20 Questions: Camille Paglia

Like her hero the Marquis de Sade, Camille Paglia considers herself "an independent thinker who shocks." Paglia, a Yale Ph.D. who's an associate professor of humanities at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, has shocked critics, academics and feminists with her thesis that human biology contributes much more than modern men and women--especially women--are willing to admit when it comes to ambition and achievement. Paglia insists, "There is truth to sexual stereotypes." For good measure, she claims that Western culture is built upon a pagan foundation, which Judaeo-Christianity has been unable to vanquish.

She makes her case with an analysis of 70,000 years' worth of Western art and literature, religion and psychology, detailed in her 700-page "Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson." Published in 1990, the book might have remained an inspiration for debate in ivy-covered halls, but Paglia has ventured off campus with a vengeance. She has condemned fellow academics for their narrow specialization and has editorialized against feminists for their attitudes toward beauty and pleasure, not to mention sex and rape. She claims that she is out for nothing less than the destruction of feminist rhetoric ("Social slogans inevitably become repressive," she insists). Academics and feminists have reacted with fury, but Paglia relishes the combat. She describes herself as an heir to the tradition of the Amazons, the mythological woman warriors, and cites her Roman forebears for their noble mission of civilizing the known world. "Sexual Personae" has sold nearly 15,000 copies, remarkable for a work originally aimed at a university readership. The paperback appeared in September and the book's second volume, which applies Paglian analysis to the period from the middle of the 19th Century to the present, will be published in 1992.

Warren Kalbacker telephoned Professor Paglia for an appointment. He recalls, "She warned me that I'd need time to prepare, that parts of 'Sexual Personae' were tough going. So I began to cram, with art books and volumes of plays and poetry close at hand." A couple of weeks later: Kalbacker traveled to Philadelphia to meet Paglia over lunch. "I felt I'd done my homework pretty well," he says. "But I was glad I could use a tape recorder; she talks so fast I developed genuine sympathy for those who have to sit in her classes and take notes."

1.

[Q] Playboy: You've written that clams on the half shell have a "latently cunnilingual character." Would you care to comment further before squeezing the lemon and adding cocktail sauce?

[A] Paglia: I began to notice that people had intense reactions to my ordering raw clams on the half shell, which I adore. This is my clam theory: Eating clams is extremely sensuous. It's not just cutting something very neatly with a knife and a fork; you're actually picking up the clam and getting into the shapelessness and the marine character of it. There's an ancient analogy between the smell of marine life and the female genitals. According to Sandor Ferenczi's Thalassa: A Theory of Genitality, the substance in decaying fish is the actual chemical in female genital secretions. What does this have to do with our primeval origins in the early sea? Some people say, "I love the way a woman smells; I find it very arousing." Others think it's disgusting. Many gay men seem to loathe raw clams. I find this pattern of attraction and revulsion coming from our senses very important in eroticism.

2.

[Q] Playboy: You've described Sexual Personae as an "obnoxious" book. Many of your critics, especially feminists, agree. Did you set out to piss them off?

[A] Paglia: It was intended to please no one and to offend everyone. The entire process of the book was to discover the repressed elements of contemporary culture, whatever they are, and palpate them. One of the main premises was to demonstrate that pornography is everywhere in major art. Art history as written is completely sex free, repressive and puritanical. I want precision and historical knowledge, but at the same time, I try to zap it with pornographic intensity.

3.

[Q] Playboy: Since the "Cliffs Notes" for Sexual Personae are not yet available, would you synopsize a few of Professor Paglia's ideas?

[A] Paglia: Sex is much bigger than the genitals. It's a matter of sensory awareness, living in the physical world and reacting to it in a sensory way. Aesthetics is at the heart of human nature. Once you start talking about aesthetics, you have to talk about the aesthetics of the human body. If you take an art class, you're being trained to see things in a bisexual way. To truly respond to the full history of art, you have to have a bisexuality of response to see the eroticism and beauty of the male figure and the beauty of the female figure. Artists are in some way androgynous. They are mediators negotiating the territory between the sexes; but most men and women are totally separate from one another and can never understand one another.

4.

[Q] Playboy: Would you care to set the Playboy centerfold in the context of the Western critical eye?

