From: rhogan@phakt.usc.edu (Ron Hogan)
Newsgroups: rec.arts.books
Subject: Re: Paglia (was: Cross-Writing)
Date: 7 Jan 1993 02:05:45 -0800
Organization: University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA
NNTP-Posting-Host: phakt.usc.edu

Heather:
>_Tristram Shandy_ was mentioned in the Emily Dickinson chapter of _Sexual
>Personae_ in a discussion of hypochondria, specifically the fear of losing
>limbs.  The full quote is: "Laurence Sterne's _Tristram Shandy_, which I find
>utterly unfunny, may be a male hypochondriacal construction, for it is an
>accident series of disasters to body parts -- a flattened nose, shattered
>knee, crushed groin bone, a penis circumcised by a falling window." Her
>personal opinion in this case is a casual aside, and doesn't appear to affect
>her critical judgment of the work.

Oh?  and what *is* her critical judgement of the work?  As far as I can tell,
the sum of her judgment is that it's "utterly unfunny".  In a cultural survey
like this, almost no remark is 'casual'-- this one sentence becomes the sum
of her judgment of Tristam Shandy.  If she's ever written or spoken about
its literary qualities (apart from its lack of humor), I'd like to know.

My remark on the word 'tiresome' comes, of course, from the version of the
thread that adolphson and I had running.  Thank you for running the quote
in its entirety and clearing that up.

Me:  Camille's media events generate a cult of personality around herself
and are a fact in the equation of her personality with SP's contents.

Heather:  >I don't see why this is a problem.

I don't think it necessarily is a problem.  I'm just stating it as a
situation that exists.  If she wants to be a media figure, great.  If
I had my choice, I wouldn't be toiling in obscurity either.

Heather:
>Her critics certainly feel they can call *her* names.  Gloria Steinem, for
>example, has compared her to Hitler.

Not in any way to justify Steinem's remark, which I find reprehensible,
but was this before or after Paglia insulted her?  Maybe they could take
a lesson from Gore Vidal and Norman Mailer and sue each other repeatedly.

Me:  The Bette Davis cult among male homosexuals is blown out of proportion.
I imagine that the number of male homosexuals who like Bette Davis is not
significantly greater than those who like other actresses, and also not of
a greater percentage within the homosexual community as the percentage of
heterosexuals who idolize Bette Davis.  I add in parting:
>>If male homosexuals were out preserving Thelma Todd's memory or something,
>>that would be a cult. 

Heather:
>You *are* kidding, right?

Not at all.  I don't have the numbers to back that kind of claim up--
I seriously doubt it's ever gone to the polls, but it strikes me as
a perfectly reasonable claim to make.  Of course, being a film student,
I'm surrounded by hetero/homo/bi/a/sexual people who do nothing but
watch films-- so everybody knows Bette Davis' work and the opinions of
her work are pretty standardized from one group to the next.  Whether
this is true of what we like to think of as the 'outside world' remains
to be seen.

So I think it's a perfectly reasonable claim in terms of numbers-- but I
would be so bold to guess that you're referring to the specific intensity
of idolization in those male homosexuals who dress up in drag and sing
cabaret songs.  And again, I say she's blowing it out of proportion, and
I thought she came close to stating an essentialist link between the two
states of being.

Many heterosexuals idolize Bette Davis/Marlene Dietrick/Judy Garland/et al--
is this due to different reasons than the reasons homosexuals do?

Some heterosexuals even dress in women's clothing and perform cabaret.  Do
they do so for different reasons than their homosexual counterparts?

Some heterosexuals even, though I can't fathom why, enjoy fistfucking.

My complaint here isn't that Paglia's arguments for why male homosexuals
enjoy these things are entirely wrong, but that they do tend to lump their
components into generalized categories.  I'm sure if she were pressed, she'd
say her arguments may apply to heterosexuals as well, but she didn't then,
and the way it reads in SP, it runs the risk of being miscontrued.

Ron Hogan

I do a more than passable Ethel Merman impression,
and yet I am heterosexual.  Many homosexuals can't.