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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:
Having been a front-office survivor of the Lisa Olson debacle (when a
female reporter was exposed to the genitals of a New England Patriots football
player while giving an interview in the locker room), I am curious about
your views on women in sports.
Why is it that the WNBA seems to have no shot at approaching the popularity
of the NBA? Why is any given sport dominated by men -- in terms of eyeballs
watching and dollars subsidizing? Surely it can't be because women are
lesser athletes -- a quick look at Picabo Street flying downhill on a Super
G course or a wonderful floor routine of any supple female gymnast proves
that women are in fact athletically superior in certain respects.
And why are most sportscasters men? Is it because women fear going into the locker room again?
T. Patrick Murray
Dear Mr. Murray:
Thank you for your query during these, the High Holy Days of football, as we tensely await the Jan. 31 confrontation between the surprising Atlanta Falcons and the favored Denver Broncos in Super Bowl XXXIII. May the grittier team win!
As a dissident feminist and football fanatic, I was disgusted by the humorless petulance of Boston Herald reporter Lisa Olson, who was goaded on by women's groups to file a sexual harassment lawsuit against the New England Patriots in 1991, in one of the last blasts of the puritanical Catharine MacKinnon-Anita Hill period in feminism. Our current Satyr in Chief, President Clinton, has made workplace penis-wagging fine and dandy -- exactly what tight end Zeke Mowatt was accused of sarcastically doing to Olson in the Patriots locker room in September 1990. If Olson, perfectly safe in a crowded semi-public space, couldn't come up with a snappy put-down to a limply brandished weenie, she was a hell of a bad reporter. Spunk should be the minimum requirement for female professionals invading formerly all-male turf.
As for the public's lack of interest in women's team sports, I have written repeatedly about the team as a vehicle of male bonding that dates from the dangerous hunting forays of prehistory. We all admire individual women athletes -- although the great period in women's tennis is sadly long gone -- but not many people seem to get seriously worked up over female teams after college. I heartily recommend anthropologist Lionel Tiger's very readable 1969 book "Men in Groups," which was unjustly trashed by feminists but which should be a basic text of gender studies programs.
I constantly lament women's lack of teamwork in rock music, where the commercially successful women's bands, from the Go-Gos, the Bangles and Bananarama to the Spice Girls, regularly fall apart or lose diva-minded members before the groups can artistically mature. Whether Title IX, which federally mandates equal funding (still unachieved) to men's and women's campus sports programs, will strengthen women's talent for teamwork remains to be seen. Perhaps evolutionary biology cannot be altered so quickly.
Men in teams -- subordinated, self-sacrificing, disposable -- got the human species from caves to palaces. Team rejects, on the other hand, like artists and many gays, have contributed incalculably to culture, partly from their bitter sense of exclusion. As a television watcher, I often find it jarring to hear some prettified female reporter shrilly nattering on about football, a complex game she never played, just because affirmative action demands a squirt of on-screen estrogen. When we watch men's teams at work, we pay homage to 10,000 years of male achievements -- a record of vision, ingenuity and Herculean labor that feminism has been too mean-spirited to acknowledge.
Dear Camille:
I am familiar with some of your work and your column in Salon, but
I have never read anything by you on the "punk" movement of the mid-'70s to early '80s. I would be fascinated to read any commentary
you have on that nihilistic scene.
Sonny Ross
Dear Mr. Ross:
The Sex Pistols, the British band often given credit for beginning the punk movement, burst on the rock scene with "Anarchy in the U.K." (1976) and "God Save the Queen" (1977). They were never able to reproduce their success in the United States, since their ferocious anti-establishment stance was so geared to the ossified class system that has weakened but that remains an overt feature of British life.
The Sex Pistols' 1977-78 U.S. tour fell flat partly because they were out of sync with the inner dynamic of American music. London may have needed a retro kick in the ass to restore primal, masculine rock energy after the dissolving androgyny of the glam and glitter period, but we Americans had already been ravished by the punk artistry of Patti Smith, whose 1975 album "Horses" remains one of the greatest products of the rock genre. Television, whom I saw in 1977 at CBGB's in New York, and early Talking Heads (though not the Ramones) were the punk avatars for me and my circle.
The Sex Pistols undoubtedly struck many young listeners as highly original, but in the late 1970s I was already 30 and had gotten my punk zap from the Velvet Underground, whose mesmerizing first album was released in 1967, when I was in college. In their first phase (the early- to mid-1960s), the Rolling Stones and the Who had also been aggressively punk in assumptions and attitude. Furthermore, by the time the Sex Pistols arrived in the U.S., disco was in full swing -- a much-derided style that I took seriously and had been closely following since James Brown begat funk.
Although their manic influence can be traced in rhythmic terms to thrash rock and in performance terms to brash boy personae as far afield as Billy Idol and Anthony Kiedis of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, the Sex Pistols self-destructed too soon to leave much of a musical legacy. Nothing they composed remotely approaches the enduring brilliance of David Bowie albums like "Aladdin Sane" (1973) and "Diamond Dogs" (1974). (Bowie's baroque art-rock was a primary punk target, and he briefly took refuge in Berlin, where he revamped his style.)
Punk anarchism may be an adolescent phase of simplistic rebellion against authority. The Rolling Stones' canonical late-1960s songs, "Sympathy for the Devil," "Jumpin' Jack Flash," "Street Fighting Man" and "Gimme Shelter," are far more comprehensive statements about life and its inevitable conflicts between individualism and order. The Sex Pistols' Sid Vicious, who died of a drug overdose in 1979 several months after he was charged with murdering his girlfriend, didn't live long enough to work through his early punk positions.
I would cite the Who's magnificent, rumbling "Eminence Front" (from the 1982 "It's Hard" album), with its penetrating insights into psychology and politics, as an example of what an evolved punk can and should achieve. Anarchism is glorified thumb-sucking. Off with the diapers, and on to business! Construction, not destruction, is the name of the human game.
N E X T_P A G E | The double standard of female vs. male pornography |
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