Ever since the publication of her
extraordinary 1990 critical study Sexual Personae, Camille Paglia (Humanities
and Media Studies/Univ. of the Arts, Philadelphia; Free Women, Free Men: Sex,
Gender, Feminism, 2017, etc.) has been somewhat of a split personality, and
some readers may wish her two sides could be separated. Keep the artist/critic,
the excavator of cultural mysteries, the scold of higher education, and the
daunting interpreter of art and poetry whose book Break, Blow, Burn (2005) is a
masterpiece; banish the self-promoter who often gets triggered by liberalism
and feminism. The present volume, which collects the author’s work from
Washington Post Book World, the Wall Street Journal, the Weekly Standard,
ARTnews, the Hollywood Reporter, and many other diverse publications, is both brilliant
and occasionally obnoxious. 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 “scarred 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. (Wallace Stevens “ended his career with a
laborious, plodding, skeletal style, employed in self-questioning poems of
numbing length.”) Paglia loves classic rebels, including Dylan, Dalí, Picasso,
Warhol, and the gay artist Tom of Finland, but she’s equally inclined to power.
She writes fondly of Ayn Rand, a “bold female thinker who should immediately
have been a centerpiece of women’s studies programs”; New York Mayor Rudy
Giuliani (“I am frankly enjoying his assault on the arts establishment”); and
Sarah Palin (“like Annie Oakley, a brash ambassador from America’s pioneer
past”).
Your
mileage, as they say, may vary where this shrewd cultural historian—and shallow
contemporary observer—is concerned. Take it or leave it: This career
retrospective is both maddening and essential.
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 policed 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
fatefully 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, insight, 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
Mapplethorpe (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 flagrantly 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 oppose 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 poster
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 opportunity 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 “Oscar Style” with Glenn Belverio (in his drag persona
as Glennda Orgasm) 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 Oscars, with their climactic late-night finale. Hence I lobbied
David Talbot about the Web’s potential for rapid response to the Oscars
broadcast, and the result was a yearly feature on Salon, “Camille Does the
Oscars”. I also campaigned in Salon and Interview magazine for comprehensive
reporting on Oscars fashions—another of my prophetic themes: the red carpet
would eventually win epic coverage by Joan Rivers and become a media staple,
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.
‘This
Book is Not for Everyone’: Camille Paglia Talks ‘Provocations’ By Alexandra
Silets. |
WTTW , October
30, 2018 Plus
an interview.
Also
of interest : Philip Dodd explores the value of causing offence. Interview by Philip Dodd
on BBC’s Radio 3 , Arts and Ideas, September 26, 2018
Paglia describes herself as a
libertarian democrat, which would place her in the lower left-hand corner of
that all-pervasive political compass that divides all possible diversity in
political stance into simplistic quadrants. This is misleading, in my opinion,
considering that her political takes are always on the level of aesthetics and
not particularly strong when it comes to policy. However, her recorded anti-war
stance from the run up to the invasion of Iraq, an interview from 2003 titled
“No to the Invasion of Iraq” has aged very well. The key to that piece is that
she understood the destruction of the Columbia space-shuttle as a bad omen of
supernatural significance, which is to say, she opposed the war on a
mystical-aesthetic level, from the reading of entrails, from her guts and not
so much from her brain, on the grounds of geopolitical strategy.
Paglia
is no Chomskyan nerd who derives an abstracted anarcho-syndicalist utopia from
theoretical first principles. She thinks with her entire body. It is for this
reason that she is the greatest female Nietzschean since Ayn Rand, who she
admires, but castigates for her dour seriousness, which she opposes to her own
comedic-carnivalesque “yes-saying.” This has always made her an enemy of
contemporary feminism, with its cliquish hen-pecking nature and its
upper-middle-class careerism and codes of politeness. She promotes
“street-smart” feminism, an Amazonian code which celebrates brash working class
women, knife-wielding strippers, and the women of frontier America who were not
afraid to get their hands dirty. Hers is a feminism for the femme-fatales of
hollywood’s golden age which appeals not at all to contemporary feminists who
“literally shake” at the thought of automatic rifles.
I
find her position aesthetically appealing myself, but with some misgivings.
