Camille Paglia: Building Her Wall Between Art & Life

Camille Paglia: Well you have to remember that I spent 20 years writing a book, Sexual Personae, that was out for a year without people knowing who I was, uh, I had no picture on the book, uh, was completely unknown. It was only one year after that people who were reading my book asked me to comment for the media. So, um, all that's happened basically is the media has gotten to know my real personality. I've been teaching for years. All my students will attest this is my real personality. People who think that I became famous because of my attack mode are quite wrong. Sexual Personae again was virtually anonymous in many ways.

Nichols: About your new book. You describe yourself as doing "yeomen's service in the culture wars." As quickly as you can I'd like you to name your principal battlefronts starting with what you'd presently consider the most important one.

Paglia: Well, essentially I am a Sixties free-speech militant. Therefore I oppose dogma in all areas: ah, in feminism, gay activism, ah, academic, ah, you know, curriculum, and in French theory. I oppose all ideology and false abstractions.

Nichols: American feminism, you say, "is stuck in an adolescent whining mode, full of puritanism and suffocating ideology." What does your self-description as an anti-feminist feminist mean?

Paglia: Well, the term anti-feminist is just one of those, you know, absurdities people use for anyone who's trying to critique a dominant ideology. I'm a feminist. I feel that I'm true to the roots of feminism as a progressive reform movement, and, um, I'm opposed not to feminism but to the feminist establishment which seems to me to have a kind of Kremlin mentality. Now, I can't do a lot more complaining on this because, you know, in the four years since I really came on the scene its obvious I've helped to inspire a reform movement that is obvious from coast to coast and therefore, ah, most people are not aware , ah, you know, indignant about the . . .

Nichols: In other words bringing up the issues . . .

Paglia: Yeah, the victim orientation of contemporary feminism is pretty much understood now and a lot of my language, a lot of my critique has passed into general usage so I can't be as angry about it as I was four years ago because I have succeeded.

Nichols: Would you consider yourself free of ideology?

Paglia: I think that ...yes. I think that I'm someone, I'm very eclectic, or, you know, I pick and choose from many different important thinkers in history. I think that that is the whole power of my work. I follow no one dominant ideology. And that's why I left the Catholic Church 25 years ago, because I hate that kind of total ideology.

Nichols: You seem to like what you call (quote) "an eerie, sultry, tableau of jaded androgynous creatures, trapped in a decadent sexual underground." You call sado-masochistic images "hypnotic" -- and you celebrate a "perverse and knowing world" as seen in Mapplethorpe's photographs. You call Mapplethorpe "today's pagan priest of art." Is this why you also claim that your view of human nature has been formed in large part by the Marquis de Sade, not to mention Freud and Nietzsche? (p.105)

Paglia: Ah, yeah, now Sexual Personae, my first book, ah, followed, ah, one of the most important things I followed through Western culture was this thing of sado-masochism. I am not a practising S&M anything. My real sex life is rather boring, probably. But, um, I just discovered that theme and, you know, and by the time that book came out it was amazing how, um, it was part of the general culture, through Mapplethorpe's images and a lot of other things that were going on in movies. So, um, I would just say that for me I follow the philosophy of the Marquis de Sade, that is I do not believe as Rousseau claims that we are born good and that we're made bad by corrupt society or rather we're born ...

Nichols: In other words, you believe like the Catholic Church teaches that we have an original sin.

Paglia: Yeah. For me its not sin, but rather aggression. I don't believe in God so I believe that we're born with a tendency toward aggression.

Nichols: Two questions here . . .

Paglia: Wait, wait a minute. Let me just complete that thought and say that I believe in the rational code of ethics, that is we have an obligation to curb our instincts toward barbarism and so I'm not just saying "let it rip," I'm saying we're born with a tendency for aggression but it is civilized for us to restrain ourselves.

Nichols: OK, I do ask about that a little later on. You hope to fuse realism into your thought. Elizabeth Taylor-- "without any sexual ambiguity in her personae" you call "the greatest actress in film history." Without demeaning Ms. Taylor, wouldn't it be possible to say that this opinion of yours is merely an explosion --not of the realism you hope to own-- but of your own personal taste?

