R E C E N T L Y
Why American athletes don't kiss and hug like soccer stars
Linda Tripp, the White House's ghoulish bad conscience
I'll take religion over gay culture
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America's New Age obsessions: The good, the bad and the inner child-y
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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 | PAGE 2 OF 2
Dear Camille:
I wonder if you have formed any theories as to the intimate lives of such
culturally critical figures as Shakespeare's patron, the spinsterly Queen
Elizabeth, Jane Austen, Helen Keller and that cranky bachelor Henry David
Thoreau? To what do you attribute their lack of romantic or erotic
attachment? Did they not marry because they were gay, or had their love been
rejected, or were they simply disinclined to form lasting intimate
relationships?
I know it's an odd assortment of people I have mentioned: I allude to them
because I am so familiar with them and I wonder what you have to say about
these and other historical figures.
Which are the intimate relationships -- or lack thereof -- that most interest you?
-- Your Curious Reader
Dear Curious:
You have pinpointed a main question behind my doctoral dissertation and then book, "Sexual Personae." I was always fascinated by the austere or quirky sex lives of so many major figures like Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo -- who are carelessly called "gay" today when they seem to have been solitary and nearly monastic in temperament (though both of them certainly had an eye for pretty boys).
A big name is missing from your list: Jesus Christ, a charismatic visionary who inveighed against the temptations of the flesh and, in his questioning of material reality, belonged to a line of thought in the Hellenized Mediterranean world that can be traced to Plato.
Very gifted people may be sociopathic in varying degrees. Perhaps the great leaps forward of the human race have been produced by diverting energy from sex and personal relationships, a process Freud called sublimation. This is why rubrics like "All you need is love" or "We're put on earth to care for each other" are so squishily wrong-headed. Little of lasting value has come from one-on-one relationships -- except when they have been miserably thwarted, after which people go off and write "Romeo and Juliet" or "The Divine Comedy"!
Historically, women's quest for love has held them back as a gender in terms of pioneering achievement in the arts and sciences. The great creators, even when happily married, have always rigorously protected a cold psychic zone where no intimacy was allowed.
Openly gay literary critic G. Wilson Knight (who deserves far more respect than klutzy Michel Foucault, who managed to miss all of Romanticism) has written brilliantly throughout his many books about this process of rechanneling psychic energy away from sexual action and into thought and creation.
Dear Camille:
"Intersexuality," the phenomenon of children born with genitalia that
are neither clearly male or female, has recently been getting a lot of
attention. The standard procedure since the 1950s has been to perform
surgery on the infants to make them unambiguously male or female.
What is your view of the debate over the surgical alteration of
intersexual children? Is this a necessary measure to ensure their
happiness in later life, as the doctors argue, or is it a dangerous
and harmful form of mutilation, as intersexual activists would have
it?
-- A Concerned Citizen
Dear Concerned:
It was Hugh Hampton Young's stunning 1937 text, "Genital Abnormalities, Hermaphroditism, and Related Adrenal Diseases," that first familiarized me with this subject. I discovered the book, with its copious photographs, in graduate school while doing research for my dissertation in the Yale Medical School library.
In classical antiquity, hermaphrodite births were regarded as bad omens, and the infants were usually exposed -- left to die in the open at the mercy of the gods. More complex are cases of sexual misidentification at birth, due to misshaped or overenlarged genitalia. At puberty, when the gonads are functioning normally, an individual whose sex has been misassigned can end up appearing to change sexes -- which may have led to legends like that of Teiresias, the hermaphrodite seer.
Modern diagnostic procedures can catch these conditions, some of which are entwined with very serious growth, excretory or reproductive problems. Medical ethics is still grappling, however, with when and under what circumstances medicine should intervene with hormone therapy and/or surgery. Even male circumcision, rooted in tribal custom thousands of years old, is starting to look like a barbaric practice inflicted on helpless infants who cannot choose.
In the case of genital abnormalities, however, at what age could informed consent actually be given? Surely, it would mean puberty at the earliest, well after the psychological damage had already been done to a child with malformed genitals. For better or worse, it's parents who will have to make these decisions. But they should probably be allowed a much longer period to weigh their options. At the moment, surgeries are being done, depending on the diagnosis and sex of the patient, anywhere from just after birth to 3 years of age, although vaginal reconstructions are usually performed much later.
As with everything in medicine, the quality of doctors, hospitals and counseling varies widely, depending on location, insurance coverage and access to specialists. Hence many atrocious cases have occurred of misdiagnosis and bungled surgery, leading to needless suffering. However, the worst-case scenarios should not be used to condemn an entire therapeutic approach that overall has probably done far more good than harm.
I deeply sympathize with intersexuals, since I certainly felt like one growing up in the sexually conformist 1950s. Even today, I bridle a bit at having to check "male" or "female" on government forms and wish there was a unisex category called "other."
However, I totally reject not only the current, jargon-ridden, academic distinction between "sex" and "gender" but the postmodernist position that the existence of biological hermaphrodites subverts our allegedly false "binary" assumptions about two sexes. Feminist geneticist Anne Fausto-Sterling of Brown University (that PC swamp) is one of the worst propagandists in this regard. She is responsible for the ridiculous thesis that there are really "five" sexes: It got into the United Nations platform documents of the 1995 World Conference on Women at Beijing, caused an uprising among offended Latin American delegates and brought public mockery on the entire enterprise.
Hermaphroditism is a birth defect, not a separate sex. It's a silly pipe dream to imagine that, given children's irrepressible savagery toward anyone different, there will ever be a world in which young intersexuals will be happily accepted by their peers (outside of an Ivy League Montessori nursery school, where authoritarian caretakers craftily hover).
Whether the chichi gender theorists like it or not, sexual duality is a law of nature among all highly evolved life forms. We are at a period in history when overpopulation allows us the luxury of not having to tie fertility to the survival of the human race. The happiness of the individual is now our concern.
The crusading indignation of adult intersexuals, however justified, must be weighed against the rights of newborns to have as normal and unstressed a childhood as possible. It will take the wisdom of a transsexual Solomon to decide this one.
To Debi from San Diego, who asks about pets: I am a cat person, as testified to in my analysis of the Egyptian cat cult in my first book, which indexes my gray-blue Vermont stray, Numa Pompilius, who ruled my roost for 15 glorious years.
To Robert, who asks when my book on Alfred Hitchcock's "The Birds" will be available in the United States: Indiana University Press, which handles North American distribution of British Film Institute publications, predicts mid- to late-September. Meanwhile, the BFI is taking direct orders at its Web site in London, where the book was released
in July.
Postscript: The Wall Street Journal asked for my opinion about sensitivity training, and you can imagine my reply. See my satire, "Camp Insensitivity," in the July 30 issue, with its cartoon of drumstick- and cigar-chomping yahoos wearing "Camp Paglia" sweatshirts and toasting marshmallow books ("Bambi," "It Takes a Village" and "Das Kapital") over a roaring fire.
Feeling overly sensitive? Not sensitive enough? Ask Camille.
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