Review
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“I loved Camille Paglia’s new collection of
essays, Provocations. With her signature acerbic wit, Paglia
offers astute and humorous cultural commentary across pop
culture, art, feminism, and politics.”
—Lily Kupets, Visual Editor, Vogue
“Brilliant. . . . The scholar and culture warrior comes out
swinging. . . . Paglia covers a vast swath of society and culture
at large, including sections on popular culture, literature,
education, art, politics, and more. She is still at her fiery
intellectual best as a teacher, whether she's throwing out odd
but intriguing comparisons—Captain Ahab and Ziggy Stardust are
both ‘red by lightning,’ each ‘a voyager who has defied
ordinary human limits and paid the price’—or deciphering poetry,
happily butchering sacred cows along the way. . . . This career
retrospective is both maddening and essential.”
—Kirkus Reviews (starred)
“Outrageous, just as we expected and hoped! Not a neutral
observer, Paglia has an eye. She can see movement, see fissures
developing, hear the winds shift. Here, in her collection of
essays, we are doing time travel, but with destinations set. The
author is showing us what she sees ahead.”
—Patricia E. Moody, Blue Heron Journal
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About the Author
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CAMILLE PAGLIA is the University Professor of Humanities
and Media Studies at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia.
She is the author of Free Women, Free Men; Glittering Images;
Break, Blow, Burn; The Birds; Vamps & Tramps; Sex, Art, and
American Culture; and Sexual Personae.
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Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
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Introduction
This book is not for everyone.
It is not for those who believe that they and their friends,
allies, political parties, or churches have found the absolute
truth about mankind, present or future.
It is not for those who believe that language must be d to
serve what they view as a higher social good, nor is it for those
who grant to government and its proxies on college campuses the
right to require and enforce “correct” thinking.
It is not for those who believe that art is a servant of
political agendas or philanthropic goals or that it contains
hidden coercive messages that must be exposed and destroyed.
It is not for those who see women as victims and men as the
enemy or who think that women are incapable of asserting their
rights and human dignity everywhere, including the workplace,
without the intervention and protection of authority figures
deputized by the power of the state.
It is not for those who see human behavior as wholly formed by
oppressive social forces and who deny the shadowy influence of
evolution and biology on desire, fantasy, and anarchic impulse,
from love to crime.
This book is instead for those who elevate free thought and free
speech over all other values, including material considerations
of wealth, status, or physical well-being.
It is for those who see art and the contemplation of art as a
medium of intuition and revelation, a web work of meaning that
should be enhanced and celebrated and not demeaned by teachers
who cynically deny the possibility of meaning.
It is for those who see women as men’s equals who, in their just
and necessary demand for equality before the law, do not plead
for special protections for women as a weaker sex.
It is for those who see nature as a vast and sublime force which
mankind is too puny to control or alter and which efully
shapes us as individuals and as a species.
It is for those who see life in spiritual terms as a quest for
enlightenment, a dynamic process of ceaseless observation,
reflection, and self-education.
A premise of this book, following the great cultural revolution
of the 1960s, which was thwarted by the reactionary and elitist
forces of academic postmodernism, is that higher consciousness
transcends all distinctions of race, class, and gender. Sixties
multiculturalism was energized by a convergence of influences
from world religions—both Buddhism (a legacy of the Beat writers)
and Hinduism, which suffused popular music. Standard
interpretation of the radical 1960s in exclusively political
terms is a common but major error that I address in detail in an
essay collected here, “Cults and Cosmic Consciousness: Religious
Vision in the American 1960s”.
Although I am an atheist, I have immense admiration and respect
for religion as a comprehensive symbol-system, far more profound
in its poetry, in, and metaphysical sweep than anything
currently offered by secular humanism. In my Cornerstone Arts
Lecture at Colorado College, “Religion and the Arts in America”
(also collected here), I demonstrate how central religion has
been to American culture and how its emotionally expressive and
multiracial gospel tradition remains the principal reason for
America’s continued world dominance in commercial popular music.