Paglia: (Laughs) Yes, my philosophy follows that of Oscar Wilde and his master Walter Pater. I believe that a critic, someone of strong sensibilities, strong individuality, and that your function is to express your personal taste very vividly in order to help others form their personal taste.

Nichols: Thinkers like yourself or like me would hope to be demonstrably realistic, but may, in fact, merely be writing about the colors of our own developed sexual/ personal growth. Your writing revolves much around the idea that we are all wearing various --personaes--or masks, even though there's a kernel of self in each of us that is primarily genetic. Would you agree with the late David B. Feinberg, author of Eighty Sixed and of Queer and Loathing, says: There is no literal truth. Truth is a philosophical invention one can only approach. All writing is lies. Good writing is lies skillfully told. What hides behind Camille's writing mask? What can you say to convince me that you're not just another talking head, perhaps a guilty Roman Catholic girl--brainwashed by those nuns---to think that human nature revels in degradation, or that your vision of art isn't just simply a celebration of the sado-masochistic realm which, as you write, you believe lies in the deepest level of human nature.

Paglia: Well, number one: that, you know, would be a mis-reading of Sexual Personae which argues that ...

Nichols: But you did say that you thought that sado-masochism lies at the deepest level. . .

Paglia: Yes, that's correct, but ...but ...its a mis-reading, that is I say that we must honor equally Apollo and Dionysus, ah, that is the urge toward freedom and sexual licence and the urge toward order and restraint, OK, so I'm always talking about creative duality. It's like Yin/ Yang. When you balance these two opposing forces in our nature, now, as far as being brainwashed by the nuns, I, I never got along with the nuns, OK, and ah, had open confrontations with them, and, um, that's one reason I left the Catholic Church so, um, in no way, I mean I did have...I did not go to Catholic school.

Nichols: But you did speak of a, of a sado masochism lying at the deepest levels of our natures. Wouldn't it be more accurate to say that it lies, perhaps not in everybody's but at the deepest core of your own nature?

Paglia: No. Not at all. No. What I'm arguing is that we are essentially animals, that we we have evolved, OK, through history...there's...

Nichols: So here let me...

Paglia: Wait, wait, wait, let me complete my thought, OK, please, OK? What I said in Sexual Personae, OK, is that man is, mankind is very complex, that we are hybrid beings, that we are still animals and unevolved--that this is what Freud would call the unconscious realm of the id and the libido and so on, but that we also have to have a super ego, that for some reason we can not explain there is something in us that strives for transcendence, ah, whether it is a soul...I do not believe in God so I do not believe there is a soul but I do have a kind of mystical, spiritual bent and I've constantly said in my work, OK, and close readers will be aware of it that this conflict within led to the great achievements of mankind but also to our deep neurosis, our deep unhappiness, so, um, that is a correct reading of my work.

Nichols: You say that you believe that aggression and violence are primarily not learned but instinctual.

Paglia: Yes, but that is ...

Nichols: Do you side with Freud's position that biology is destiny and what would be the precise academic description for your viewpoint? Would you, say, be considered a biological instinctivist?

Paglia: No, and that was one of the most idiotic mis-readings of my work by the feminist establishment, calling me a biological determinist. Its on the first page of Sexual Personae. And I say it again and again, sexuality is an intricate intersection of nature, of culture, OK, we ...cannot go on in this social constructionist rope that feminism has been in for 20 years to say that we are nothing but the product of environmental forces. Now, let me complete my thought. Sexual Personae is a 700-page book not about biology but about the fabrications and the artifaces of art.

Nichols: Where do you stand on the death penalty?

Paglia: I am, in Vamps and Tramps, in the main essay "No Law in the Arena," argues I am pro-capital punishment for extreme crimes like political assassination or repeated atrocious acts like, ah, rape-murders, especially of children. But I am also simultaneously for abortion rights and I have said that abortion is killing and that we must be able to admit that. The feminist establishment is totally hypocritical in being pro-abortion but anti-capital punishment.

Nichols: You are for free choice?

Paglia: I am for unrestricted access to abortion rights. This is my radical libertarian position. Similarly in Vamps and Tramps argues I am for the abolition of all sodomy laws, I'm for the legalization of all drugs ...

