paglia, review of Zappa, a biography of musician and composer Frank Zappa by Barry Miles, The New York Times Book Review, November 14, 2004.

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  Sheelah Kolhatkar, “Notes on Camp Sontag,” The New York Observer, January 5, 2005. “ ‘Mary McCarthy once told Susan [Sontag], “I hear you’re the new me,” ’ said Morris Dickstein….‘It’s absurd to think there had to be only one woman intellectual, but it’s clear that Camille Paglia had that same All About Eve feeling toward Susan Sontag that Susan Sontag had toward Mary McCarthy.’ ” [The All About Eve analogy originated with Paglia’s essay, “Sontag, Bloody Sontag,” in Vamps & Tramps. About Sontag’s disastrous 1973 visit to Bennington College, Paglia wrote: “It was All About Eve, and Sontag was Margo Channing stalked by the new girl.”]

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  Franklin Foer, “Susan Superstar: How Susan Sontag became seduced by her own persona,” New York magazine, January 14, 2005. “It was telling that Sontag felt such chilliness toward Paglia. Over the last two decades of her life, Sontag became an eloquent critic of the culture’s turn away from ‘seriousness,’ its relinquishment of Partisan Review high-mindedness for Paglia-like frivolity. She began to worry that her writings may have played an unwitting role in this change.”

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  Editor-in-Chief Kerry Lauerman, “Warrior for the Word,” interview with Paglia after release of Break, Blow, Burn, Salon.com, April 7, 2005. Paglia: “Another thing I object to, and the media seems to really ignore, is how many books by prominent academics have been supported by graduate assistants and research assistants, often paid for by the university itself. They’re the ones doing all the book-running, checking quotes, accumulating examples, assembling the footnotes and bibliography. As a scholar, I can see it in people’s work from major universities. I can tell who are the professors who actually did the reading and gathered the quotes, as opposed to people who are so busy running this or that and exercising academic power that they have to have examples and evidence supplied to them. And what gets me is when a reviewer says in awe: ‘This is a very erudite person—there are so many pages of footnotes!’ I want to laugh! Well, pages and pa
ges of footnotes in the back of a general-interest humanities book usually indicate weakness. You don’t need all that if your scholarship is solid. And the idea that the trendy professors of the elite schools have actually read all those books is usually false. Not only haven’t they read them, they haven’t even gone to the library to get them. I have no research or clerical assistance whatever. I teach at a small college where I must do every single thing myself. But that is what, I believe, sympathetic readers are sensing: quality control.”

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  Paglia, Culture Klatsch column, in conversation with Ingrid Sischy, “Camille Paglia on the Great Academic Meltdown of 2005,” Interview magazine, May 2005. Paglia: “Universities are always talking about diversity, by which they mean more women, more blacks, more Hispanics—but they never mean intellectual diversity. And so, unfortunately, it’s been left to conservatives (like the former radical, David Horowitz) to address that issue and to demand that in courses on politics or gender, both sides be explored. It is our responsibility as teachers to articulate the other side—there should never be a party line in a classroom. Too few teachers these days try to ensure that the classroom is a neutral arena of discourse. In fact, many professors claim that it’s their obligation to change the world. They’ll say things like, ‘Yes, I’m trying to change minds,’ or ‘The purpose of the university is to effect change in society.’ Humanities professors all over the country have been saying that openly for at least 25 years. Well, I don’t agree with that at all. A professor is there to help students use the mind in a detached, objective way to analyze society and culture. The moment you attempt to convert, you’ve sold out and become a missionary or ideologue.”