I have argued for decades that true multiculturalism would be
achieved in education not by splintering the curriculum into
politicized fiefdoms but by making comparative religion the core
curriculum of world education. An early piece on this subject
(published in my first essay collection, Sex, Art, and American
Culture in 1991) was “East and West: An Experiment in
Multiculturalism”, a chronicle of an interdisciplinary humanities
course that I co-taught with artist and social activist Lily Yeh
at the University of the Arts. In the present volume, the same
theme is addressed in my opening statement for a 2017 debate at
the Yale Political Union, “Resolved: Religion Belongs in the
Curriculum”.
Provocations covers the two and a half decades since my last
general essay collection, Vamps & Tramps, in 1994. Some of my
articles and lectures on sex, gender, and feminism were published
separately a year ago in Free Women, Free Men. The latter volume
contains my 1991 New York Newsday op-ed on date-rape that caused
prolonged controversy as the first public protest against an
escalating hysteria around that issue on college campuses and in
the media. I continue to espouse my code of “street-smart
feminism”, which frankly acknowledges the risks and dangers of
life and encourages women to remain eternally vigilant and alert
and to accept responsibility for their choices and adventures.
However, as the generations pass since the sexual revolution
launched in 1960 by the release of the first birth-control pill,
discourse about sex has become progressively more ideological,
rigid, and banal. The feminist rejection of Freud as sexist has
eliminated basic tools of psychological analysis once standard in
cultural criticism. Few young adults with elite school degrees
today appear to realize how romantic attractions and interactions
often repeat patterns rooted in early family life. Nor do they
seem to have heard of the complex principle of ambivalence, which
produces mixed messages that can disastrously complicate social
encounters.
In my first book, Sexual Personae (1990), I wrote extensively
about the tormented fragility of male sexual identity—which most
feminist theory, with its bitterly anti-male premises, seems
incapable of recognizing. Too often, women fail to realize how
much power they have over men, whose ambition and achievement in
the public realm are often wedded to remorseless anxiety and
insecurity. Canonical feminist theory has also missed the
emotional and conceptual symbolism in sexual behavior—as in the
infantile penile displays of entertainment industry moguls who
appear to have routinely chosen as targets women who would show
embarrassment, confusion, or fear and not those who would laugh,
scold, or whack that tender member with the nearest shoe, purse,
hairbrush, or lamp. Interpreting such pathetically squalid scenes
in exclusively political rather than psychological terms does not
help women to make their way through the minefield of a
professional world that will always be stressful, competitive,
and uncertain for aspirants of both sexes.
The masculine dream of sexual freedom is writ large in the
drawings of Tom of Finland, who heavily influenced gay male
iconography after World War Two and directly inspired
photographer Robert plethorpe (whom I defended in Sex, Art,
and American Culture). My essay, “Sex Quest in Tom of Finland”,
which was written for the massive Taschen edition of Tom’s
collected works, stresses the pagan energy, vitality, and humor
of Tom’s pornographic all-male world, with its panoply of
archetypes borrowed from Hollywood and Nazi-era Finland.
The initial theme of my work, however, was not masculinity but
androgyny, the subject of my doctoral dissertation at Yale. (Its
title was Sexual Personae: The Androgyne in Literature and Art.)
When the prospectus for my thesis was accepted in 1971, it was
the only dissertation on sex at the Yale Graduate School. While
completing its writing at my first teaching job at Bennington
College, I was electrified by David Bowie in his Ziggy Stardust
phase, which seemed to encapsulate everything that I had been
thinking about gender. Forty years later, Bowie would put Sexual
Personae on a list of his 100 favorite books. It did not surprise
me: that great artist was sensing himself mirrored back from my
pages. It was a tremendous honor to be invited by London’s
Victoria & Albert Museum to write the article on gender for the
catalog of its mammoth 2013 exhibition of Bowie costumes, which
then toured the world. That essay, “Theater of Gender: David
Bowie at the Climax of the Sexual Revolution”, is reprinted here.