Nichols: OK, I know that. You attacked author Rita Mae Brown for what you call "tunnel vision, lack of hard political knowledge, indifference to aesthetics, and shrill reductiveness." These are sweeping charges. Could you provide some specifics?

Paglia: Rita Mae Brown? I don't remember ever mentioning Rita Mae Brown.

Nichols: Yeah, she's mentioned in your book, Sex, Art and American Culture (page 112.)

Paglia: I really don't remember...

Nichols: Yeah, along with Kate Millet. You mentioned them both in the same line.

Paglia: In a list. In a list. Oh well, I certainly have not focussed, I mean, whatever words that I used were about Kate Millet, not about Rita Mae Brown. You're just really surprising me because I do not remember Rita Mae Brown because I have a lot to say about Rita Mae Brown and I was sort of holding it back. It was Kate Millet I was mentioning.

Nichols: OK. You say that the quest of the 60's generation for sexual freedom ended in disaster. Does this mean unmitigated disaster? Or have there been some triumphs?

Paglia: Well, um, what I'm saying is that I'm I'm part of the sexual revolution, um, and I feel that the...in one of my most controversial sentences is "Everybody who preached free love in the 60's is responsible for AIDS." I mean by that the Mama's and the Papa's and all of us, so, the price of that revolution has been paid by gay men, primarily. I think that what we're understanding is the enormous power of nature. Even Larry Kramer is starting to talk like this now: that nature apparently did not want us to be promiscuous and that it puts a thousand obstacles in our paths such as these diseases. OK. I feel that procreation is nature's law, and that's why I defy nature, I resist it, I oppose it. OK. I think that women certainly are in the..um, you know we were the first generation to have the birth control pill, OK, which frustrates nature.

Nichols: OK, I was just going to ask you about that next. In your writing I've noted some generous curtsies to motherhood. What are your views on birth control and overpopulation?

Paglia: Well, you know, I again feel that nature is...wants...makes a billion entities, OK, and there's a struggle for survival among them and that, for me, that's why Tennessee Williams' Suddenly Last Summer is a very great vision, the whole thing about the sea turtles racing toward the sea and being eaten alive.

Nichols: I remember well...

Paglia: Fantastic, OK, and so I'm saying nature is this fascist, the ultimate fascist is nature that just wants us to procreate and puts these instinctual urges toward sex in us and then will not allow us, OK, to use our sex organs for anything but procreation so when gay men want to have sodomy it leads to disaster.

Nichols: Let me get to that because I have a question. You say that "masculinity is aggressive, unstable, combustible." Isn't it possible that you have a stereotyped personal vision of what constitutes masculinity?

Paglia: I know just what you mean by that question and you see I think that that's what feminism when it came back on the scene in the late 60's , early 70's tried to do. It tried to critique the traditional view of masculinity and say that it was an illusion, that it's not true, we're going to revise the standard of masculinity and I'm saying as a cultural historian, someone who has studied, you know, world history, that in point of fact that there is something masculine and that gay men know what it is. Unfortunately, every culture except maybe the Quaker society has seen that that the beauty of young masculinity that which its its height, we know this even the hormonal height of it is in the early 20's. You reach your sexual peak when you're in your late teens or early 20's if you're a man and so on, women is like mid-30's when you reach your sexual peak, um, and I'm saying that, um, that gay men have enshrined further art forms, OK, in the West, OK, since Greek art and since the Florentine renaissance and so on, the beauty of the masculine. Its something real. Its there. Its... its beautiful because its transient, OK, and in fact all of modern sports except for these like individual competitions like tennis, most of modern sports when its team sports...

Nichols: I know you like football. (Laugh)

Paglia: Yes! Its about...in world soccer too...that is really about the beauty of the young male form and...and I'm saying that... that there is, in other words, not that its homoerotic, its not that like people are really gay.

Nichols : Is that what you mean then when as an adult you admire teen males who celebrate their few years of freedom from female control --between mother control and wife control...

Paglia: Yes.

Nichols: by rampaging in gangs in public malls?

Paglia: Yes! Yes!

Nichols: The word you used kind of freaked me out, "rampaging."

