Camille Paglia Predicted 2017 - What the '90s provocateur understands about the Trump era.

[Ubiquitous]

On the day I met Camille Paglia for lunch, I arrived early at the
Greek restaurant she had selected and let the hostess guide me to a
table in the back. To me this seemed like a perfectly fine table.
Paglia, who arrived a few minutes later, disagreed.

It was a booth. And there were people right beside us. There was a
table near the front, Paglia said, where she had taken meetings
before; perhaps we could sit there. Accompanied by the hostess, we
walked to the new table and considered it. Paglia allowed that
probably the hostess could not grant the two of us this six-top. We
needed a smaller table — but one that was quiet, and private. A
second restaurant employee had joined us. Another booth was
proposed, another booth rejected. Paglia felt it imperative that we
have real chairs. Sitting on a booth’s cushions might lull us into a
state of haremlike drowsiness, she felt. We needed to be alert.

I found myself swept along by her willingness to be difficult, which
did not manifest itself as rudeness or a sense of entitlement but as
a perfect, inviolable comfort in pursuing exactly what she wanted.
She was going to get the right table. And what was I going to do,
apologize for Camille Paglia? If it is possible to possess immunity
to the unspoken expectations of female behavior — to be impervious,
on a cellular level, to the will of the patriarchy (to use one of
her least favorite terms) — then Paglia possesses that immunity.

At last we were seated at a small table a few yards from the first.
We would remain there for the next 4 hours and 45 minutes. In the
grand scheme of Paglia interviews, mine was brief. When Francesca
Stanfill profiled her for a New York cover story, in 1991, their
conversation lasted ten hours, long enough for Paglia to consume two
steaks: one for lunch and a second for dinner.

“Normally I would order meat, but I think it’s going to interfere,”
Paglia explained, as we considered the menu. “Because I’ll be
talking nonstop.” She selected moussaka and a Corona, and began.

Here are some things of which Camille Paglia — perhaps the most
famous alleged anti-feminist feminist in American history —
approves: football, Bernie Sanders, Katharine Hepburn, Rihanna, the
Real Housewives franchise, taramasalata. (It tastes like lox, not
like nova, which is good, because nova is too refined; it’s missing
all the fish taste.) Here are some things Camille Paglia scorns, and
should you have a problem with her scorn, know that she enjoys a
fight: Michel Foucault, Doris Day, Lena Dunham, Elena Ferrante,
college students who are always whining about date rape. Here are
some things of which Camille Paglia used to approve, but has since
exiled from her esteem: Bill Clinton, Madonna. She continues to
believe in both the ’60s and rock and roll.

Paglia’s new book, out this month, is called Free Women, Free Men,
and it compiles writings from throughout her career addressing sex,
gender, and feminism — in other words, her most cherished and
contentious themes. Paglia first came to prominence with the 1990
release of Sexual Personae. It was a 700-page book based on her Yale
Ph.D. thesis, and the rare academic volume that might be described
as swashbuckling. Sexual Personae cut an eccentric,
interdisciplinary path across Western culture from antiquity onward,
recounting what Paglia viewed as the ceaseless battle of nature
(which is violent, irrational, untamable, and female) versus culture
(aesthetic, logical, ever struggling and failing to tame nature,
and, yes, male).

Amid the culture wars of the early ’90s, she presented a seductive
alternative to liberal pieties, and to an academy in thrall to
deconstructionism and multiculturalism. A self-described libertarian
advocate of sexual freedom and free speech, she thought that
second-wave feminism had become a homogenized, repressive force for
ill (also, that it was intellectually bankrupt). What if, she
demanded, Western civilization and the white men who built it
deserved some credit? What if feminists were ignoring everything
that was important not just about art but about sex? What if she,
Camille Paglia, was the true feminist, because she believed women
shouldn’t be asking some sexual-harassment grievance board to
protect them from the world’s dangers? In her pop-culture-friendly
tastes and in her noisy, splashy flair for performance, she offered
herself as the populist foil to the liberal elite — she was, for a
time, irresistible to the press, winning airtime and magazine
covers, and claiming the throne of anti-PC provocateur par
excellence. She made her name scorning all that the left held
sacrosanct. “Her calling herself a feminist,” Gloria Steinem said
back then, “is sort of like a Nazi saying they’re not anti-Semitic.”

