Camille Paglia seems to enjoy her own contradictions. She is a feminist who criticizes the feminist establishment, a lesbian who celebrates the penis, an atheist who defends the Catholic Church, a libertarian Clinton Democrat who praises Rush Limbaugh and Howard Stern. She authored the best-selling 700-page scholarly tome, Sexual Personæ: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson, but she loves to expound upon her "evangelical love for popular culture."
With the publication of two more best-selling books and dozens of cover stories on popular culture, plus her appearance on countless television programs, Paglia has entered the mainstream discourse of which she is both student and critic.
Robin Bernstein: Are you a pop culture icon?
Camille Paglia: Yes, that seems to have happened, bizarrely. I've only been on the scene since 1990. This large book, Sexual Personæ, was issued by Yale University Press without my photograph and with no publicity about me, and within the year The New York Times asked me to write about Madonna. And from that moment forward, I entered the pop culture stratosphere.
It was not only that I was commenting on popular culture; it was also my style, which is rather vernacular. I have this very American voice. I am the product of Italian immigrants, so I'm in love with the American idiom. I use slang a lot. When I started to be asked to go on television, suddenly I was up there behaving as no one had ever seen an academic behave. I was immediately called "the academic Joan Rivers," because of the speed-freak velocity of my discourse. So that was the moment I became this pop culture figure. Almost immediately, cartoons about me began to appear. The sheer number of cartoons about me in so many different places indicates that people were processing me as a popular culture phenomenon.
RB: Pat Califia has called you a "media whore." What's the difference between a whore and an icon?
CP: Such remarks indicate simple jealousy. She was never able to get the attention for her ideas that I did. It's a very sexist and misogynist remark. In point of fact, I never sought any publicity of any kind. People are just ignorant and uninformed if they believe that's the case. There was no publicity machinery at Yale University Press. Sexual Personæ went out there and became one of the biggest bestsellers in the history of university press publishing, and it had no publicity behind it. It just sold and sold by word of mouth. People started calling me, making pilgrimages from all over the world to see me here in Philadelphia. So that's an outrageous statement from a very bitter woman whose career has sunk. She was used to being the sole voice of the pro-pornography wing of feminism, and then I came along. Her little leather-clad Dr. Ruth persona has grown rather stale, and people are not interested in her.
RB: How have you been used as an icon within the gay community?
CP: Well, right from the start, the gay community attacked me. In the gay and lesbian newsletter of the MLA, the review of Sexual Personæ called me a Nazi. It called Sexual Personæ "the most evil book ever written." The PC assumptions in academe and among gay activists then are not to be believed. Every fascist, Stalinist attempt was made to silence dissenting voices. I was constantly compared to a Nazi. I kept talking my talk and putting my ideas out there, and slowly but surely everything shifted. I used to be attacked by the Advocate, but now I'm a columnist for the Advocate. That seems to me one of the most profound symptoms of the speed of cultural change, the lifting of the black cloud of censorship that hung over the Left.
When I came on the scene, the Village Voice put me on the front page with a bunch of conservatives: "Wanted for Intellectual Fraud." My criticism of what we all now know as the "PC" discourse is acceptable now, but when I came on the scene in 1990 or '91, people didn't understand yet what I was talking about. So when I criticized liberalism or liberal excesses, they all said, "Oh, she's a neo-conservative." You're either one thing or the other; you're either a progressive or a neo-con. I said, "This is sick!"
RB: Does your image in popular culture represent something different now?
CP: I no longer have the problems that I had in the beginning, but my position within the gay world is still very controversial. There are people who absolutely adore my work, and there are people who loathe me, those identified with the Foucault establishment. But I think it's clear that my side is gaining because it's just more fun. I mean, I have the drag queens on my side! So I think that step by step the power base of my opponents is shrinking. That "theory" thing that people thought was so interesting even five years ago is now really a bore, as everyone knows. You can see the academics who are desperately trying to follow in my footsteps - all the wannabes - slowly divesting themselves of all the Lacanian rhetoric. I am single-handedly responsible for the death of Lacanian feminism! I consider that one of the great successes of my career.
RB: You've talked a lot about the pop icons you care about, such as Liz Taylor and Madonna. How do you use these icons? What is their importance to you?
CP: I'm so proud of the long piece I wrote on Madonna in 1991 for the Independent in London, which begins, "I am a true-blue Madonna fan." It talks about all her videos. It tries to recreate your first impression of experiencing those videos year by year.
