ON THE RECORD: Equal Opportunity Offender

Outspoken University of the Arts professor Camille Paglia explains her views on feminism, sex and rape Outspoken University of the Arts professor Camille Paglia explains her views on feminism, sex and rape(Interview conducted by Emily Culbertson) Daily Pennsylvanian: You have been described as the 'anti-feminist' feminist. What does that mean, and why have feminists argued against it? Camille Paglia: Let me just explain how I got to be where I am which is basically that I began as a feminist when I was a tiny child. I was born in 1947 and I was like totally out of synch with my sex role and was totally rebelling against it in the late 40s and 50s. I was one of the pioneers. And see what's happened is that I was inspired by a movement of feminism that was at that point dormant. What I'm saying is that something is very wrong with this movement. They could not take into itself, women like me, pioneers like me. I'm saying right from the start; the movement had troubles that are resurfacing 20 years later. Feminism is a 200 year-old movement; it's a progressive social reform movement. I am 100 percent behind that movement, which seeks the full political and legal equality of women. What I'm saying is that this phase of the movement got off-track right from the start. And it wants to remake male and female, man and woman in a whole new idea, 'Brave New World' idea. And it swept under the rug a lot of issues. One of the big issues was aesthetics. That was when I got drummed out of the movement. 1969 -- it had barely started and they drummed me out. Why? Because I'm a rock fanatic, OK. Rolling Stones I consider the greatest rock band. Volume II of Sexual Personae which has been sitting in a box for ten years, the last chapter is on the Rolling Stones. And I declared the Rolling Stones the greatest rock band and this group of feminist musicians . . . are like screaming at me, and they said the Rolling Stones are bad musicians because they're sexist. I said, "But they could be lousy people, OK, but they can't be bad musicians because they're sexist." "No. They're bad musicians and we can't listen to them." And we had a huge thing over the song "Under My Thumb"-- "Under My Thumb" which I declared not only a great song, but a work of art. They said "art? art? Nothing that demeans women can be art" . . . Right there is where I couldn't join the movement. Anyone interested in art and beauty could not join that movement because this was a totalitarian, Soviet movement. They declared that art is a servant of political ideology. I am someone coming out of art history and literature -- I wanted to be an archaeologist originally -- and my attitude is that art is the ultimate human function. It is the history of civilization. It is the servant of no political agenda . . . . The second thing was psychology. Kate Millet declared Freud a sexist and banned Freud from the movement. This is the greatest theorist of sex in the history of mankind. He wasn't like Jesus; he didn't have answers to 100 percent of human problems. This man was working on such a high level. Freud is nowhere in the present feminist movement, except though . . . schools of Sausseure is a bunch of B.S. that I am attacking right now. The people who have gone in for that are ignorant fools, and trendies and toadies. And they're not sixties people . . . So what I'm saying is that something went very wrong. Also, D.H. Lawrence was banned from the movement. And see, this was terrible. You have two of the deepest thinkers on sex in the 20th century -- Freud and D. H. Lawrence -- banned from the movement . . . . This movement began laudably, in certain ways. It wanted to open up feminism toward the ordinary woman, toward the secretaries . . . .and stewardesses. I think that's wonderful, and I approve of that. But I feel that almost immediately it got sidetracked from that and it now has an obsessive overconcern with white, upper middle-class problems. The reason I do not get along with most contemporary feminists is because they do not realize how much they have been totally co-opted by a white, upper-middle-class psychology. Like a book like Suzanne Gordon's "Prisoners of Men's Dreams" -- she's the one I had a debate with, with Working Woman. And I trashed that book in the Philadlephia Inquirer. I said contemporary femiminism is caught in a trap of princess mentality of snippy entitlement. It's sort of like "the world owes us a living." And "we should have risk-free dating." And "no always means no." And all that sort of thing. When I talk about my beliefs about feminism, I'm always in synch with like people on the street. Like I'm talking about African-American women, like Latino women. Confrontational, in-your-face, sort of street feminism, street wise, street smart femiminism. That's my feminism. Which is why you don't run to the campus grievance committee and complain, you deal with it! If a guy gives you trouble -- POW -- you deal with him. You put men in line. You keep him in line on the spot, not like Anita Hill ten years later . . . So I say the feminist, social activist agenda we all must support, which is full political and legal equality for women. However, what I am saying is that many of the problems between the sexes, OK, may be coming from something prior to socialization, something that has to do with a turbulence that has to do with every boy's origin in a woman's body, a mother's body, and the way he is overwhelmed by this huge, matriarchical shadow of a goddess figure in his childhood. And I feel that after so many decades of studying this and observation that men are suffering from their sense of dependency on women, their sense that at any moment they could be returned to that slavery and servitude they experienced under a woman's thumb, when they were a boy in the shadow of the mother. I got this from studying all world culture, and comparing and noticing how often there were these patterns in many different cultures. When I started 30 years ago, when I was 13 for example, I believed what feminism believes now; that the sexes are basically the same. Men are terrible, there's an unjust social system and when we change that, everything will be fine. Now, after all these decades of observation and experience that there are certain fundamental differences between the sexes. Many things are convention, many, many things come from convention and socialization and environmental pressure. But there are fundamental differences. And when feminism tried to wipe out those fundamental differences, it alienated the entire world. So I am not trying to get rid of feminism; I am trying to reform feminism from within, but it may involve destruction -- destruction of the feminist establishment that opposes me. I'm going to destroy reputations. I'm going to do everything I can to get women's studies abolished; I think that's a mistake. We need something called sex studies, where men can talk to women, gay can talk to straight . . . Right now, who takes women's studies seriously? Do you think men do? . . . There's no great work coming out of women's studies . . . We have to have our women trained in high-level intellectual thinking. That's the only way to do sex theory. You have to be reading Hegel or Nietzsche or something like that. (continued)