As I have often said, my own protest against gender norms began
in childhood with my rantly dissident Halloween costumes:
Robin Hood at age five; a toreador at six; a Roman soldier at
seven; Napoleon at eight; Hamlet at nine. (A photo of me as
Napoleon appears elsewhere in this book.) From college on, I
adopted the gender-bending styles of Mod London, which were
effectively transvestite. However, despite my lifelong
transgender identification, I do not accept most of the current
transgender agenda, which denies biological sex differences,
dictates pronouns, and recklessly promotes medical and surgical
interventions. An excerpt from an interview with the Weekly
Standard, where I condemn the use of puberty blockers on children
as a violation of human rights, is collected here. When Sexual
Personae was released, I called it “the biggest sex change in
history”. Gore Vidal rightly said that the voice of Sexual
Personae was the voice of his transsexual heroine, Myra
Breckinridge. Aggressive, implacable, and scathingly satirical,
that voice is a transgender construction, using the materials of
language and mind. To questioning young people drawn to the siren
song of hormones and surgery, I say: stay fluid! Stay free!
It is surely my sexually dual perspective that has allowed me to
understand and sympathize with Alfred Hitchcock’s awed and
quasi-mystical view of women, which so many other feminists have
reductively condemned as “misogynous”. I defended Hitchcock in my
British Film Institute book on The Birds (1998), as well as in
essays such as “Women and Magic in Alfred Hitchcock”, written for
the BFI’s 2012 Hitchcock retrospective and collected here. Other
pieces on film in this book celebrate movie music and lament the
waning of European art film as well as the decline of film
criticism.
One of my principal ambitions since my student days has been to
develop an interpretative style that could integrate high and
popular culture, which had exploded during the 1960s. I call
myself a Warholite: Andy Warhol’s improvisational, avant-garde
short films (starring gay hustlers and drag queens) and his
conversion of publicity photos of Hollywood stars into radiant
Byzantine icons provided an inspiring template for my work. In
contrast, I detest and se academic media studies that
monotonously recycle judgmental, politicized terminology from the
passé Frankfurt School, which has no feeling whatever for popular
culture.
Provocations, I submit, demonstrates the range and flexibility
of my system of interpretation, which fiercely attacks when
necessary but which respectfully illuminates both the artist and
the artwork, from Old Masters like Shakespeare and Leonardo to
modern music stars like Prince and Rihanna. In college, I was
impatient with the New Criticism, which I felt was too narrow and
genteel and had to be urgently expanded with history and
psychology. But I have continued to apply the New Critical
technique of close textual analysis to everything I write about,
as in my pieces here on Picasso’s “Girl Before a Mirror” or on
what I call the “psychotic mysticism” of poet Theodore Roethke.
One of my long-range goals in college was to break down the
barriers between genres, and I believe that my interdisciplinary
method has in fact done that—extending the same minute focus and
dramatic commentary to all of the arts but also to contemporary
politics.
My columns and op-eds on politics over the past quarter century
are too numerous to reprint or even catalog. I think I showed
special facility for analyzing the horse race of presidential
primaries, when my reviews of televised debates, for example,
were usually far more attuned than those of the major media to
how the candidates were actually being perceived by mainstream
voters. I consider the cover-story Salon.com interview (collected
here) that I did with editor-in-chief David Talbot in February
2003 to be a supreme highlight of my career: I was virtually
alone among political commentators in condemning the imminent
invasion of Iraq. Other leading media, including the New York
Times and the New Yorker, had shockingly surrendered to
tissue-thin government propaganda.
Full columns have been reproduced here on three political
figures: Bill Clinton, Sarah Palin, and Donald Trump. I have
written so voluminously and variously about Hillary Clinton since
the Clintons’ arrival on the national scene in 1992 that there
was no one piece that could be considered representative. Hence I
have interwoven excerpts about her from numerous articles in the
Media Chronicle at the back of the book. (It lists articles in
English only. My extensive articles and interviews on politics,
art, and other subjects in the foreign press, particularly in
Italy and Brazil, have been omitted.) The reader should be
forewarned that I began as a Hillary fan but became steadily
disillusioned over the years.
I was speaking, writing, and crusading about the first woman
president throughout the 1990s, when most other feminists were
absorbed with policy issues. Reproduced in this book is a
advertising my appearance at a 1996 debate at the Yale Political
Union (“Resolved: America Needs a Female President”), which was
recorded for national TV broadcast by C-SPAN. The Media Chronicle
also contains excerpts of then-controversial columns or articles
where I was notably prescient, as a registered Democrat, about
developing problems and evasions in my own party that would
eventually lead, many years later, to its stunning surprise
defeat in the 2016 presidential election.