Popular culture is sensory; it appeals to the senses and to the emotions. Popular culture is the culture of the people; that's what it means. Therefore any language you use to talk about popular culture has to be in the language of the people, in the vernacular. And it has to recreate the effect upon us of these images. All those stupid academic feminist attempts to talk about Madonna using big heavy words like "hegemonic" and "transgressive" - that is ridiculous, talking about Madonna in this way. She was never transgressive. Oh yeah, she grabs her crotch in "Express Yourself." People who are real Madonna fans understand that there is something absolutely primary, basic, mainstream pop about her. The music is coming directly at you from an emotional center. It has nothing to do with her challenging the patriarchy or anything like that.
I have flourished because I have ideas about the culture, but I am not a snob. I believe in reacting along with the mass of the people. I believe in the human norm. I am a deviant, I'm on the extreme of human life, but I believe in the norm. I believe that all important artwork does appeal to the norm. Popular culture is so powerful because of the failure of Modernism. The nihilistic strain of Modernism - T.S. Eliot's long tradition going down through Samuel Beckett, down into Postmodernism - has failed. It is a passive, sulking, negative, partial view of the world that I think is pernicious. And all of feminist theory discourse is the heir to this tradition. I belong to a completely different strain.
RB: One of my frustrations with gay people and popular culture is that often, when we think about a pop culture icon, we ask one question only: "Is he or she a positive role model?" How can we get beyond such simplistic thinking?
CP: That is one of the things that I have attacked from the start. For instance, when Basic Instinct was released, feminists protested, "This is not a positive role model - this image of lesbians as murderesses!" I was saying, are you crazy? She's a murderer for like, one second - the ice pick, chop! That's it. For me, most of it is fabulous. Sharon Stone is looking beautiful and charismatic and powerful. That's the overwhelming effect of it. The feminist position is really the Stalinist or Nazi view of art: a utilitarian view that says you look at a work of art with a red pen in your hand. It's an argument that goes all the way back to Plato, who in his ideal republic would have had no poets. He thought that Homer showed the gods in a negative light - gods as schemers and seducers. What I've been saying in my work is that art always shows you the dark shadows, the unpalatable truth about things. Anyone who wants to censor art for any reason, to me, has a Brave New World kind of mentality. So what I represent in both feminism and gay activism is a more sophisticated view of art that says that you cannot have any political movement succeed when it does so at the expense of art.
As a matter of fact, that's why I got drummed out of the feminist movement. It was late '69 or early '70 when I had a screaming argument with the New Haven Women's Liberation Rock Band about the Rolling Stones. I said, "Oh, they're the greatest rock band!" And they said, "No! They're bad musicians!" I said, "What? They're brilliant musicians." And they said, "No, they're sexist." I said, "Well, they may be sexist, but they're great musicians, and their songs are art!" My back was to the wall; they were literally spitting in my face. They were screaming, "Art? Art? Nothing that demeans women can be art!" So the feminist movement, unfortunately, as it re-awoke after its long dormant stasis since suffrage, immediately aligned itself with this Stalinist view of art that the only artistic visions that can be permitted were those which were tied to a prefabricated and approved social agenda. Art is not the slave of politics! Art transcends politics. I belong to a different gay tradition, the tradition of Oscar Wilde, which says that art is the greatest of all the accomplishments of civilization.
Art is intricately tied to its social period, but ultimately, all great art transcends its period and transcends its creator. So I am in a to-the-death battle with those voices within feminism and gay activism that want to soften and to censor images because they're negative. I say, to the contrary, I want to see more negative images! I want to see atrocities. I want to see all the truth, the brutal truth about the soul.
RB: But, on the other hand, we now have a new generation of young people who are coming out in high school and junior high, and they do need positive role models. So how can we reconcile young people's needs with these negative images you're calling for? Your generation has created a situation in which young people can come out in large numbers; are you saying older gay people should now abandon them?
CP: Well, if you want positive role images, it's up to you to make them. It's not for you (and I don't mean you personally) to be censoring, governing, policing other people's artistic production. That is what I would say. You want to make positive images? Go right ahead and see how well it's going to fly. Because, as a matter of fact, things which are produced from a political impulse are often extremely boring. Stalinist art is the most hilarious, boring art in the world. You have images of the happy tank soldiers coming into town as the farmers greet them with flowers.
I think the impulse to censor is one of the worst of all human instincts. I oppose it. I don't think that any truly sophisticated person ever wants to censor other people's artistic statements. It is precisely the thing that upsets you in which you find the deepest truths. For heaven's sake, talking about positive images - the Naiad Press has been pouring out all that crappy sentimental stuff for decades.
RB: But Naiad is hardly part of the mainstream discourse.
