From: HF.GTD@forsythe.stanford.edu (Gabrielle Daniels)
Subject: Cammie Fay Paglia
Organization: Stanford University, California, USA
Date: Wed, 16 Sep 1992 01:04:36 GMT

From the Sunday, September 13, 1992 San Francisco Chronicle

PAGLIA'S LATEST POP CULTURE PROVOCATION

"Sex, Art and American Culture," by Camille Paglia

Reviewed by Rebecca Radner
(A San Francisco poet whose work has appeared in the Journal
of Popular Culture)

(With asides from Gabrielle Daniels.  And I'm trademarking "Cammie
Fay Paglia" because you heard it first here.)

As usual [...] means previous text

"Sex, Art and American Culture" by Camille Paglia, professor
of humanities at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia
and author of the best-selling "Sexual Personae," is a
monumentally silly book.
.
In this collection of essays, Paglia struts and postures as
a self-appointed messiah of glitz, ready to lead us out of
the arid lands of feminism and academe into the fertile
fields of decadent pop culture.
.
Announcing that she represents "independent thought," Paglia crows,
"I'm going to be as painful as possible, until Gloria Steinem
screams!" in the manner of an adolescent who's going to grab
attention one way or another.  The pieces repeat the same themes in
the same language:  the superiority of the '60s, television, rock
music, gay and Jewish men, Penthouse and Paglia herself, "the author
as amazon epic quester." The main focus of her displeasure is the
women's movement.
.
(I think the '60s were a special, wonderful, needed, excessive and
dangerous time that we all need to learn from, acknowledge mistakes
and build upon.  Unfortunately, the girl disses the memory of that
time.  She's not for the Sixties.  She's for the Fifties:  the Beat
Generation, Playboy.  But her manic style seems cut [albeit a
sliver] from Abbie Hoffman's clothes, the Universe rest his suicided
soul.  )
.
"Feminism," she says, "with its Carry Nation repressiveness,
does not see what is for men the eroticism or the fun
element in rape, especially the wild, infectious delirium of
gang rape." Unfortunately for Paglia's arguments, she
misrepresents her opponents at every turn.
.
(I think my black women ancestors, as well as sisters living here
and now, oughta form a posse, like in Morrison's "Beloved," stand
outside the house where we all live, and hoodoo that girl out of
everybody's hair.  Maybe she digs gang rape as a hobby, but no one
of my acquaintance does, including the gay men.)
.
"Feminism," Paglia claims, "keeps saying the sexes are the same.  It
keeps telling women they can do anything, go anywhere, say anything,
wear anything" without regard to danger.  Most feminists say nothing
of the kind--nor is feminism a monolithic structure, speaking in one
homogenious and deluded voice.
.
She whizzes on to suggest that many battered women don't leave their
men "because the sex is very hot." Besides, she says in a TV
interview with Sonya Friedman, "ALL rape is erotic.  ALL rape is
sexual." When she's asked, "Erotic for WHOM?" Paglia replies,
"Erotic for the man!" The interviewer says, "Yes, but there are two
people having sex." Instead of answering, Paglia refers grandiosely
to her study of rape in "Sexual Personae," "as demonstrated in the
whole of human cultures..."
.
This is her method all through the book; rather than arguing in a
rational manner, she demonstrates the superiority of her views by
pointing to her imagined credentials.
.
(And to unnamed, so-called leading, contemporary European
intellectuals who agree with every freaking thing she says, as she
purports in the "Vanity Fair" interview last month [cover of Geena
Davis].  Whoa, girl.  Name names, lady.  Just who are these people?)
.
...On occasion, Paglia says something sensible, if hardly
original.  She has a point about the dangers of getting hung
up on victimization and the need for healthy conflict rather
than politically correct agreement.
.
(So?  So have other, more interesting folks.  I saw an article by
her on Princess Diana which was eons better than this clatter about
feminism she insists is the real deal.  Ishmael Reed is the same
way.  He's great talking about how it is to live and fight to live
in Oakland, California, but totally clueless on feminism.  And he
addresses white feminism, not black feminism, always.
Self-promotion, all the way.  Better to bat what's close at hand
than what is unknowable and unthinkable.)
.
Her ploy, however, is to pile one wild-media courting statement atop
another in her hysterical, "hyped-up" style until any grain of sand
in her original argument is buried.
.
Paglia's methods are as dubious as her ideas.  Repetition
rather than reason is her main way of bludgeoning the reader
into submission.  We hear the same phrases over and over:
Apollonian and Dionysian, Italian pagan Catholic  (the only
thing to be), "in your face" (good), "ass-kissing"(what
OTHER scholars do), the need to surpass or conquer nature,
and sex with a "sizzle."
.
(Because of Western Civ, we hardly have any "nature" left to
conquer, much less "virgin territory" like the Americas,
Australia, Africa. Just about everything is polluted and messed
over.  And sex with a "sizzle"?  Hey, not everyone is into SM, power
games, and Kathy Acker like you are, dearie.  Suit yourself, not
everyone else.)
.
When Paglia doesn't agree with someone, [she] resorts to
name-calling and venomous attacks.  ...Naomi Wolf, author of
"The Beauty Myth,"...is called "Little Miss Pravda."
.
(Anita Hill doesn't come off very well, either.  Cammie Fay Paglia
dusts her off as someone who really can't dish it out as well as
take it on two lousy pages that doesn't get to the meat of the scene
75% as well as my girl bell hooks.  In fact, she lets Clarence
Thomas neatly off the hook and blames the victim.  Typical.  In
another article, she talks about people of color in such a breezy,
expropriating way that it becomes sidewinding diss, not praise.)
.
Paglia's style verges on fan mag.  Rolling Stone Keith
Richards is her idol; she is a "dyed-in-the-wool, true-blue
Madonna fan"; and she adores, worships and is devoted to
Elizabeth Taylor.  Indeed, she writes of Taylor, "Opening
her violet eyes, she takes us into the liquid realms of
emotion, which she inhabits by Pisces intuition."
.
(Jeez.  As a Pisces myself, I feel insulted by all this fluffy,
fruity ambrosia.  Worse than Michael Jackson's apparent
[nonsexual] seduction by Liz.)
.
...Where this leads Paglia is to a defense of "kiddie porn
and snuff films," as well as a repeated accusation that
those who believed in free love in the 1960s are responsible
for AIDS.
.
(Man, I wonder about the children.  African men doing the do from
time immemorial suddenly get AIDs.  Why didn't they get it before?
Useless twaddle...  Furthermore, she complained in an interview here
in S.F.  that she couldn't get laid because she was doing all this
so-called needed work.  The picture accompanying the review has her
parting her lips to look fetching.  She wishes.)
.
Paglia's success demonstrates that anyone with a tiny sense of
timing, a willingness for her work to appear in Playboy, a mouth
bigger than her brain, a narcissistic disorder, a passion for
self-promotion and an atrophied ethical sense can make it big in
this country.
.
(Amen.  Whereas Shahrazad Ali caused ripples in the black community
and on Donohue, Cammie Fay Paglia wants to make a breath-taking wave
everywhere, from CNN to "Vanity Fair." This girl is on 78 not 33
rpms.  I just hope it doesn't play itself in bedrooms and workplaces
around the country--we-uns have enough problems.  The girl wants to
be a star, plain and simple, and apparently she's mad at Susan
Sontag for not noticing her some 15 years ago when she was just
another aspiring woman in academe.  Yell loud enough, I guess, and
eventually someone hears you.  Someday, stars burn out.  Paglia's 15
minutes are going to be up pretty soon.  If this is what Steven
Stovall digs, I feel sorry for folks, black or white, everywhere.)




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