Paglia: Rampaging, yeah, I'm saying they're wild. They're wild! I'm saying that the reason they're so wild is because they just escape, OK, from the control by their mothers and this was a big revelation to me as a lesbian, OK, because when I was young, say, in 1960, I saw male oppression, OK, and female victimage. I saw men as obnoxious, ego-maniacal, and so on. As the years went on, OK, as I was a teacher, OK, as I evolved into my 30's I suddenly began feeling how the boys in the class saw me as the mother. You know I have no maternal instincts whatever, as a lesbian and so on, I felt, I began to see how desperate men are, and how sensitive and how vulnerable they are, how their lives---heterosexual men, their lives are nothing but sexual anxiety. I began to realize that, in fact, the story of men is not the story of male freedom, it is the story of their servitude to woman's power and that there are only two groups of men who have escaped woman's power, gay men, OK, and heterosexual men in that brief (teen) period.

Nichols: What about the sort of a-sexual males, the many males--both straight and gay, the many that those in the so-called "fast lane" call nerds? They don't seem to rampage or anything.

Paglia: No, but nerds often escape from woman in the world of technology. The computer hacker is a great example of this.

Nichols: You often identify as a Sixties person. A famous counterculture slogan of the Sixties was "Make Love, Not War." You say "sex is basically combat . ."

Paglia: That's right!

Nichols: You say "the sexes are at war." How do you react to the famous Sixties slogan?

Paglia: Well, that's what I'm doing in my work, I'm critiquing the false Rousseauism, the naive Rousseauism in my own generation, say, for example, that I have written that Woodstock was a very wonderful ideal of a million people getting along in harmony but they actually aren't ...was shown some months later by Altamont, OK, where before the stage where the Rolling Stones, people beating each other with pool cues and a murder occurring inside. So I'm saying that, yeah, that was a naive day dream that human nature, and nature itself is inherently benign. I'm saying that that's an illusion. Nature is ambivalent, it's both creative and destructive.

Nichols: You often chide other thinkers for being short on historical knowledge and yet Walt Whitman has said that all historians are either liars themselves or must depend on liars for their information. How would you reply to Whitman?

Paglia: Well, he's right. That is, I regard, I mean, in line with one of your earlier questions, I regard all tellers of tales, all historians, all psychoanalysts, makers of art, as essentially, that you're creating a narrative, OK, its a possible narrative. There is no absolute truth, OK, but I feel, you know, I've written this, that we have an obligation to try to seek the truth. So, um, the point is, you have competing narratives in history. People are trying to compete with each other. Who can tell the story that seems to make the most sense at any given moment. So for me, you know, Whitman is a very great bard and he was, in essence what he was saying that epic poetry is the real history of America, not the conventional kind of history-making that was going on, people going around and recording the events of the civil war. He is the one who is telling the most essential truths about American history.

Nichols: Your statements on lesbians seem rather final.

Paglia: (Laughter)

Nichols: "Lesbianism," you wrote, "seeks a lost state of blissful union with the mother," and is "cozy, regressive, and" --you are sorry to say --"intellectually enervating, tending toward the inert."

Paglia: Yes! (Laughter) Oh, I'm being too loud at the pool here. I must restrain myself. Go ahead.

Nichols: You say lesbians shy away from sex and enthrone only emotion. Don't you see this as blatant stereotyping of lesbians, coming not from lesbianism itself but from old-fashioned sexually-repressive female roles? Or, rather, have you never, as a lesbian, met an intellectually stimulating, highly-sexed lesbian?

Paglia: After a 10-year drought in my sex life when I tried to date both men and women, um, I'm now happily, you know, sort of wed, you know, as it were, to a young woman 19 years my junior, Alison Maddex, M-A-D-D-E-X, who is an artist and curator, and the thing is, you have to realize that my remarks about lesbians are not coming from just theorizing, you know, its coming from my experience.

Nichols: I lived among lesbians for a year-and-a-half as a youngster and I also have been close to many lesbians.

Paglia: But the point is, I'm looking, like, to have sex with them, OK, and what you're getting with me is someone who was out before Stonewall, OK, I was out there, you know, as an open lesbian and...

Nichols: Me too, and I wrote the first commercial gay journalist's account of Stonewall.

Paglia: Oh my god! That's absolutely great! Where?

