R E C E N T L Y
Martha Stewart, I salute you
Men and their discontents
Why we leer at JonBenet
Boycott Rosie, not the tabloids
Wisdom in a bottle
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About Camille Paglia
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A S K_C A M I L L E +|+ C A M I L L E+P A G L I A
Dear Camille:
What do you think of the recent nanny murder verdict in Massachusetts? Even assuming the nanny is indeed guilty, do you think the parents bear some responsibility for leaving their baby with a teenager for long stretches of time?
A dad Dear dad:
While I think it likely that British au pair Louise Woodward did indeed, peevishly and carelessly, cause the injuries that led to 8-month-old Matthew Eappen's death, I find the verdict grossly unjust and welcome the judge's reduction of the
charge to manslaughter and his sentence of time served.
There was no firm physical evidence that it was Woodward, rather than Matthew's parents, brother, neighbor or family friend, who accidentally or purposefully caused his skull fracture and weeks-old broken wrist. Indeed, the sometimes homicidal hostility of toddlers toward an infant sibling who displaces them in the family limelight is well-established in the annals of psychology. Every alternate hypothesis needed to be excluded.
Matthew Eappen was clearly a charming, vibrant baby whose personality leaps out from his snapshots. This makes it all the more odd that his parents have made such a bad impression on many distant observers. Even allowing for their agonizing public crisis, I find the father arrogant and condescending and the mother snippy and prudish. She's a perfect example of the kind of brittle, narrow, perfectionist, head-cut-off-at-the-neck, WASPy, contemporary careerist -- all will power and no instinct -- that I have been railing against since the days of Zoe Baird and Kimba Wood, the yuppified, failed Clinton nominees for attorney general.
The Eappens obviously exploited their 18-year-old au pair for duties that should have been handled by a mature baby sitter or nanny. Once seething tension erupted with the au pair over her social life, how stupid could parents be to leave their very small children under her supervision?
Watching the Eappens smile their way past an overcredulous Larry King last week (shades of the Ramseys), I was struck by their autopilot mechanism of denial, their inability to share responsibility for the tragedy.
Of course, the Eappens were outmatched here by Jenny Jones, currently rolling through the talk shows with her new book, who has managed to win the Moral Imbecile of the Year Award for her glib, pattering refusal to admit the slightest responsibility for the fact that a gay-crush stunt on one of her shows led three days later to the murder of one of her guests by another.
I'd love to see her grilled on the stand at Nuremberg.
The international focus on the Eappen case (the trial was broadcast in England) is highly embarrassing to the American judicial system. The prosecution team has grandstanded shamelessly. And Barry Scheck, the principal defense lawyer, came off like a shrill popinjay and jackass, shunting off responsibility, at his glum, post-verdict, midnight press conference, onto the Woodward family and a court-appointed advisor for his misjudgment of brokering away a lesser charge of manslaughter. He looks like a shoo-in for the Jenny Jones Award for Creepy Callow Cowardice.
Dear Camille,
Due to the sudden interest in the pornography industry (Larry Flynt and
Hustler magazine, the movie "Boogie Nights," porn stars advertising ski
wear, etc.), I was wondering if you had an opinion on this matter. Is
pornography becoming mainstream? Or is this just due to the end of the
millennium?
Do you believe that pornography is the new "opiate of the people"? And if
so, should we (as women) be worried?
Sheryll Dear Sheryll:
Neither "The People vs. Larry Flynt" nor
< href="http://www.salonmagazine.com/ent/movies/1997/10/17boogie.html" target="_top">"Boogie Nights" honestly deals with the real-life porn industry, which they condescendingly show as overrun by dimwitted buffoons. Neither movie comes close to capturing the sizzle of outlaw sexuality -- which was, for example, well-done in the raunchy lesbian seduction scenes of "Bound" (an otherwise clumsy, boring movie).
Far from pornography becoming mainstream, popular culture is showing less and less ability to create and sustain an erotic charge. Alfred Hitchcock could get more steam out of Grace Kelly and Cary Grant sitting fully clothed on a couch (in "To Catch a Thief") or Jimmy Stewart asking Kim Novak to put up her hair (in "Vertigo") than today's inept directors can produce in nude orgy scenes in a bordello.
Naturally, I'm not "worried" about porn becoming mainstream, since I took a radically pro-porn position in my first book, "Sexual Personae," where I argued that pagan sex and violence are so integral to the Western high art tradition that even Michelangelo and Emily Dickinson were pornographers. A condensed version of my theory of pornography can be found in "No Law in the Arena," the main essay of "Vamps & Tramps."
The best pornography depends on a strict sense of social limits and norms, which the picture or story violates. This intelligent evocation of context is exactly what is missing from lousy movies like "Showgirls" or "Striptease." Look at what Sharon Stone could do just by lighting a cigarette and uncrossing her legs in a police station in "Basic Instinct" -- where her sweaty, transfixed, male onlookers practically melt into a pool of butter.
Porn has paradoxically gotten weaker in the 1990s, after my side in the culture wars defeated the Catharine MacKinnon-Andrea Dworkin anti-porn feminist/Christian conservative coalition that ruled the 1980s. The normally prescient Madonna, for example, flubbed badly with her ugly 1992 book, "Sex," whose unappetizing, awkwardly shot sadomasochistic scenarios were already passé after the Robert Mapplethorpe controversy had died down.