These sorts of philosophies are for the elite of spirit, for the self-reliant,
and can never wield power or inspire a mass-audience without performing the
contradiction that is “Libertarian-Authority.” Someone has to make the rules
and set the limits, even when the rules and limits are maintained in the spirit
of openness. As Paglia attests herself, the educational establishments of
America are a nightmare for anyone sharing Paglia’s temperament. I can attest
to the enmity I faced when contradicting an Eve Sedgwick-toting teaching
assistant by championing Paglia against her during my time as an undergrad. The
frontier closed long ago, and Camille was one of the lucky few who snagged some
territory before the market was monopolized. It is improbable that she could
repeat her feat today. Any individualist is swallowed in the maw of the tribal
warfare that surges around us today the way a man-of-no-country would be
immediately captured, executed, or blown to smithereens if he were to walk
across a live battlefield littered with landmines and mortars.
The most egregious example of her
reasonable inadequacy is her position on abortion, which emerges many times in
her writing. She is, of course, pro-abortion, but with misgivings to the
framing of the debate. She dislikes the deaf standard of feminist framing which
claims a moral high-ground over the “dumb fundamentalists” by interpreting
their pro-life concern for the unborn as a disguise for the authoritarian
control of “female bodies” (a puerile Foucauldian rhetoric of biopolitics that
has become the standard means of liberal-leftist discourse today).
Abortion
has been a wedge issue in america since the instantiation of Roe, and has been
brought to the foreground once again by Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court confirmation,
which has sent feminists, once more, into the hysterical apocalyptic vision of
The Handmaid’s Tale. Paglia could square this circle quite simply if she took
the hardline Nietzschean stance of a spartan eugenics, as many on the alt-right
have, but she maintains her allegiances with the “working-class left,” that
phantasm of the late-19th to early-20th century which continues to haunt public
intellectuals in the limelight, leading them astray into a willful anachronism.
What’s
worse is that Paglia understands the metaphysical implications of abortion
being the primary concern of contemporary feminism, which is that it renders it
an alienating cult of sterility. In Provocations, she bemoans the careerist,
and thus, shrewdly capitalist foundation of modern feminism, with its inability
to establish a meaningful narrative for motherhood that does not render it a
male imposition over the autonomy of the female body. She even understands that
this inability is what swells the ranks of a religious fundamentalism that she
opposes. The far-right, be it christian or pagan, is able, where libertarians,
liberals, and leftists of all sorts are unable, to incorporate motherhood and
fertility within its narrative structure of iconic meaning formation. There is
also the obvious fact that groups that reproduce generationally, and value this
reproduction, outlast those that do not.
Where Paglia is strongest is in her
rage against the inadequacy of contemporary education, both public elementary
and collegiate. Her essays on Columbine and trade school, gay ideology in
public education, canon-formation, classicism, and “real multiculturalism” are
phenomenal. I suspect that this is due to her long career as an educator. This
is her home turf, while issues that surround heterosexual motherhood are
foreign territory for her, a staunch lesbian who borders on transgenderism. I
would recommend Provocations for the weight of this section alone, in which
every piece is strong and relevant.
When
it comes to collegiate education, Paglia’s recommendations for a new trinity of
intellectuals to undergird a future university curriculum are Marshall McLuhan,
Leslie Fiedler, and Norman O. Brown in place of Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida,
and Michel Foucault. Further, Adorno, and Marcuse should be replaced by
Northrop Frye and Harold Bloom. This is a canon of erudite, witty, and
pragmatic media-ecologists from our neglected Anglo-American Tradition against
the morose, cynical, snarky intellectual fads spawned by the Frankfurt School
and Francophone-Freudianism. Further, Paglia believes that Comparative Religion
should be the mandatory backbone of the humanities, to give some spiritual
insight to our woefully materialistic and secular society of pharmaceutically
numbed neurosis. Everyone should have more than a caricature of understanding
when it comes to the great world religions and their eternally relevant
symbolic systems.