Nichols: For SCREW magazine.

Paglia: Oh my god! That's great! That's wonderful! But you see, the point is, my life was highly sexually frustrated, you see, for years. When I began in the 60's with my gay male friends I thought oh, yes, yes, there's a whole new world of lesbians! If I were a young lesbian today I would have many more options, obviously. There are a lot of more girls who are experimenting with bisexuality and all kinds of things now. I'm talking about my experience. I'm 47, and so and people who know--people who know me, know perfectly well my misery, OK, about this. I lived in Philadelphia 10 years ago. There's this enormous lesbian scene in Philadelphia and I put my time in as you can't believe in those bars and I could never--ever meet one single date coming out of all those years, I mean the time I put in there, whereas, that's what I'm saying, gay men who wandered into the bar and I would end up having these fabulous conversations with them. So what I'm saying is that I'm trying to remedy the problems in the lesbian-feminist world which I think are very serious and Sandra Bernhard and I are on exactly the same track here. I think that we cannot go any longer just thinking that we have to be nice and pretend things are fine. They aren't. OK, gay men inherently seem to be able to have a fabulous sexual world and to be oriented toward civilization as a whole. They're very alert and aware of cultural currents and things that are going on outside the gay world. That is not true of lesbians and feminists, OK, and there has not been one single major work in the arts or in thought coming out of lesbian-feminism, so I'm speaking as an experienced and battle scared veteran of the sex wars.

Nichols: You admire male homosexuals, you say...

Paglia: Yes.

Nichols: for what you call rejection of suffocating female controls. In a revealing chapter on homosexuality you say, "To have sex in a dark alleyway is to pay homage to the dream of male freedom." Again, could this description of male freedom be seen as somewhat limiting? What would you say to those gay men who don't identify with this and who recoil from such a description of the freedom-dream aspect of what you hope they do?

Paglia: Well it seems to me that its rational and ethical to recoil from that, but what I'm saying is that gay men have pushed the limits, OK, of...of...of...sexual freedom, OK.

Nichols: John Rechy would agree with you on that. And my experience would too. (Laugh)

Paglia: Yes, I received a recent issue of the magazine Steam, OK, and I talked about it at Stanford University the other night in an open setting there. I said that here was a man who went around with a camera, OK, and went, like, to one of those rest stops on an Arkansas highway and where, like, heterosexual hunters come just to pee and he..you know, these magnificent genitals, OK, stuck them through this hole, this glory hole, obviously there was this straight man there, alright, who, like, can't get his wife to do fellatio, or whatever, OK, and this man, this gay man, had these fantastic photographs of these magnificent genitals coming through this hole. I said, gay men, I mean this is so erotic. This is the ultimate in eroticism! Nothing anyone would have ever produced--gay or straight, OK, has ever been this erotic, OK, this worship of the beauty of the male genitals. So, in other words, some people would recoil from this, "That's so degraded. That's so de-personalized. That's so this or that." I say, "Yes, most gay men maybe can't do that, but I really honor that. I honor that. I, as a lesbian, find that highly erotic, OK, yeah.

Nichols: What would you say if I asked you if you don't think that's what one might call anatomical overfocus?

Paglia: It is! But the point is, why are people doing that now? Because in the last 25 years, OK, we have a culture that is slowly defining masculinity downwards. You've got to be sensitive. In this revolution, no one would have direct access to their own masculine energy, OK, and identity. If you went to war, if you worked on a farm, if you went out on a freighter, OK, you could be masculine. Now, what can a guy do in the white middle class? He's stuck with a computer in an office. How can you recover the masculine? And that's why we have this cult of the phallus. It is...it is a direct response to the needs of our culture and by the way, that ...that image of the penis there coming through the hole, that is exactly like the great images of Hinduism, of all fertility cults, the great erect phallus, so for me it is a sign of veneration for nature's powers.

Nichols: You do like the Washington monument then. (Laughs)

Paglia: Well, the Washington monument to me, of course, mainly for me that's an obelisk in the great style of ancient Egypt. I'm constantly saying is that ancient Egypt's great constructions...that is the male imagination, stonework pointing towards heaven, yes.