The past few years have felt like a return to the identity-politics
wars of the 1990s, another period in which liberals (especially
those inside the academy) began to draw bright lines dictating the
boundaries of acceptable discourse. Paglia was always on the wrong
side of those lines — and in some ways she seems never to have left
those years, when her persona was forged in the crucible of
contrarianism. Is it that she hasn’t learned any better, or that
everyone else hasn’t?

Paglia may have set out to make feminism great again — to restore it
to some imagined golden age of tough screwball heroines and Simone
de Beauvoir — but she’s been taken up by the opposite force
altogether. The men’s-rights activists of the “manosphere” and alt-
right conservatives find fundamental truths in Paglia’s ancient
understanding of sex roles: the notion that women bear terrifying,
mysterious powers of seduction and reproduction, and therefore men
need to prove themselves by conquering, competing, and creating.
Milo Yiannopoulos, perhaps today’s most high-profile hater of
feminists, has called Paglia a chief influence; the alt-right news
site Breitbart often cites her work approvingly.

She herself is wary of any alignment with the right wing. Back in
the ’90s, she took umbrage when she was sometimes branded a
conservative, and would respond by stressing her rebel credentials:
She was out as a lesbian back in the late ’60s, she hated
censorship, hated prudery, wanted to liberalize alcohol and drug
laws — how could she possibly be a conservative? And yet, by the
logic of shared mutual enemies, her attacks on liberalism make her
work useful artillery (with the added credibility of coming from
someone ostensibly in the enemy camp). She hasn’t paid much
attention to the rise of the alt-right, but, she said, “elite
discourse about gender has become so nonsensical and removed from
reality that rowdy outbreaks of resistance and rebellion are
unsurprising.”

Though Paglia writes, from time to time, about politics and culture,
for the most part she has receded from the center of feminist
debate. “It must be stressed that my flamboyant media presence
lasted scarcely four years and was boosted by the official book
tours for three bestsellers in a row (1991–94),” she writes in the
new book. “After that, like the Roman general Cincinnatus returning
to his plow, I simply resumed my cherished seclusion as a teacher
and writer. As I often say, I’m just a schoolmarm!” She has been
ensconced at the University of the Arts, a school of visual and
performing arts, in Philadelphia, for 33 years. In the past decade,
she’s undertaken solitary research into the Native American tribes
of southeastern Pennsylvania, collecting artifacts and noting rock
formations that she believes appear manmade. She hopes this research
might develop into a book, but said that her agent foresaw little
commercial appeal.

Paglia presents herself as a willing academic pariah. The University
of the Arts provides her “a real job,” she says, one grounded in
“everyday, mundane reality.” (“This is what Susan Sontag never did,”
she told me. “Intellectuals have to do that.”) But a fascination
with fame, her own and others’, tugs at her insistence that she
loves anonymity. “I’m lucky,” she told me. “I have absolutely no
importance of any kind. Now and then, someone will come up to me and
say, after class, ‘You know, my father is a fan of yours, and he
says that you’ve written some books.’ I say, ‘Well, thank you, send
my best wishes to your father.’ So they have absolutely no sense
whatever that I write books or anything else. Maybe now they’re
starting to, because of the web — they’re starting to see me
interviewed on YouTube or things like that.”

Paglia is small, and, at 69, a little stooped. The severe chic of
her ’90s styling — dark eyebrows, sharp cheekbones, and a salt-and-
pepper crest — has softened a bit with time. Lately, she wears her
hair in a light-brown shag, which she got after bringing a photo of
Jane Fonda’s Klute cut to her stylist. Her ex, Alison Maddex (a co-
founder of New York’s Museum of Sex), lives nearby, and the two of
them are parents to a 14-year-old son. (“I wouldn’t have known how
to raise a girl,” Paglia said. “I mean, the idea that I would have
to — pink nail polish, all that, oh my god. I don’t know what I
would have done.”) The only TV she watches are Turner Classic Movies
and the Real Housewives. She has no interest in Facebook, Twitter,
or the Kardashians.

Certain biographical details, offered up regularly in Paglia’s
writings and interviews, seem freighted with the mythic significance
of a superhero origin story. She enjoys telling the story of the
time she literally kicked the ass of a student when she was teaching
at Bennington. (“I was wearing my big Frye boots,” she informed me.)
Her family was Italian, hence her intense appreciation of beauty and
other sensory pleasures, and Catholic, which attuned her to wild
pagan elements of the Western tradition neglected among America’s
bland mid-century WASP elite. (Her willingness to paint cultural
traditions in broad strokes is in keeping with her disdain for PC
delicacy; her willingness to attribute significance to family
origins is appropriate for someone who thinks Freud gets
shortchanged these days.) As a child, she dressed up in a succession
of “transvestite” Halloween costumes — Robin Hood, Napoleon, Hamlet
— because these were the characters with whom she identified. “But
never in my passionate identification with heroic male figures was I
encouraged by concerned but misguided adults to believe that I
actually was a boy and that medical interventions could bring that
hidden truth to life,” she writes, in the introduction to her new
book. (And yet: She’s called herself a “non-gendered entity.”)

