Is Camille Paglia duffing up the right-on `feminazis’ on behalf of bad girls everywhere? Or is she peddling outdated, simplistic views completely out of touch with the Nineties? Angela Phillips on the working-class motormouth who enrages as much as she engages
This should have been Camille Paglia’s week. The woman who put the sex back into sexual politics, who believes that a sex-free workplace is neither possible nor desirable, ought to be rubbing her hands with glee. She should be busily tapping out a new lecture on the entrapping female and the tragic male ensnared by his own insatiable appetites – or what she would see as Apollonian culture crushed by Dionysian nature. Yet, oddly enough, Paglia’s take on the Clinton affair is not like that at all.
She has described Monica Lewinsky as a confused girl and castigates Bill Clinton for defiling the “sacred space of the Oval Office”. A puzzling charge, but then Paglia is a puzzling woman.
At 51 she has written only one substantial book, unusual for such a well-known academic. She works in the tiny humanities department of Philadelphia’s University of the Arts, which registers about nil on the Richter scale of academia. Her students are dancers and artists who are more interested in their own art than in analysing the artists who went before.
Yet Paglia has rocked the academic establishment to its roots and is feted by every United States and British newspaper and television channel. In London she has been invited to present a series of films at the National Film Theatre next summer and write the notes for next month’s National Theatre performance of Antony and Cleopatra. The deeply cerebral British Film Institute is so thrilled with her recently published essay on Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds that it is asking her to write another.
The media loves her because she is an extremist, and academics (particularly feminists) loathe her for the same reason. There are some media dissenters, such as Jonathan Dimbleby, whom she famously walked out on mid- interview, and some academic supporters (mostly male), who see her as a refreshing wind blowing though a rigid institution.
In her treatise Sexual Personae she describes women, or at least reproductive woman (in this she manages to exclude herself), as nature at its most primitive and sees culture as created by men in their effort to escape the clutches of the sucking, swamping female. Her view allows her to invest women with a mysterious power which, set against the prudery of the anti-porn sisters Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin, and the victimising tendency of the date-rape squad, does indeed provide a refreshing alternative. But to see her as the leader of new-wave feminism is to misunderstand her writing at the most fundamental level.
One of Paglia’s most-quoted remarks is: “If civilisation had been left in female hands we would still be living in grass huts.” The only response has to be that had feminism been left in the hands of Paglia, women would never have progressed from the 1950s. She loves to see herself as a child of the 1960s, the era of protest and excess, but the 1950s are undoubtedly her spiritual cradle, peopled by lonesome cowboys, simmeringly sexy women and the odd maverick (like herself) whose non- conformity provides the cultural life force for an otherwise ordered society.
Her views are colourful, her books are immensely readable, but her simplistic view of the sexes is totally at odds with the more complex thinking and analysis which informs the modern academic study of gender. Paglia portrays herself as a woman who has been opposed and ostracised throughout her academic career by the “feminazis” who she believes have taken over academia.
Paglia sees her recent notoriety as a vindication of her position. Yet as Lynne Segal, professor of gender studies at Middlesex University, says: “She comes in lobbing bombs at feminism and then says `why do they exclude me?’ She is basically a very conservative 1950s Freudian who refuses to engage with any of the developments of the last 30 years. And then, having laid down the law about how we should all behave, she of course is completely different. She excludes herself from her own analysis.”
Andy Martin, a Cambridge don who invited her to lecture there earlier this year, suggests that she is a latter-day Galileo being excommunicated by the high priests of academia while to some extent deliberately cultivating the dispute. “She has adopted the persona of Diana Rigg in The Avengers: the individual against the world.” Robert Cesario of Philadelphia’s Temple University, who is one of her greatest friends, says, “She doesn’t want dialogue, she wants conflict. She sees dialogue as a sentimental term for coercion.”
Like many apparently aggressive people, her trigger-happy style covers up a sense of inadequacy and fear of challenge. Paglia is a working-class kid whose way of dealing with being frozen out by the rich kids of Yale, where she went to graduate school, was literally to put up her dukes and fight for her freedom.