Education is a major theme in this book. As a career teacher of
nearly half a century, I have watched American universities miss
their epochal rtunity for radical curricular reform in the
1970s and descend decade by decade into the balkanized,
bureaucratic, therapeutic customer-service operations that they
are today. High scholarly standards and deep erudition (as
admirably exemplified by the stiff, stuffy, old-guard professors
at Yale when I arrived as a graduate student) have so vanished
that their value and indeed their very existence is denied by
today’s bright, shiny, and shallow academic theorists. The real
revolution would have been to smash the departmental structure of
the humanities, reunite the fragmented fields of literature and
art, and create an authentically multicultural global curriculum.
A principal piece in this volume is “The North American
Intellectual Tradition”, which was given as the Second Annual
Marshall McLuhan Lecture at Fordham University. There as in my
long exposé, “Junk Bonds and Corporate Raiders” (published by
Arion in 1991 and reprinted in Sex, Art, and American Culture), I
reject European post-structuralism and call for a reorientation
toward North American pragmatism, grounded in nature. The
academic stampede toward pretentious, abstruse French theorists
in the 1970s was a grotesque betrayal of the American 1960s,
which was animated by a Romantic return to nature and a
reconnection of art with the sensory—the dynamic life of the
body. Michel Foucault’s primary influence, by his own admission,
was playwright Samuel Beckett--whose depressive postwar nihilism
was swept away by the communal music and dance of the 1960s.
Today’s jargon-spouting academic postmodernists with their
snidely debunking style are not the heirs of Sixties leftism but
retrograde bourgeois elitists, still picking through the shards
of T.S. Eliot’s Waste Land.
This book contains multiple examples of my early involvement
with the Web. “Dispatches from the New Frontier: Writing for the
Internet” documents the process by which I developed the unique
format of my long-running Salon.com column. Because articles
written for the Web are viewed on a screen rather than a page,
adjustments must be made in syntax, diction, and visual design. A
continuing failure to recognize this has produced the rafts of
slack, verbose, meandering prose that currently clogs the Web on
both news sites and blogs. Historically, it will eventually be
recognized that my lengthy, multi-part Salon column, with its
variety of tone and topics, was the first blog, a new literary
genre of the digital age. When I began writing it, only Mickey
Kaus was doing anything comparable, but his Slate.com column was
wholly focused on politics. My autobiographical diary approach
was so new that Salon’s editor-in-chief relayed complaints from
other staffers that there was too much of me in my columns. In
retrospect, it is clear that my work for Salon prefigured today’s
universal social media.
“Dispatches from the New Frontier” also describes how the
geographically scattered, maverick founders of the Web instantly
understood and supported my libertarian and multi-media ideas. In
the early 1990s, while my work was being ostracized by the
academic establishment, the dissidents on The Well were
discussing it from coast to coast. Stewart Brand, a co-founder of
The Well, interviewed me in 1993 for the premiere issue of Wired,
which called me “possibly the next Marshall McLuhan”. I co-hosted
early online chats, an innovative interactive genre whose format
was, by today’s standards, strikingly primitive.
Included in this book is the transcript of a collaboration I did
on “O Style” with Glenn Belverio (in his drag persona as
Glennda Orm) for an America Online “CyberPlex Auditorium” in
1996. The print-out format of our dialogue with real-time
questioners, as the Academy Awards unfolded on TV, has been
reproduced as exactly as possible. Before the Web, people had to
wait more than a full day before there could be newspaper
coverage of the Os, with their climactic late-night finale.
Hence I lobbied David Talbot about the Web’s potential for rapid
response to the Os broadcast, and the result was a yearly
feature on Salon, “Camille Does the Os”. I also campaigned in
Salon and Interview magazine for comprehensive reporting on
Os fashions—another of my prophetic themes: the red carpet
would eventually win epic coverage by Joan Rivers and become a
media ste, currently on the verge of excess.
Finally, two interviews here focus on my philosophy and practice
as a writer. My writing has always been motivated by the search
for a voice—or rather for many voices, keyed to the moment. There
is nothing more important to me than the power of words to
describe, recreate, entrance, and provoke.
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