TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/011392/0113520.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 9.5 KB | 200 lines

                                                                                PROFILE, Page 62

The Bete Noire of Feminism


Cultural iconoclast CAMILLE PAGLIA likes to throw punches, both
physical and verbal, against smug formulas and codes of political
correctness

MARTHA DUFFY/PHILADELPHIA


    "There is something in my book to offend absolutely
everybody. I am proabortion, pro the legal use of drugs,
propornography, child pornography, snuff films. And I am going
after these things until Gloria Steinem screams."

    The speaker -- at nonstop, sewing-machine speed -- is
Camille Paglia, contrarian academic and feminist bete noire, and
her 1990 book, Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from
Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (Yale University Press), is the
most explosive tome to emerge from academe in quite some time.
The book is about many things -- paganism, pop culture,
androgyny, sexual conflicts -- but what has drawn the media with
magnetic force is the author's contempt for modern feminists.
Paglia writes with freshness and blithe arrogance, and she does
not hesitate to hurl brazen insults. She accuses author Germaine
Greer, for example, of becoming "a drone in three years," sated
with early success. Susan Sontag is another victim of celebrity.
Princeton feminist Diana Fuss's output is "just junk --
appalling!"

    Along with the zingers, Paglia articulates positions that
many people of both genders seem to want to hear these days. To
them feminism has gone quite far enough, and they like
Personae's neoconservative cultural message: Men have done the
work of civilization and can take credit for most of its
glories. Women are powerful too, but as the inchoate forces of
nature are powerful. Religion and marriage are historically the
best defenses against chaos.

    Such theories have aroused profound displeasure among
feminist authors. For one thing, as Teresa L. Ebert at the State
University of New York, Albany, points out, they were caught
napping by Paglia. "She wasn't taken seriously, but her attacks
are part of Ronald Reagan's and Margaret Thatcher's
conservatism," says Ebert. "They mean a backlash against women.
Paglia is reviving old stereotypes with new energy." Harvard's
Helen Vendler says Paglia "lives in hyperbole. It is a level of
discourse appropriate to politics, sermons, headlines. She
should be on talk shows, talking to Geraldo." She probably will
be.

    In fairness it should be said that nothing about Personae
was calculated to bring its author notoriety. The book was
rejected by an honor roll of prestigious publishers. But when
success finally came, nine years after the manuscript was
completed, the star was ready and waiting to be born. Personae
climbed to seventh place on the paperback best-seller list, a
true rarity for a scholarly book.

    Paglia is the new media princess, and acts the part. When
she accepts a speaking engagement now, she generally shows up
with two massive bodyguards togged out in black leather
jackets. She has been featured in the New Republic, Playboy, New
York, NYQ (for New York Queer), Russian, Japanese and French
publications.


    One reason for her high profile is that Paglia has
bristling opinions on subjects other than feminism --
particularly education. She advocates a core curriculum based
mostly on the classics and rails against what she considers
politicized frills, such as most African-American studies and
the currently chic French theorists Michel Foucault and Jacques
Lacan. Never one to let consistency get in her way, Paglia has
a strong libertarian streak -- on subjects like pornography --
that go straight to her '60s coming-of-age.

    Loquacious is too impoverished a word to describe Pa
glia's speaking style. She talks at triple speed, rarely even
using contractions, hurtling along in a grating pitch that comes
perilously close to a cackle. Her aural punctuation is
hilarious. A recent SRO lecture at the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology was typical. Yuh? Yuh? O.K.? O.K.? peppered her
speech, and the audience answered right back.

    Someone recently compared Paglia with Phyllis Schlafly,
and she was appalled. Despite all the brickbats, Paglia
considers herself a lifelong feminist; Personae took shape when
she read Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex and resolved "to
do something massive for women." But Paglia believes the current
movement has declined into smug formulas and codes of political
correctness. "What began as a movement of eccentric
individualists has turned into an ideology that attracts weak
personalities who are looking for something to believe in." Or,
she adds, someone to blame: to her, rape is a dreadful crime,
but women who make their accusations years later -- not to
mention those who complain of date rape and sexual harassment
-- are deluded. Anita Hill should have stepped forward at once
when Clarence Thomas was offensive to her, she argues. "My
feminism is, like, deal with it!" says Paglia. "Not ten years
later."