Paglia tends to describe the years between graduate school and the
publication of Sexual Personae as a period of solitary toil in the
academic hinterlands. But infamy quickly followed its release. In
the space of a year or so after the book came out, Paglia wrote a
handful of widely discussed and reprinted articles in the mainstream
press — what might now be called hot takes: a Newsday op-ed on date
rape in which she decried “dopey, immature, self-pitying women
walking around like melting sticks of butter”; an op-ed for the
Times (the piece that made her “instantly notorious,” she says) in
which she called Madonna “the future of feminism.”

The new book provides a brief introduction to the Paglia who
inhabited the ’90s-era popular press. There’s a selection of
clippings that includes cartoons with Paglia punch lines; magazine
covers and photo shoots; and an illustration of Paglia, Gloria
Steinem, and Betty Friedan that Vanity Fair ran with a 1998 story on
“America’s Most Influential Women” — an illustration, rather than a
photo, because Steinem allegedly refused to pose alongside her.

Despite her brawler affect (she liked showing up to photo shoots
with swords and whips) and her confidence — the kind of confidence
required to declare that the “Ur-model for Sexual Personae as magnum
opus” was “undoubtedly the Metropolitan Museum of Art” — Paglia was
stung to be rejected by the intellectual and feminist Establishment
and others she saw as natural allies. Like the Village Voice — “I am
a CHILD of The Village Voice!” she wrote me in an email — which
portrayed her as a conservative and an “intellectual fraud” in a
1991 cover story, and which she eventually threatened with legal
action for its “pattern of malicious conduct.” And like Madonna,
whom she praised in 1990 for teaching “young women how to be fully
female and sexual while still exercising control over their lives.”
“For her to complain that she never had any female peers when I was
right there and ready,” Paglia said, wistful. She still thinks she
could have improved Madonna’s Sex book, if she’d been given the
chance. “I’m just another Italian-American like her.”

“I’m 43 years old,” she said, remembering the response to Sexual
Personae. “A middle-aged woman, you know, who has struggled for 20
years to write a 700-page book, and this is the way they treat her?
Like she’s an enemy of the human race? And malign me? It’s
unbelievable. So that’s why I became popular. I got a flood of mail
from people who had been treated the same way by feminists.”

Today, Paglia is something of a cult taste. (Heterodox feminists
will, occasionally, admit to a bygone Paglia phase, as a sort of
indulgent guilty-pleasure confession.) Her style — confrontational,
high-low omnivorous, with a retro-’90s veneer — feels weirdly on-
trend. You could imagine seeing “Camille Paglia” alongside “Fran
Drescher” on the pencils (celebrating women who “defy expectations”)
sold at the Wing. But she feels as little kinship with feminists
today as she felt with their ’90s forebears. “I was fearing talking
to you, actually,” she told me, during our lunch, as we watched the
waitstaff change over and the lights brighten, then dim again for
dinner. “I had no idea if you’d be a political ideologue.” I had
graduated not too long ago from a liberal East Coast college, I
worked in the liberal New York media: To Paglia, all this was
ominous.

Paglia was not surprised by the election results. “I felt the Trump
victory coming for a long time,” she told me. Writing last spring,
she’d called Trump “raw, crude and uninformed” but also “smart,
intuitive and a quick study”; she praised his “bumptious exuberance
and slashing humor” (and took some pleasure in watching him fluster
the GOP). Speaking two weeks into his administration, she sounded
altogether less troubled by the president than any other self-
declared feminist I’d encountered since Inauguration Day: “He is
supported by half the country, hello! And also, this ethically
indefensible excuse that all Trump voters are racist, sexist,
misogynistic, and all that — American democracy cannot proceed like
this, with this reviling half the country.”

In fact, she has had to restrain herself from agreeing with the
president, at least on certain matters. “I have been on an anti–
Meryl Streep campaign for about 30 years,” she said. When Trump
called the actress “overrated” in a January tweet, “I wanted to leap
into print and take that line but I couldn’t, because Trump said
it.”