CP: In terms of images in the general media, I think that no minority has any right to tell the majority of a culture, "You have an obligation to produce for us images that we find comfortable." Again, I think we have to face the truth that homosexuality is a minority preoccupation. The idea that any minority's agenda should become the primary agenda of any culture is ridiculous. It's far more important for gays to study the larger culture and to understand the larger frame of human life, because this identity politics thing, this little ghetto - the more gays are in the ghetto, the more they identify overwhelmingly with the gay side of themselves, rather than with all the other human sides of themselves, then the less their artwork will have a general appeal. It was different ten, fifteen, twenty years ago, when it was important to get a gay voice out. Now, it's a total dead end. It's like people are all cramped in a tiny bed, and they don't realize that they have to stand up! Get out of the house! Go look at the real world, and try to produce work that has a general perspective that takes in the whole of human achievement in art and literature.
RB: So, does your generation have any responsibility at all to gay teenagers?
CP: The positive role models have to be gay people succeeding in the real world. We don't have to manufacture images for young people. Like these crappy lesbian movies that have been coming out the last couple of years - you think that Go Fish is a positive image for young people? It's the most depressing, embarrassing piece of crap - girls dragging themselves around depressed, losers. We have to get out of that. You think people struggling with their sexual impulses at the age of fourteen, fifteen, sixteen are going to feel empowered by that? I don't think the terrors they are experiencing are going to be necessarily solved by positive role models. I think it's going to come from learning about general human life. I'd give them Jane Austen. I'd say, get out; stop thinking about yourself and your adolescent problems. Read about ancient Egypt! Here's a book about India! That's the way I would solve their problems. They will come to realize that their problems are not so big.
RB: You've often said that you're a product of 60's culture. When you look at people of my generation - that is, people in their 20's who are products of 80's and 90's culture - what do we look like to you?
CP: Well, it's sad. We of the 60's thought that there was going to be generation after generation of bold and independent and free-thinking people. I'm a teacher now; I've been teaching for 25 years. So I have watched this process happening; this slow kind of drawing-back of the young. It seems to me that the young as a whole; they're very nice, very sweet, but rather melancholy, for reasons that must relate to what this whole generation has experienced, divorce on a massive scale. When I was growing up, I knew of only one divorced family. There's been a massive breakdown of the stability of the home environment. I think that there is a level of affluence but also reduced expectations on the part of young people.
RB: How is my generation's pop culture different from your own?
CP: I think there's a shallowness to the media culture today. The young have this MTV culture. MTV once was so fabulous to me - this 24-hour music channel with all these wonderful images - but it's turned into pabulum. It's like Friends, where the boys are like the new woman's dream of what a man should be: not very threatening, kind of like a brother. The whole premise is like an eternal dorm room.
I began to be distressed in the early 80's when I got back to Yale, teaching part-time. The Yale undergraduates seemed very sophisticated; that is, they knew how to write an essay. They were very polished, but they had no passion, no spontaneity, no ideas. They completely lacked what we had in the 60's - the cosmic perspective. Their education totally cut them off from nature. The new discourse they were learning - the post-structuralist discourse - paid no attention to nature. In the 60's we were fighting every kind of social injustice and political authority, but we believed in the magnitude of nature. So we had the kind of visionary perspective on life that is completely missing from today's most sophisticated young. We believed that you must love art and love pop and read Rimbaud and Baudelaire and Lorca and Genet and Mishima, and people like that. And you showed passion. It was cool to show passion, ardor, to be excessive, to be unique, to be weird, to be eccentric; that was cool.
Suddenly, in this generation of the 80's and 90's, it's cool to be cool. You don't want to be embarrassed; you fear saying something that's ridiculous; you fear not being part of the group. There's an incredible conformism that I see everywhere. There's a passionless androgyny. This is why I think there is so much homosexuality right now. People want to say, "Oh, homosexuality is finally free after so many thousands of years of oppression." But the reason there's so much homosexuality is related to the breakdown of the family. Now, I don't want to go back to the nuclear family; I've constantly said that that's a toxic construction. The great extended families of the past were the healthy units. But this bisexuality thing, which some people think is so hipbullshit!
RB: So are positive gay images in popular culture worthless?
CP: Everything you read now about gayness, it's all very simplistically affirming. It uses words like "homophobia" about anyone who doesn't like it. The whole discourse is filled with lies right now. Lies and half-truths and fudged statistics. I'd like to sweep it all out. My platform is about understanding that civilization as a whole is what we ultimately belong to. I mean, I'm Italian-American; I'm constantly talking about my ethnicity, but I am also interested in the norm. I think the minute you get a group that defines itself separate from the whole, they're off on a branch. They're sawing themselves off from the trunk of a tree. And that branch is going to break.