    Paglia's ideal women are independent, like Amelia Earhart
or Katharine Hepburn. She became obsessed with Earhart as a
teenager and even wrote a book-length manuscript about her.
Little Camille's enthusiasms were something her Italian
immigrant parents fostered. Her father, a French professor at
Le Moyne College in Syracuse, taught her to pursue goals
aggressively. Today the daughter says ruefully, "He created a
monster he couldn't control."

    She can't remember a time when she was not scuffling with
boys to be first in line. When she devoured books on ancient
Egypt, her father was gratified. But movies also held her in
thrall. Paglia's love affair with popular culture, which forms
the forthcoming second volume of Personae, was already
blossoming when she was a child. "Egypt and Hollywood were
equivalent phenomena to me, equally rich and fabulous," she
says. Her father demurred. "He lectured me on Voltaire's
disapproval of actors," Camille recalls, "and this was the time
when I was making my collection of 599 Elizabeth Taylor
pictures."

    In 10th grade Paglia got her first taste of social
ostracism and its consequences. Some of the pretty blonds in her
class suddenly turned into bland, cliquish sorority queens. She
was left behind as a tomboy with a serious case of ambition.
The lesson was not lost on her; to this day she sides fiercely
with the outsider.

    She was class valedictorian at the State University of New
York, Binghamton, in 1968, "when it was full of radicals." The
students were throwing off '50s shackles and looking to other
cultures for solutions. The Doors' battle cry, "We want the
world, We want it now," exhilarated Paglia. After four restless
years at Yale getting her Ph.D. in English, she found herself
teaching at Bennington.

    Her seven-year stint there was a series of explosions. For
one thing, she is, as she says in a rare understatement,
"physical." Paglia throws punches. She kicks people twice her
size. Once she even called the president of the college to
inform her that she was about to kick an obnoxious male student.
Fine, said the president, who was new on the job and probably
thinking in metaphors. Paglia landed one that sent the fellow
sprawling in the cafeteria. Says the woman warrior: "Committees
were always convening over me." After leaving Bennington in 1979
-- one tiff too many -- she struggled for a decade to support
herself.


    Paglia usually refers to her private life as a disaster.
Through the years she has had relationships with both women and
men and for a while considered herself a lesbian. "But lesbians
don't like me," she notes, in part because she insists that most
women are bisexual, that the role of hormones accounts for an
inevitable attraction between the sexes. Lately Paglia has been
going out with men. But, she asks, "what man is going to take
me seriously? I'm not a nurturer. Men have flashes of ego and
confidence followed by relapses. They have to be stroked, and
I don't have that patience." There is also the age problem.
Recently she dated men around her age, 44, but found them over
the hill sexually. She would prefer younger men, but her pride
restrains her. "Like there's something faintly ridiculous about
Cher with that young guy: she looks like a dowager with a
gigolo." Some dowager.

    Paglia will take next fall off from her academic and
speechifying schedule to get the second volume of Personae into
shape. The book promises to be a whopper, the author's thoughts
on a lifetime of blustery enthusiasm for popular culture. The
sport section, for instance, will deal with baseball vs.
football: Paglia is passionately in favor of the latter.
Baseball she considers an academic pastime: "Wasp, cerebral,
Protestant." Football, on the other hand, she wishes she could
have played: "The rhythms of my writing are high impact.
Colleagues have seen my ability to look downfield and see
pockets of trouble. And I hit them."


    What she will say about her beloved rock idols is less
clear. Megasuccess may be poisoning them. She finds Michael
Jackson's current album "appalling," Prince a letdown, Madonna
drifting. "She wants to cover all frontiers, but she has very
little talent for acting," says one of the Material Girl's most
vocal fans. "O.K.?"

    O.K. But Paglia is determined to hit a few frontiers too.
Kafka once said "a book must be the ax for the frozen sea inside
us." Paglia wants to write that book -- "not the Band-Aid, not
the comforter, not the down quilt." The ax.