As the millennium approaches, the culture seems to be moving in the opposite direction. Most people are concerned at the moment not with exploring the sexual extremes -- we've already liberated that territory -- but with basic issues affecting the upbringing of children, including accessible day care and educational reform. Civil libertarians like me must remain vigilant, however, that these vital matters don't intrude (as in the Internet porn debate) into adults' constitutionally guaranteed free-speech rights.
Dear Camille:
What's with all these feminists who are writing books on men and boys?
I've seen notices that Susan Faludi, Carol Gilligan and Christina Hoff
Sommers all have works in progress. (And if they see it's a trend, Naomi
Wolf and Gloria Steinem are sure to get in on it.) I expect Sommers will
produce an interesting, nonpoliticized book, but when I think of the
others, Camille, I fear for my sex. (Gilligan offers a sample of her
wisdom in the New York Times Magazine: "What we are discovering is how
vulnerable boys are. How, under the surface, behind that psychic shield, is
a tender creature who's hiding his humanity.") I have no doubt that women
can write truthfully about men -- cf. your magnificent work in "Sexual
Personae," and, more recently, Dr. Laura Schlessinger's "Ten Stupid Things
Men Do to Mess up Their Lives" -- but I wonder about the sudden interest in
males, and about the motives of feminists who study men when they're still
so bad at analyzing women.
A Mortified Male Dear Mortified:
The new focus on men is a long-needed corrective to feminism's obsession with female victimhood, which led to a quarter-century of male-bashing. I'm delighted that "Sexual Personae" (finally released in early 1990 after rejections by seven publishers and five agents) is seen as the turning point.
My celebration of male technological and economic achievements, which freed women from the home and made feminism possible, was one of many things in the book that provoked vicious attack from the PC establishment on campus and off.
Susan Faludi's book on men, the project she has been working on since her internationally bestselling paleofeminist screed, "Backlash" (1991), will surely contain much detailed reportage, which is welcome. But on the basis of the excerpts we've already seen -- a nasty piece on the Citadel for the New Yorker (where she naively treated drag-queen bar chat as gospel) or a gloating interview with a fatigued Sylvester Stallone for Esquire -- caveat emptor!
Faludi has a plodding, pedestrian, grimly literalistic mind. She has no culture and certainly no humor. Her primary motivation seems to be to work out the grudge she's been carrying all these years for the way her father treated her mother -- she made revealing remarks about this in early interviews, though it apparently involved nothing more lurid than a difficult separation or divorce. As a scholar, I find Faludi's facts often wrong and her logic twisted. For a commentator on the sexes, she has a fatal lack of psychological insight. And on the porn front, she's clearly a MacKinnonite Puritan who would have hung all the witches in Salem.
At least we've been hearing less of Faludi's Harvard designer Marxism since she accepted the $1 million advance for this book. Wolf got a $600,000 advance for "Promiscuities" (1997), and when the latter didn't do well, despite all the efforts of Team Naomi -- the raft of advisors, editors and husband (a former New York Times and New Republic editor, now a Clinton speech writer) who labor over, reorder and moderate her prose after she emits it -- she had to come down a bit for her next project. (Look at Wolf's April 3 New York Times op-ed piece on abortion: As a teacher who's been marking papers for 26 years, I have questions about whose syntax that is.)
Does anyone wonder why the publishing industry is in economic trouble?
Editors who approve such overblown advances should have their paychecks garnisheed when the profits fail to materialize. It's the serious, struggling, first-time and veteran midlist authors who suffer: Their production and publicity support is gored to pay for these grotesque excesses, committed by an amoral, schmoozing literary clique protected from public scrutiny.
As for Carol Gilligan, that pillar of schmaltz, she's an unscholarly, bourgeois fantasist who has been overpromoted by a craven PC Harvard administration and whose prominence is entirely due to massive, uncritical course adoptions of her 1982 book "A Different Voice" by women's studies programs desperate to prove the academic legitimacy of their then-nascent field of study. Gilligan groupies and their pretentious antagonists, the jargon-spouting poststructuralists, are queens of the town dump that is women's studies. (Yes, there's a scattering of substantive work in that area, but as I said at San Francisco's Herbst Theater in 1992, why dig through a mountain of manure just to find a few nickels?) Anyone in doubt about Gilligan's mediocrity should look at her vapid Sept. 9 New York Times piece on Diana -- high-school-level stuff!
Christina Hoff Sommers, I have repeatedly said, is one of the most courageous women of my generation. She went out alone against the campus feminist establishment in the late 1980s and took tremendous abuse for it. She is a sober, ethical scholar who has been vilified by PC hacks and pampered academic despots. In "Who Stole Feminism?" (1994), she demonstrated, in devastating detail, the incompetence and outright lies of feminist leaders -- an exposure from which they have never recovered.
As the mother of a young son, Sommers is very troubled by the anti-male messages that feminism has been pumping into the culture for so long. Her book on boys, which she is currently researching, should be of the highest interest to anyone concerned with the tortured state of sexual relations in this country.
In a tortured state yourself? Ask Camille.
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