Paglia’s diagnoses of primary
education in Provocations are, perhaps, even more compelling. In “The Columbine
High School Massacre,” she writes:
At home, American teenagers are being simultaneously babied and
neglected, while at school they have become, in effect, prisoners of the state…
the mental energy presently being recreationally diverted by teens to the
Internet and to violent video games (one of the last arenas for masculine
action, however imaginary) is clearly not being absorbed by school. We have a
giant educational assembly line that coercively processes students and treats
them with Ritalin or therapy if they can’t sit still in the cage. The American
high school as social scene clearly spawns internecine furies in sexually
stunted young men.
This essay, published in Salon on
April 28th 1999 (back when it was actually, really, good), is prophetic in the
age of uproar over “toxic masculinity,” incels, Gamergate, and the yearly cycle
of school shootings. None of the underlying causes in the Normie Meme Prison
system have been addressed in the two decades since Columbine. The public
discourse is still unable to digest the uncomfortable truths that Paglia
understood so long ago: “Guns are not the problem in America… these shocking
incidents of school violence are ultimately rooted in the massive social
breakdown of the industrial revolution.”
Paglia, put on your pine tree emoji,
because this is not too far from the infamous introduction to Industrial
Society and Its Future. When a public intellectual of such stature and
erudition is able to explicate the hidden grounds of wyrd-pagan
environmentalism emerging after the 60s, she can be forgiven all minor flaws.
The most disappointing element of Provocations is realizing the lost potential
of a Paglian twitter account, a medium with which she would have excelled.
Provocations is worth any reader’s
time. Whether or not one agrees with Paglia on issues of policy, one cannot
doubt the consistency of her vision over all these decades in the spotlight.
She can provide eclectic glimpses into the life of the underworld, tours in the
red-light districts and Hollywoods of the mind. She can just as easily lecture
on the criminally neglected 19th century German philologists or the cinematic
depictions of the Homeric epics over the 20th century. What’s most impressive
is how easy she makes this look, compared to that coterie of pontificates which
surrounds us, calling themselves intellectuals, but straining to state any
unequivocal conclusions.
Paglia is the antipode to all
unprovocative conversation. Do not read Paglia if you wish to remain
comfortably within the realm of normal discourses on the subjects of our times.
If you want to see these subjects rendered from a perspective which will likely
conflict with your own, read Paglia.
Invoking
Liberation: A Review of Provocations. By R. Cam. Jacobite Magazine, October 20, 2018
The stiletto high heel is modern
woman's most lethal social weapon. First imagined in the 1930s but not realised
until post-war technology made it possible in the early 1950s, the stiletto is
a visual slash born to puncture and pierce.
While platform shoes increased stature for
both men and women from Greco-Roman actors to Venetian sophisticates on flooded
walkways, the slanted structure of current high heels descends from the boots
of early medieval horsemen seeking traction in the stirrup. Hence high heels
have a masculine lineage, latent in their use by emancipated women eager to
rise to men's level.
But this quest for equality,
dominance, or merely assertive presence at work and play is contradicted by a
crippling construction: no item of female dress since the tight-laced Victorian
corset is so mutilating. Pain and deformation are the price of high-heeled
beauty. The high heel creates the illusion of a lengthened leg by shortening
the calf muscle, arching the foot, and crushing the toes, forcing breasts and
buttocks out in a classic hominid posture of sexual invitation.
The eroticisation of high heels
(still at medium height) was sped along in the 1920s by the rising hemlines of
flappers showing off their legs in scandalously hyperkinetic dances like the
Charleston. Alfred Hitchcock's fetishistic focus on high heels can be seen
throughout his murder mysteries, from his early silent films in London to his
Technicolor Hollywood classics like Vertigo and The Birds, where Tippi Hedren
(a former fashion model) demonstrates the exquisite artifice of high-heel
wearing as well as its masochistic vulnerability, chronicled in a thousand
low-budget horror movies. A woman in high heels, unable to run, is a titillating
target for attack.
But the high heel as an instrument of sex war can be witnessed in action
in a stunning face-off in Butterfield 8 (1960), where Elizabeth Taylor as a
glossy call-girl, her wrist painfully gripped by Laurence Harvey at a chic
Manhattan bar, implacably grinds her phallic spike heel into his finely
leathered foot. This was at a time when stiletto heels, which concentrate
enormous pressure in a tiny space, were banned from buildings with susceptible
linoleum or hardwood floors.