[A] Paglia: Very sensuous and very physical. But in no way threatening. The idea of a beautiful woman as an object of sensuous pleasure seems to me to be perfectly acceptable, part of human life. The centerfold has a terrible reputation among feminists. They're hostile to what they term the "male gaze," the way men by their voyeuristic obsessiveness keep women in the position of sexual objects that are passive to their staring. The male gaze is a cliché of contemporary feminism: Every photograph or painting of a nude woman presupposes a male observer and excludes female observers. Feminism has not fully been able to absorb the idea that a man can be aroused by looking at a picture of a nude woman.

5.

[Q] Playboy: We understand that two women in New Haven returned Sexual Personae to their bookstore and demanded their money back. They termed it ideologically unacceptable. Are you concerned about the refunds' mounting up?

(continued on page 170) Camille Paglia (continued from page 133)

[A] Paglia: The Yale professor and the graduate student--the thought police. This proves my point that feminism is not about debate. It's not about an inquiring mind. It has a frozen and petrified ideology. What I want to do is smash the entire superstructure of feminist ideology. I support the feminist social agenda--full political, legal and social equality for women. But everything that feminism has said about male and female eroticism, gender, abortion and rape is a bunch of malarky. There has to be a revolution. The feminist way of looking at things--blaming male oppression and patriarchy--is absurd. There's not a single leading feminist today who is as confrontational with men as I am. I am more learned than they are. I've been thinking about sex longer than they have.

6.

[Q] Playboy: just how long have you been thinking about sex?

[A] Paglia: In the Sixties, I felt the enormous sexual oppressiveness of Roman Catholicism, the nuns and the stress of being a virgin. The nuns pushed Saint Maria Goretti. She was a young girl who was stabbed twenty times and died rather than give up her virginity. I knew right from the start that there was something erotic about Catholic iconography, the sensuous statues, the bleeding statues. Part of Catholicism's richness is this pagan element, the sensory or erotic. That's missing from Protestantism, which makes no sensory appeal.

7.

[Q] Playboy: Sexual Personae analyzes the development of Western art and literature over thousands of years. Why are you now creating such a ruckus outside the classroom by tackling issues such as rape, pornography and prostitution?

[A] Paglia: I'm offering a comprehensive new view of things. I'm going to be calling it Italian pagan Catholicism. I allow for the pornographic element in life; for beauty, pleasure. It's a Mediterranean synthesis. Madonna and I belong to this. Italian-American women have never done anything in public. Geraldine Ferraro was a brief little thing. And suddenly these two dominatrix types have emerged. Like Madonna, I'm very disciplined, very orderly, very focused.

8.

[Q] Playboy: In a New York Times essay, you declared Madonna's Justify My Love video pornographic and at the same time proclaimed her the "future of feminism." What would you discuss with Madonna, dominatrix to dominatrix?

[A] Paglia: We have so many parallels. She had a very religious Italian background. We've become known for porn. She and I both identify strongly with gay men. Cleopatra was a great figure in history and Madonna is the closest we've ever come to that combination of a full female sensuality with a masculine political astuteness. She's not particularly learned, but she is a shrewd businesswoman and extremely alert mentally. She has totally accepted herself as a full female sexual being. Virginia Woolf was brilliant, but sex-phobic and food-phobic. Emily Dickinson was a virginal spinster. Very rarely have we ever had an achieving woman who has, like Madonna, fully accepted all the sluttishness of women. It's fantastic. It's very important in the history of women. Madonna's sexual persona is enormously innovative. People call her a slut or a whore. I'm embracing that. Madonna is recovering the great archetype of the whore of Babylon.

9.

[Q] Playboy: We won't ask you to define pornography, but do you know it when you see it?

[A] Paglia: Hamlet's musings about his mother are pornographic. It's everywhere in Michelangelo. Pornography is sexual reality for me. If a person cannot deal with pornography, he cannot deal with the reality of sex. You go to a museum, you see nude men and women. That's pornography. It's not pornography merely because it seems very elitist. The entire history of art is filled with these nudes. I am radically propornography. I draw the line nowhere. Every fantasy must be permitted. The imagination must not be policed. I endorsed, or defended, man--boy love in my book. This practice was rational and honorable in Greece at the height of civilization. Child porn? Half of Caravaggio's career is nothing but kiddie porn, small boys exposing genitals. I could see why you would ban actual films of children being drawn into pornography, but I defend paintings of child pornography or sex comics, which I really like. There's an increasing market for sex comics; I feel they're more imaginative than women simulating orgasms.

