Newsgroups: bit.listserv.words-l
Date:         Wed, 11 Nov 1992 00:17:12 EST
From:         "Tony @ Brownvm" <EL406045@BROWNVM.BROWN.EDU>
Subject:      Re: Camille Paglia
Comments: To: words-l@uga.cc.uga.edu

Posted on 10 Nov 1992 at 23:03:48 by Graham Toal

>I didn't know anything about this women you've been talking about lately
>(except that she's an occassional poster to soc.bi whose name I vaguely
>recognised) - but I saw her on your 60 Minutes tonight and I have to say
>what I saw I liked...  there was very little she said I disagree with.

By strange coincidence I just logged on to mention that today's Globe &
Mail has a review of last night's lecture by Ms. Paglia at the Winter Garden
theatre in Toronto.  Evidently it was a "capacity crowd of 1080".

It's too long to post all of, but perhaps a few excerpts.  The reporter
seems to have liked her.

  A frantic high-camp intellectual on fast forward, Paglia waggled her
  hips and gestured broadly while delivering a rant that ranged from
  predictable assaults on feminist authors Gloria Steinem and Naomi
  Wolf ("That hair!  Would she be where she is without that hair ?") to
  her personal failure to find good conversation in lesbian pickup joints.

  ...

  Another was her psycho-biological explanation for the alleged
  humourlessness of lesbians.  (According to Paglia, a self described
  bisexual, lesbians are too close to their mothers' anger.  By contrast,
  gay men are witty and playful: They have separated most radically
  from their mothers and the female principle.)

  Meanwhile, throughout the evening, Paglia lavishly praised her own
  importance.  "I'm a one-woman liberation movement," she declared.
  Certainly she unleashed controversy with the publication in 1990 of
  _Sexual Personae_, a closely packed study of archetypes in art and
  literature, and with her subsequent attacks on academic and feminist
  trends as narrow-minded.

  Overnight she became a hero in some reactionary circles, but she disavows
  those on the right who embrace her.  Last night she called herself
  "a Clinton Democrat and a radical libertarian".  She said that
  _Sexual Personae_ was "satire from beginning to end."  Rolling her eyes
  with delight at what she got away with, she cited a chapter in which
  she speculated on who had sex with whom in Samuel Taylor Coleridge's
  poems -- "and Yale University printed it!"

  ...

  Real feminism, she said, is a movement going back 200 years, which
  championed such laudable aims as child labour laws and equal
  opportunity for working women,  "But feminism's aims are only in
  the social realm.  And we are greater than our social selves.  Feminism
  cannot solve the problems or deal with the power between mothers and
  sons."

  According to Paglia, feminism went off track in the early 1970s.
  She contrasted Germaine Greer at the time of _The Female Eunuch_'s
  publication -- when she appeared in a Life magazine profile "looking
  fabulous in suede" and made witty asides -- with the earnest, humourless
  Greer later on who "looked like a harridan" and stated she was no
  longer interested in art and literature.

  "That was a turning point," said Paglia.  "A woman learned in
  Shakespearean comedy turned her back on art ... the record of the
  human race.  Feminism of the last 20 years is indistinguishable
  from philistinism."  She added that "Great art can only be
  produced by the universal, the whole" and said the voice of
  great artists is "hermaphroditic."

My wrists are getting tired - carpal tunnel syndrome approaching ?

I wish I'd known Paglia was speaking last night - I didn't see any ads.

>Anyone know the titles of her books?

_Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily
Dickinson_ is the only one mentioned in the review.

Tony H.