It was already being rumoured in
those pre-Stonewall days that drag queens, harassed on the street, would whip
off their high heels and ferociously wield them against assailants. In 2006,
noted New York drag queen Flotilla DeBarge was jailed after a bar-room fracas
where she swung her black high heels (impounded by the police as evidence) to
inflict wounds requiring stitches upon an insulting straight man and his date
(an online headline: "Meatpacking District Drag Queen High-Heel
Beatdown").
Reports
of high-heeled crime were on the increase in 2013. In Washington, DC, a man
complained to the police that a petite woman had hit him in the head with her
shoe outside the Ibiza nightclub. After a fight at a Washington 7-Eleven, three
women were arrested for stabbing their opponents; one wielded a knife, but the
other two used their shoes, leading to the charge, "assault with a
dangerous weapon". In Houston, Texas, a 44-year-old woman was charged with
murder after a bloody clash in a condominium tower during which her professor
boyfriend died after being struck in the head, face, and neck by 30 blows from
her stiletto heels.
The dagger later called a stiletto
began as a needle-like medieval tool to finish off a fallen knight by a thrust
through chain mail or between plate armor. During the Renaissance, the stiletto
became the favourite weapon of Italian assassins, jabbing from behind through
heavy fabric or leather and killing invisibly while barely leaving a drop of
blood. The stiletto's historic association with deception and treachery thus
gives an aura of sadistic glamour to the modern high heel, whose stem contains
a concealed shaft of steel. Woman as seducer or seduced can also lance and
castrate.
Helmut Newton, whose superb fashion photography was suffused with the
perverse world-view of his native Weimar Berlin, captured the disturbing
complexities of the high heel in Shoe, a picture taken in Monte Carlo in 1983.
Here we see the fashionable shoe in all its florid delicacy and dynamic
aggression. The stance, with shifted ankle, seems mannish. Is this a dominatrix
poised to trample her delirious victim? Or is it a streetwalker defiantly
defending her turf? Or a drag queen scornfully pissing in an alley? The shoe,
shot from the ground, seems colossal, a pitiless totem of pagan sex cult.
The
luxury high heel as status marker is directed not toward men but toward other
women – both intimate confidantes and bitter rivals. The high heel in its
dazzlingly heraldic permutations (as dramatised in Sex and the City) is beyond
the comprehension of most men: only women and gay men can tell the difference
between a Manolo Blahnik and a Jimmy Choo. In full disclosure, I never wear
these shoes and indeed deplore their horrifying cost at a time of urgent social
needs. Nevertheless, I acknowledge and admire the high heel as a contemporary
icon and perhaps our canonical objet d'art.
At the Neiman Marcus department
store at the King of Prussia Mall in suburban Philadelphia, a visitor ascending
the escalator to the second floor is greeted by a vast horizon of welcoming
tables, laden with designer shoes of ravishing allure but staggering price tags
(now hovering between $500 and $900 a pair but soaring to $6000 for
candy-coloured, crystal-studded Daffodile pumps by Christian Louboutin).
Despite my detestation of its decadence, this theatrical shoe array has for
years provided me with far more intense aesthetic surprise and pleasure than
any gallery of contemporary art, with its derivative gestures, rote ironies,
and exhausted ideology.
Designer shoes represent the slow but
steady triumph of the crafts over the fine arts during the past century. They
are streamlined works of modern sculpture, wasteful and frivolous yet elegantly
expressive of pure form, a geometric reshaping of soft and yielding nature. An
upscale shoe department is a gun show for urban fashionistas, a site of ritual
display where danger lurks beneath the mask of beauty.
Feminist
Camille Paglia on the allure of the stiletto heel. Australian Financial Review , May 4 2018
This
is an edited extract from Free Women, Free Men by Camille Paglia
Broadly: Your book is called Free
Women, Free Men. Why do you believe men need to be free for women to be free?