10.

[Q] Playboy: You've noted with delight that your views on rape have inspired feminist fury.

[A] Paglia: I am being vilified by feminists for merely having a common-sense attitude about rape. I loathe this thing about date rape. Have twelve tequilas at a fraternity party and a guy asks you to go up to his room, and then you're surprised when he assaults you? Most women want to be seduced or lured. The more you study literature and art, the more you see it. Listen to Don Giovanni. Read The Faerie Queene. Pursuit and seduction are the essence of sexuality. It's part of the sizzle. Girls hurl themselves at guitarists, right down to the lowest bar band here. The guys are strutting. If you live in rock and roll, as I do, you see the reality of sex, of male lust and women being aroused by male lust. It attracts women. It doesn't repel them. Women have the right to freely choose and to say yes or no. Everyone should be personally responsible for what happens in life. I see the sexual impulse as egotistical and dominating, and therefore I have no problem understanding rape. Women have to understand this correctly and they'll protect themselves better. If a real rape occurs, it's got to go to the police. The business of having a campus grievance committee decide whether or not a rape is committed is an outrageous infringement of civil liberties. Today, on an Ivy League campus, if a guy tells a girl she's got great tits, she can charge him with sexual harassment. Chickenshit stuff. Is this what strong women do?

11.

[Q] Playboy: You categorize the Western eye as "intense." What do Camille Paglia's eyes see that feminists' do not?

[A] Paglia: I'm extremely voyeuristic. The way I see things is quite unlike the way women see things. I see the world from male eyes. I don't know whether it's through some gender-bending thing or just a higher cortical oddity. I see women jogging on the street with their breasts bouncing up and down and I think they're out of their minds. They really do not see that they're just a walking provocation to attack. One of the main problems for feminists is their incomprehension that dress conveys provocative signals.

12.

[Q] Playboy: You've received threats from feminists. Do you fear for your personal safety?

[A] Paglia: Certainly not. They know I'm more violent than they are. I have a long history of punching and kicking. I just kicked someone here a few weeks ago. Some guy who didn't know I was a faculty member, because I was wearing sneakers, tried to move me out of the way. I kept kicking him and got into a huge scene. At a Madonna concert three years ago, I felt splattering at my feet; I turned around and saw this guy peeing behind my seat. I just slugged him. Then I heard voices up in the stands saying that some lady was hitting their friend. These men came down. I explained that the guy peed on our seats and I hit him. The men accepted this. They turned around and went back to their seats. This is interesting about men. It's like frontier justice. You pee on our seats; I slug you; we're even. Men are so simple. You just have to understand how to deal with them.

13.

[Q] Playboy: You've described men's urination as a "arc of transcendence." Frankly, we'd never thought about taking a leak in such elevated terms.

[A] Paglia: I feel that the way our bodies are shaped, the way we urinate and the way we have sex ultimately form the way we see the world. Men are limited, very narrow and very focused, but they achieve an enormous amount. All art forms are in some way a conceptual projection and they have largely been by men. I really think it's a hormone. There's something in men that's obsessive, maniacal, unrealistic--a mutilating drive that produces those great achievements. I believe that the masculine male homosexual is the ultimate symbol of human freedom, and that's why you have male homosexuality occurring at those great high points of culture such as classical Athens and Florence. Gay men and men in general have made astonishing contributions: haute cuisine, haute couture, the Pyramids, the George Washington Bridge. Every construction is in some way an attempt to create an artificial world away from a man's origin in the woman's body. We don't have a Michelangelo among women. We don't have any example of a woman so madly obsessed and turbulent and deranged, and with this titanic achievement over many decades. Because I'm a strong woman, I don't have a problem admitting this.

14.

[Q] Playboy: You give high marks to men for artistic achievement. Would you care to offer a few more compliments?

[A] Paglia: Male culture created the Western technological tradition that enabled the birth of the modern woman and permitted me the freedom and the leisure to write a book. The entire effort of my life was to seek freedom from men. The more I sought freedom, the more as an honest scholar I saw my degree of dependence on men. The car made me realize this. The car is the ultimate symbol of freedom. I've had Mustangs up to now. This time, I got a red Pontiac Grand Am. It's befitting my new exposure. Normally, I would not get a red car. I feel it's bad for a woman. It attracts attention. When anything goes wrong with a car, the men come with the tow truck. The men repair it. Where are all the women with advice about cars? Maybe there are some in California, but not around here.