After she walked out on a debate with Dimbleby, he hit back at her, just as all those rich boys probably did, by patronising her. He wrote in The Guardian: “Here was a woman who boasted that she had created `a radical Amazonian feminism’, who had denounced Naomi Wolf as a `twit’, Kate Millett as an `imploding beanbag of poisonous self-pity’ and … Beatrix Campbell as a `stupid little mediocrity’, and all this middle-aged woman could think of is her appearance.”
Believing him, I was expecting to find a sharply dressed, hard-faced battle-axe in spike heels, and I took her refusal to meet me at her place of work as evidence of her need to control the encounter. Instead when I saw her in a down-town restaurant in Philadelphia I found a pleasant-looking, conservatively dressed woman, and when she did later take me to visit her office I could see why she hadn’t wanted to rendezvous there. The dingy, book-crammed room is shared with two other people, and there is barely room to sit down.
This is not the environment of a media star but of a harassed working academic who has to deal with a pile of mostly irrelevant mail, a heavy teaching load and the pastoral needs of badly educated inner-city college kids before she even starts on her own writing. It isn’t hard to see why the second volume of Sexual Personae is some seven years late.
If the famous temper was not in evidence, the well-known motor-mouth certainly was. As her bottom hit the seat, so her mouth opened, not for food – she barely lifted her fork in four hours – but to let loose a torrent of words. Trying to steer the conversation was like trying to turn an ocean liner. I resorted to stopping the tape in an effort to take her in the direction I wanted to go. She would oblige, initially, but soon steered straight back on to her own course.
As she has said: “Behind every book is a certain person with a certain history.” Behind Sexual Personae lies a child born in 1947 to strictly Catholic, first-generation, Italian immigrants. She was a clever tomboy trapped in a female-dominated extended family and what she describes as “the suffocating claustrophobia of the Catholic church”.
Paglia may see herself as a pagan but she was brought up with the idea of original sin, sado-masochistic images of tortured saints, a male God who must be obeyed, the Madonna and the whore, and the crucified sage. It is these images which suffuse her writing.
“My parents were very religious, my feelings of suffocation came from those jammed churches, every Sunday, without air conditioning, wearing gloves and stockings, with the sense of people pressing in behind and in front, having to kneel down – I just cannot tell you how suffocating it was.” Her female relations were suffocating too. “I remember the constant drumbeat of pressure from all the women. You are being too loud, too rough. They weren’t happy with the way I was. My mother will still say now, `Tone it down, be nice.’ She wanted me to conform.”
Later she sent an e-mail with more: “When I first read Virginia Woolf’s masterpiece, To the Lighthouse, I was electrified by its portrait of her parents – since I felt they so resembled my own. Sir Leslie Stephen, in his intellectual manner and physical appearance, reminds me so much of my own father. And Woolf’s mother – with her attention to children and social gatherings and bringing people together, as well as cooking that work of art, the fragrant, stewing, boeuf en daube, reminded me of my mother too.”
And it is that bubbling beef stew which, to Paglia, seems to represent the female condition, sucking the intellectuals back into the steamy kitchen. It is a theme which constantly recurs in Sexual Personae: “Woman’s body is a labyrinth in which man is lost. It is a walled garden … in which nature works its daemonic energy. Woman is the primeval fabricator, the real First Mover. She turns a gob of refuse into a spreading web of sentient being, floating on the snaky umbilical cord by which she leashes every man.”
That family memory, with its Dionysian suck of strong women, cooking and weaving their domestic spells, was the labyrinth from which she had to escape; but it also attracts her. Indeed it has to be upheld if her theory of gender is not to collapse. Her Appolonian man must have a Dionysian woman to run from if he is to be able to create great art and culture. It is a picture which conventional feminists spoiled with their prosaic demands for creches and maternity leave.
Paglia thinks that mothers should be allowed to be mothers: “Feminism quite justifiably wanted careers to be opened up but it denigrated home-making. In the Italian culture the mother is of enormous importance. There is no one so frazzled as a contemporary mother who can do neither mothering nor her job well.” Fortunately, Paglia doesn’t have to deal personally with the contradiction in her own position. She says: “The question of motherhood is a huge one for me. I am absolutely blank in that area. There is some weird thing which draws women to babies. This is where I identify with men. I adore toddlers. But the baby thing – I go blank.”