Camille Paglia:
My primary
inspiration since adolescence has been the thrilling decades of the 1920s and
30s, following American women gaining the right to vote in 1920. There were so
many major women figures entering the professions—like my idols Amelia Earhart
and Katharine Hepburn, who were determined to show that women could achieve at
the same level as men. The bold new women of that period did not insult or
denigrate men. They admired what men had done and simply demanded the
opportunity to show that women could match or surpass it. One of my persistent
quarrels with second-wave feminism is how male-bashing became its default mode
from the start. Movements often attract fanatics or borderline personalities,
and that's exactly what happened. Too many damaged women with bitter gripes
against men took over feminist discourse. Kate Millett was a prime example—her
life has been an endless series of mental breakdowns and hospitalizations.
What I'm saying in Free Women, Free
Men is that women can never be truly free until they let men too be free—which
means that men have every right to determine their own identities, interests,
and passions without intrusive surveillance and censorship by women with their
own political agenda. For example, if there is an official Women's Center on
the Yale University campus (which there is), then there should be a Men's
Center too—and Yale men should be free to carry on and carouse there and say
whatever the hell they want to each other, without snoops outside the door
ready to report them to the totalitarian sexual harassment office.
Broadly : What could feminists learn
from country women?
Camille Paglia :
Published for the first time in my
new book is "Southern Women: Old Myths and New Frontiers," a lecture
I gave to the Honors College Convocation at the University of Mississippi in 2014.
I focus on three Southern archetypes: the old mountain woman, the mammy, and
the Southern belle. One of the themes running through my book is the
excessively bourgeois or white middle-class assumptions of so much feminist
thought today. For example, I find Facebook's Sheryl Sandberg insufferably smug
and entitled. I thought her bestselling book, Lean In, was utterly dishonest in
failing to acknowledge how the affluent lifestyle of women executives like
herself requires a rotating squad of servants and nannies, whom she has
carefully kept invisible. I argue that country women of the agrarian era were
physically and mentally stronger than today's high-profile, feminism-spouting
women careerists, doing their Pilates and spinning routines at the pricey gym. Country
women had big voices and big attitudes—it's something that I observed myself as
a child among the immigrant Italian women in the factory town of Endicott, New
York where I was born. The elderly Italian women, often widows dressed in
black, were tough and fearless. Don't get in their way, or they would knock you
down—or deafen you with a voice that could cut through walls! One of my
favorite scenes in all movies is the first moment we see Hattie McDaniel as
Mammy in Gone with the Wind: she's leaning out a second-floor window at Tara
and yelling at Scarlett—a whole scolding litany at top volume. It sweeps me
right back to my childhood—because that's exactly the bossy way the Italian
country women behaved, including my own beloved maternal grandmother. The great
irony is that too many of today's privileged white middle-class girls at elite
schools can't seem to express themselves forcefully enough even to manage their
own dating lives. They have to run to parental proxies on campus grievance
committees to intervene for them. This isn't feminism—it's neurosis and
hysteria.
Broadly : In 1992 you told Daniel
Richler you were going to push post-structuralists "into the sea."
Did you succeed?
Camille Paglia :
I did not succeed!
Even though I helped scuttle Jacques Derrida and Jacques Lacan,
post-structuralism centered on Michel Foucault has continued to spread like a
plague through North American universities, and it has even reached multiracial
Brazil, which up until now has always had a far superior sexual system to our
own. In Free Women, Free Men, I reprint a long piece I wrote in 2013 for The
Chronicle of Higher Education, where I reviewed three new books by young women
academics about the hot new trend of bondage and domination. It was shocking to
find so much current evidence of the intolerable tyranny of post-structuralist
professors sucking the life's blood out of idealistic young teachers and
writers. This elitist garbage has destroyed the humanities. Post-structuralists
are ignorant fakes. They know so little about high-level intellectual history
that they truly think that Foucault invented the major ideas they hail him for.
He was a thief who concealed his real sources (such as Emile Durkheim and
Erving Goffman). Foucault was a cynical game-player who knew literally nothing
about any period or discipline before the French Revolution. The army of
humanities professors who fell hard for Foucault are pitifully naïve. I don't
give a damn about them—but they should be punished with derision and loss of
reputation for their amoral destruction of the next generation of scholars.
Camille Paglia Discusses Her War on
'Elitist Garbage' and Contemporary Feminism. By Mitchell Sunderland. Broadly , March
14 2017,
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