Nichols: You say there are principally two kinds of male homosexuality, those who flee their mothers and those who identify with them. Now, an old activist, Dick Leitsch, told me something like this many years ago, but his classifications were different. By the way he's a reader of yours. He likes you.

Paglia: Oh, great!

Nichols: He said there are Gideans--too serious moralistic types like Andre Gide and Oscar Wildeans-- a bit wilder and I replied that there where certainly more than two gay-male types, that there are Walt Whitmanites too, for example 'cause I'm one of those. Don't such statements-- these two-typing classifications-- lead to more stereotyping again?

Paglia: Well, I simply want to make categories. I...I desire to make categories.

Nichols: Can I say something?

Paglia: Go ahead.

Nichols: I have written in my work that this is a characteristic of sado-masochists, that they are very category-oriented.

Paglia: Well, but that's a characteristic of Catholics, OK, because Catholic theology is highly categorical, the catechism that we were forced to learn, OK, see Catholic theology trains your mind...oh, I'm being gestured to from across the pool. We have another interview.

Nichols: OK, I have just two more questions. You write that "the gay world has become a crowded, glittery, fast-paced world unto itself, gay men began to lose the brilliant mental edge that they had in the old haunted world of masks, where comedy was born of suffering." You almost seem to harbor a longing for the good old closety days. And since you made this statement about 3 years ago, gay comedy is now all the rage. Its going bigtime. And, even worse for your ideology of women, many lesbians are top-notch gay comedians, including Kate Clinton, and other big names -- many who are intellectually stimulating and hilarious.

Paglia: Well, ah, no, I still have to say Kate Clinton, for example, her remarks about me indicate that fundamentally she is very humorless, OK, I mean, I'm sorry ...

Nichols: I didn't know about that.

Paglia: No, she's been vicious about me and...Laird Delorio...

Nichols: But we know there are very funny lesbian comedians.

Paglia: People are tired of her already, OK, and Lea Delaria was like a short split, she's over, and then we've got, you know, Robin Tyler, and I met her in real life, OK, and she's like very grim and grim, you know, in real life. Now the point is, yeah, these women can go in front of an audience and get women to laugh. That's not my point. Most lesbians have one-millionth of the wit of most gay men, OK, so please, they're no where near getting to that point yet.

Nichols: One more question.

Paglia: Wait, wait. I do feel there's a renaissance, OK, as I go around and see among young gay men, I do feel there's a kind of...there's Wayne Koestenbaum's book on the great opera divas. It shows us that we're starting to go full circle again, back to gay men trying to find their cultural identity.

Nichols: I'm reminded of certain lines by the Scottish poet, Robert Burns, when you say that you absolutely love the idea of hierarchy and given your stance on S&M, I don't find this surprising. Burns probably knew little about S&M but his verse about lords and nobles reminds me of ...sado-masters of the sort you seem to adore, those who are stalking their bedrooms dressed in leather breeches and delivering ominous glances and I'd like your reaction to Burns' lines:

Paglia: Ah, well, you know, I've constantly said, OK, that like Oscar Wilde, OK, that I'm a democrat in egalitarian politics but I'm an elitist in the artistic or around the sexual imagination. So that's what my attitude would be, that I love the great hierarchs like Catherine Deneuve and The Hunger, OK, in art, but in real life, no, I'm a democrat, see?

Nichols: One more quick question. Are you familiar with Sallie Tisdale, author of Talk Dirty to Me?

Paglia: Yes, who has ripped me off without credit...

Nichols: Oh yeah?

Paglia: in a way that's utterly deplorable.

Nichols: How about the gay neo-Freudian, Mark Simpson, author of Male Impersonators -- Men Performing Masculinity?

Paglia: I haven't seen that and I certainly will look at it now that you've brought it to my attention.

Nichols: OK, great. And I'll tell you what I wrote, which you will probably hate me for, Men's Liberation: A New Definition of Masculinity, Penguin Books, 1975.

Paglia: Oh, you're kidding! Gee, I wanna look at that. That sounds really great.

Nichols: Well, its quite a bit different from your thoughts, but anyway, you can see that from my questions.

Paglia: You make sure you send to Vintage anything that's printed, right?

Nichols: Oh sure. Good luck....

Paglia: Great questions. Thank you very much.