But it isn’t just lack of interest. Paglia’s personal horror of maternity suffuses the pages of Sexual Personae: “Disgust is reason’s proper response to the grossness of procreative nature.”
Her father, whom she clearly adored, represented the outside world, the mind, and a way out for her. In her youngest days he was often absent. He went for a time to Paris to study at the Sorbonne and later taught French at a Jesuit College in New York State. “My father went to college on the GI Bill, he was the first in his family to do so. He was charismatic but authoritarian. He said `Think for yourself, defend yourself.’ I was taught to be what I wanted to be but at the same time his word was law.” It is not surprising that her first passion was Amelia Earhart, who flew the Atlantic solo in 1932, and that the second woman to catch her imagination was Simone de Beauvoir – who, like her, was desperate to shed the trappings of her female body and fly intellectually as, in those days, only a man could do.
Paglia was fortunate that the world was with her. She graduated from college and went on to Yale in 1968, just as women’s liberation hit the campus. She says: “I was a flaming lesbian feminist, the only openly gay person there.” At Yale, Paglia’s greatest friends were gay men, described in one of her essays as: “Aliens, cursed and gifted, the shamans of our time.” She often says that she would have liked to be a gay man, which may not just be because of their outsider status, which she covets, but also because they are the only group of people who can be entirely free of the suffocating suck of female nature.
As a lesbian Paglia had a problem here, though she laughingly admits never to having initiated a sexual relationship: “I don’t flirt, which is why my sex life is so bad. The only affairs I have ever had were if they have pursued me.” Her current relationship -with Alison Maddox, an artist and curator – has lasted five years, which seems to amaze her. Indeed, for someone who has made her name talking about sex, she seems to have very little time for doing it.
Paglia may have been a “flaming lesbian feminist” but she had little time for feminist organisations or the lesbian scene. She says of women in groups: “In my mind it is as if they are a huge flock of pigeons burbling to each other and then taking off en masse.”
Robert Cesario has been a friend since Yale days, when he was involved in organising a student association. He says hers was an individual protest: “Yale had an oppressing and intimidating atmosphere but Camille did not subscribe to it. She frightened us at times, she was so frank and in-your-face. I used to think, `My God, how imprudent she is. How can she be so self-possessed?’ But secretly I was delighted by her.” Indeed, it is fierce individualism more than anything else which marked her out.
The explosions continued. Paglia has a string of stories to tell about people she has attacked and freely admits that it was her contentious behaviour which deprived her of her first job at Bennington, an exclusive women’s college which had just gone co-ed. In 1974 it was the perfect place for her: radical and relatively relaxed.
As a new teacher it is usually necessary to work hard, publish as soon as possible, and keep your nose clean in order to get a tenured job. Paglia certainly worked hard. She had written most of Sexual Personae as her thesis and was now preparing it for publication. She taught hard. Kristin Lippincott, now director of the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, was her student: “She was a fabulous teacher. Her classes were always over-subscribed. She taught literature but you would get Greece and Rome, art history, popular culture, records and movies. She would weave it all together so that it made sense.
“She is very passionate about ideas and irritated with people who are intellectually lazy. If you were slouching at the back she would shake you out of your adolescent complacency. She had the ability to teach by grabbing the students and making them take notice.” It was when she grabbed a student by the collar, spun him around and kicked him in the rear that her time at Bennington drew to a close. The student in question had apparently insulted a woman at a local nightclub. Paglia lay in wait for him the following day in order to teach him a lesson and was awarded a golden boot for “liberating the women of Bennington”.
The boot is what she then got when her contract came to be renewed. It was 1980, the beginning of a major recession, jobs were scarce, and she was having trouble getting her thesis published. She survived on a string of temporary teaching posts back at Yale, supplemented by classes at the local community college and even in an aircraft factory.
