It took a long time for me to get mad at Camille Paglia. No one here had heard of her until 1990, when her soundbite attacks on ‘whining’ feminists fed a delighted male-dominated media, as well as her own appetite for publicity. From time to time I’d see her glazed, stilted performances on C4 or BBC2, or read with astonishment her abuse of serious women writers I admire. ‘She only does it to annoy’, I said.
When I heard she was to be included in a series of television interviews by my husband, Jonathan Dimbleby - alongside veteran writer Norman Mailer, UN General Secretary Kofi Annan, and Attorney General Janet Reno, I wondered why. I told him I’d heard her storm out of a radio programme because she didn’t rate the ‘unintelligent’ questions put to her by the audience of British women. Nose deep in one of her books, he said surely she was an interesting commentator on women and American culture? I yawned.
Then, notoriously, she flounced out of the Dimbleby interview when she did not like his questions about date-rape and other issues to do with ‘American womanhood’ that she’d been told to expect. I wouldn’t return to the subject, but now she has rehashed her attack on the LWT team ‘exclusively’ in the new ‘Tatler’, as ‘the whole story’. The million people who watched the truncated interview will know that Dimbleby was in full control as he put tough questions any serious academic could have taken - and will only wonder why a British magazine could publish such a farrago of libellous falsehoods without bothering to check facts that have already been corrected in the press. Paglia’s behaviour was - and is - so embarrassing, most balanced people would have wanted it lost in the ether.
But no - she telephoned a newspaper, gave interviews, spouted on the Internet, and now repeats her egotistical fictions in an article which ends hilariously: ‘....I called him ‘the worst-prepared popinjay of a reporter I have ever encountered. An Amazon’s arrows are swift and sharp. That phrase will stick to Dimbleby for the rest of his career, and it will probably end up in his obituary’. Oh really?
It isn’t the silly spat that annoys. I’m married to a fine journalist who - having reported from war zones, filmed undercover in fascist states, cross-examined vicious dictators, and is about to return to the troubled Horn of Africa - is hardly fazed by the self-styled “world class intellectual’ and ‘Italian-American Feminist’ he now considers off her trolley. No, what makes me spit is the fact that Tatler calls her ‘the world’s most famous feminist’. That is an epithet I refuse to share with an embittered, spiteful woman whose views are repellent.
I was once asked by an editor if I was a feminist.’What else is there to be?’, I replied. For me feminism is about valuing the worth of women and the multi-levelled contribution they can make to society, and wanting young girls to be educated to self-worth. It is also about social justice: the continuing fight against exploitation because of gender (or race). It is about acknowledging that some women are strong (Mother Teresa, Lady Thatcher, Camille Paglia), but that others - like the abused girls who play their trade on the city streets at 15, or the ones forced to submit to sadism in hardcore porn movies - are not in control of their lives. Are victims.
But most of Paglia’s published work, and statements in published interviews (many edited by herself) are in direct opposition to all that. There is no compassion, no real anger against injustice. She pours scorn on the idea of ‘victimhood’, saying that, although rape is an outrage, you canot ‘regulate male sexuality’, and if raped ‘you should pick yourself up, dust yourself off and go on’.
Such sensitivity...and for battered women too. She says, ‘Many of these working class relationships where women get beat up have hot sex...Why won’t we allow that a lot of wives like the sex they are getting in these battered wife relationships’. Paglia splutters because a male (Dimbleby) ‘dares to lecture me on date-rape’ - as if these subjects were beyond the understanding of the many civilised men who don’t share the dark fantasies (like gang rape) Paglia panders to in her work. Well, as a female I say that her views are disgusting, dangerous and full of ignorant contempt for womankind.
In a week when outgoing censor James Ferman’s views on the liberalisation of pornography have made headlines, it’s worth quoting Prof. Paglia on her favourite subject: movies. Calling sex and violence ‘great principles’, she says that showing ‘every kind of mutilation or distortion or amputation or decapitation’ on screen, is ‘an attempt to discover the lost sensual physical truths about the body’.Sensual?
Here is some more. ‘...the female body, just by virtue of biology has a softness and vulnerability. Therefore when we see it being torn to ribbons we have this sense of a barbaric kind of splendour’. Splendour? Perhaps we find a clue to the sick undercurrents in this woman’s psyche when she delivers herself of the following. ‘As for the idea of taking voyeuristic pleasure in the suffering of male or female...this is going into the history of mass media and picking out this one thing and interpreting it in a very flat and quite unimaginative feminst way.’ The revealing contradiction follows immediately. ‘I always enjoy, myself, scenes where a woman is being pursued, she’s being stalked, and there’s like a slight rape innuendo, and so on. For some reason I understand it...’
I bet she does. Posturing Paglia offers up extreme opinions to cause a sensation, but those views are picked up by those glad to use them - recycling her contempt to justify their own. Porn merchants must love her. The overweening vanity of the woman (boasting on the Internet about ‘ a fierce photo of me in a purple velvet Moschino cavalier’s jacket from a 1994 Daily Mail shot’) who dismisses a whole range of feminists as ‘hangdog dowdies’, wouldn’t matter were she not used to ridicule the rest of us who actually bother to think about issues that affect the whole culture we live in, and the morality which has to be at its centre. Ah, but morality is something she despises as much as she despises people.
Who is Camille Paglia? A minor academic turned immature self-publicist who pathetically styles herself an ’Amazon’. I look up the Amazons in my classical dictionary and find a bunch of mythical women who loved war for its own sake, mutilated their girls, and were ‘situated on the borders of the known world.’ Just about it - really.