It’s true that there is not infrequently something Trumpian in
Paglia’s cadence (lots of ingenuous exclamation points — “This
tyrannical infantilizing of young Americans must stop!”), as well as
her irresistible compulsion to revisit enemies, slights, and idées
fixes (substitute “Gloria Steinem” and “Lacan” for “the failing New
York Times”). And then, perhaps most important: She, like Trump,
gives her audience the vicarious thrill of watching someone who
appears to be saying whatever the hell they want. Reading Paglia is
a bit like how it must have felt to be an enthusiastic attendee at a
Trump campaign rally: She can’t possibly REALLY mean that, you
think, and laugh, bewildered — but can you imagine how annoyed it
must make people?

She doesn’t seem especially troubled by the rise of a certain kind
of outlandish vitriol on the right. When I asked her about
Yiannopoulos, she wrote back: “Too many gay men have lost the
scathingly cruel wit for which they were famous in the pre-Stonewall
era. None of his satirical jibes seem any worse than the campy
insults that the great female impersonator Charles Pierce had Bette
Davis fling at Joan Crawford. However, true reformers need to build
as well as attack. When I burst into notoriety, I had a 700-page
book behind me and campaigned on a detailed agenda critiquing both
the Left and the Right.”

“I was horrified, horrified by the pink pussy hats.”

Paglia’s displeasure over the election was largely reserved for the
liberal Establishment, and for Hillary Clinton, whom she’s
criticized lavishly for the last 20 years. “I like Hillary because
she’s kind of a bitch,” Paglia said in a 1993 interview, but her
assessment has since evolved. She now calls Clinton “a walking
neurosis.” During the primaries, Paglia preferred Bernie Sanders —
“an authentic leftist,” who brought her back to the 1960s. “That is
what real leftists were like,” she told me. “They’re not post-
structuralists with their snide, cool, elitist jargon.” In the
general election, as a resident of Pennsylvania, she voted for Jill
Stein.

She approved — of all things — of the Women’s March. “I think it’s
important that women rediscover solidarity with themselves,” she
said. “It really wasn’t about feminism. It’s really not about Trump.
It’s not about any of that. It was all of a sudden, Oh, wow, to be
with all the women.”

Still, the pussy hats: She buried her face in her hands as she
discussed them. “I was horrified, horrified by the pink pussy hats,”
she said; the pink pussy hats were “a major embarrassment to
contemporary feminism.”

“I want dignity and authority for women,” she said. “My code is
Amazonism. I want weapons.”

Mostly, though, she was exasperated with the general sense of
upheaval that had dominated recent months. “This is all
meaningless,” she said. “So sometimes it’s like, oh my God, the
news, and then I pick up my book and suddenly I’m reading about ten
thousand years ago again, and, wow, that gives you a perspective.”
It is this that gives her Native American research its appeal.

Not long ago, Paglia joined the Society for Pennsylvania
Archaeology. When she was a child, her first ambition was to be an
archaeologist, and she finds returning to the pursuit as an adult
deeply gratifying. It also offers new battles. During a talk given
at a conference by a museum curator, Paglia raised her hand and
brought up the stone tools she’s found, which she believes were used
for scraping meat and fur off hides. She became accustomed to
recognizing them by the way they fit her grip. “You keep turning it,
and all of a sudden it falls into your hand in exactly the right
way.” She mimed this: the satisfaction of holding something well
made and potentially dangerous.

“So I raised my hand and I wanted to make a comment how incredible
that is to have them fit, and the guy overruled me and said, ‘No,
scrapers were used with wooden handles.’ I said, ‘Well, maybe some
were used with wooden handles but a lot of them are for the
fingers.’ He said, ‘No, they’re not.’ So I was really offended.”

It was only later that she realized why she saw what he didn’t. “Men
have never found that, because when they pick up these things, their
fingers don’t fit,” she explained. “My hands fit exactly. My hands
are the size of the Native American women’s hands.” Paglia saw the
promise of a new fight on the horizon.

--
Barbra Streisand says Trump-caused stress is making her fat. No word
yet on what's making her stupid.

[#BeamMeUpScotty]

On 03/08/2017 10:14 AM, PIBB wrote:

> On 10:55 8 Mar 2017, Ubiquitous wrote:
>>
>> Barbra Streisand says Trump-caused stress is making her fat. No
>> word yet on what's making her stupid.
>>
>

> Trump makes everyone around him stupid.
>
She could move to Canada and lose some weight.

--
That's Karma