Cesario says of that time: “It was very difficult but what is difficult for me never seems to be difficult for her. She has a capacity to tough it out that I don’t begin to have.” He was also concerned about her book. “The style is not the prevailing academic style – the aphoristic quality, the way in which it doesn’t substitute the academic for the artistic authority. She was very confident, sure it would bring notoriety and celebrity. I thought it was impossible. I used to worry all the time. It seemed so vast, but if I had tried to get her to limit it, or use a more conventional style, I knew she would feel I was inviting her to compromise.”
His fears were not unfounded. Her book was rejected by seven publishers before Cesario introduced her to Ellen Graham of Yale University Press (YUP) at a party. It was the late 1980s. The YUP academic committee was willing to take a risk and the marketing department smelled controversy – and there is nothing like controversy to sell a book.
By that time Paglia had settled into her current job, where she was recruited for all the reasons the academic establishment had rejected her: she was a generalist rather than a specialist and able to move from opera to James Joyce and then wind up with decadent art. She also had experience of teaching working-class students and, having rejected the French postmodernists – the fiendishly difficult theorists who dominate much of academia – her teaching could be straightforward, easy to grasp and, by all accounts, often spellbinding.
Throughout the long haul from leaving Yale in 1974 to publication in 1990, Paglia remained convinced that her book would be published and that, single-handed, she would roll back the years and force the academic establishment to reject fancy French ideas and return to the purity of kulturwissenschaft, the 19th-century German school of cultural analysis. In other words, less focus on language and how we analyse things and more on how we see and feel.
As she says: “People have always been displeased with me and I have always been convinced that I was right. I don’t come from a line of self-doubters.” To some, this refusal to engage with the major theorists of her generation looks more like pig-headedness than intellectual purity. She has not, after all, been rejected by the academy for a new theory but because she steadfastly hangs on to the old ones. But to see her merely as a reactionary would be to miss something. Paglia is a woman who has found her time.
Paglia’s supporters, such as Robert White who commissioned her for the British Film Institute and Andy Martin at Cambridge, are captivated by her swashbuckling theorising, her ability to hold an audience like a rock star, and they love her for her belief that men represent culture whereas women are stuck with biology.
Martin says there is a kind of liberating force in her work: “She abhors the French theoreticians of the last 30 years. She has managed to shift the debate back, away from the bookworm, slightly narcissistic over- emphasis on ideas towards biology. She is putting the emphasis back on the murderous, lethal female force and the fear men have of the power of women.”
Not everyone agrees with high estimates of her scholarship. One feminist academic (who refused to be named) referred to Sexual Personae contemptuously as a dumbed-down history of everything and expressed doubt that it could even have made it through the normal academic process in which books are scrutinised by other academics before they can be published.
She is wrong here. According to Ellen Graham, Paglia’s editor at YUP, the book went through the standard academic procedure: “Her facts, her reading and her knowledge are not challengeable, though her opinions certainly are and there is something in it to offend all parties.” It was a well-taken risk. The book has done well. Not as well as Susan Faludi’s Backlash, with its more orthodox feminist message. But Paglia caught a new mood and grabbed the attention of the media as much for her famously pugnacious persona as for her intellect.
In the 1970s her primeval view of the sexes would have seemed ludicrous to a generation who were determined not to be mired, as their mothers had, in the suburban family life described by Betty Friedan in The Feminine Mystique. They wanted to be able to leave the kitchen and fly as their brothers did. They were searching for new archetypes of women because the old ones didn’t fit them any more.
Thirty years later young women have different images. Their own mothers have worked, they no longer doubt their intellectual abilities, but they sense that the victim feminism of the 1980s, which swamped the more exuberant feminism of the early 1970s, has robbed them of something. Paglia appeals because, as one of her ex-students puts it, “She shows that women don’t have to be good little girls. They can be powerful and they can show that they are. That is how she is a feminist.”
But if Paglia is the champion of the bad girls then why is she not fighting for Monica and Bill and their right to have sex with whom, how and where they please? Could it be that she would then find herself on the same side as the Washington pro-Clinton feminist establishment which she so reviles? Perhaps the key to Paglia lies not in her refusal to compromise but in her refusal to be part of the chorus – if she cannot be the star then she doesn’t want to play.