15.

[Q] Playboy: There must be limits to your admiration of men.

[A] Paglia: Men at some level know that woman is the dominant sex. Women are more complex beings. They're more perceptive. They have a better sense of reality. But women have not felt the need to become obsessive, because they are confident in themselves, of their own identity. Male and female brains are different. The most recent thing I've heard is that women can use both spheres of the brain simultaneously; men can use only one side of the brain at a time. They can think or feel, but not at the same time.

16.

[Q] Playboy: Should men be just a bit paranoid about their relationships with girlfriends, wives and mothers?

[A] Paglia: What I see is a massive conspiracy throughout the world by women to keep from men the knowledge of their actual frailty. Very successful heterosexual women know that the secret is to realize the fragility of the male identity and the way it needs bolstering and uplifting almost every day. I see the horror of men's lives. How does a boy prove he's a man today when he has to work in an office? His skills are mental skills; he can be replaced by a woman. A girl knows when she becomes a woman by the fact that her period happens. Nature makes her a woman. One problem in a man's life is to create an identity separate from his mother. When a woman is having an identity crisis, she can go off and shop, change her hair color or her dress or buy new lipstick. What can a man do?

17.

[Q] Playboy: How does a poor guy deal with dominant women?

[A] Paglia: Don't listen to the feminists. The sexes are at war, and feminism is the voice of women seeking power. It's up to women to seek whatever power we can gain. I am a feminist. But it's not up to men to concede power or to surrender. Stop feeling guilty.

18.

[Q] Playboy: You're known to harbor sympathy for men who pay for sex.

[A] Paglia: The idea of relationships is a very, very recent and Western phenomenon. To insist that sexuality be a slave of intimate equal relationships is itself a kind of oppression. Prostitutes are the living emblem of sex free from relationship. At moments, a man realizes how he has fallen under the emotional control of a mother figure, and he lashes out at the woman with physical violence or pushes her away or goes out and visits prostitutes or has affairs. I see the prostitute as performing a necessary role.

When a man goes to a prostitute, he's voting for freedom of masculinity and sexuality. He isn't just stepping out on his wife. It's his need to be free as a functioning sexual identity. I honor the prostitute as a professional, an artist, a therapist, a dancer. I see them in Center City in the morning, standing there in their violet-suede miniskirts and gold-lamé tops, and they look fabulous. They're together. They're alert. They're funny. I don't see them as victims at all. I honor and respect prostitutes. Most of the negativity toward prostitutes comes from amateurs or from those who need to do drugs getting into the profession and debasing it.

19.

[Q] Playboy: Will you seek an audience with Pope John Paul II to explain Italian pagan Catholicism?

[A] Paglia: I respect the Pope. He's a very good man. Catholicism is a powerful religion. Most people need ethical guidance. They're not comfortable thinking for themselves. Italian Catholicism is one of the most comprehensive religious systems ever devised, but that's because it really isn't all that Christian. Paganism was never defeated. It went underground and has re-emerged. This would shock most Catholics. Catholicism ended up using images because it was making its appeal to the illiterate. Judaeo-Christianity in its pure form is anti-icon, completely word-centered. Protestantism and Puritanism, particularly in America, are the heirs of that. Feminism is obsessed with words.

20.

[Q] Playboy: Given its pagan origins, do you celebrate Halloween in a big way?

[A] Paglia: It's my favorite holiday. It's the one time of the year when I can enact my other self. I don't go out anymore, but I like visiting Halloween stores. The costumes are getting more and more elaborate. My first costume, Alice in Wonderland, was the only female costume I ever wore. After that, they were all transvestite: a Roman soldier, the toreador from Carmen, Napoleon, Hamlet. It was super-avant-garde for an Italian-American girl in the Fifties to appear in men's clothing. Now it's perfectly permissible to dress as a transvestite. They were beautifully elaborate costumes. I have pictures of myself in each one.

the renegade feminist and campus cult heroine lectures us on why she endorses pornography, paganism and the bracing smell of marine life