 |
|
|
|
|
R E C E N T L Y
The glories of male football and the limpness of female pornography The disintegrating public schools
Tragicomic Clinton deserves censure, not impeachment Men: Fair game for banal feminist office humor Out with self-esteem tutorials, in with standardized tests!
___________________ Do you love Camille Paglia? Worship at her altar at barnesandnoble.com
A L S O
About Camille Paglia
- - - - - - - - - - C O L U M N I S T S
Sexpert Opinion The Reluctant Capitalist Left Hook Unspun Right On! Mr. Blue Word by Word Media Circus On Television Under the Covers Let's Get This Straight Home Movies Second Thoughts - - - - - - - - - -
|
ASK CAMILLE | PAGE 1, 2
Dear Camille:
Do you think that a pornographic magazine designed for both
genders could ever be a viable commercial enterprise? I envision a
magazine that has both visual images to satisfy the male gaze and
articles that would entice women readers. I read the articles and
erotica in men's magazines, as I know a great number of women do, but I
always feel like an uninvited spectator whose presence is merely
tolerated rather than encouraged. Most men's magazines seem intent on
maintaining the pretense that their readers are exclusively male, in
much the same way the immensely unsatisfying Playgirl maintains the
pretense that its readership isn't dominated by gay men.
When I ask my girlfriends if they buy pornographic magazines,
they all say, "I would, if there was something out there I liked." My
fantasy is to create that something. What would it take to do it?
Linda Williamson
Dear Ms. Williamson: A universal pornography was indeed what the sexual radicals of my 1960s generation dreamed of, but it never came to pass. In the great heyday of the Olympia Press and Eros magazine, it seemed that the sexual imagination was about to be fully liberated, with men and women becoming equal citizens in the Garden of Earthly Delights. Alas, our headlong sexual trajectory led to the indiscriminate hedonism of the disco era, after which came the plague of AIDS. Meanwhile, the porn industry, given the green light, moved not toward artful experimentation but toward generic videos with prefab orgasms. My generation's sexual history has been a woeful mix of tragedy and banality. The bold publication closest to what you desire is probably Libido, which is based in Chicago and edited by Marianna Beck and Jack Haferkamp. Libido tries to close the gap between male and female response and to merge heterosexual and homosexual imagery -- a noble enterprise indeed and one clearly grounded in a more sophisticated European eroticism. Dear Camille:
Given the passion for the arts that you express in your column, I was
wondering if you subscribed to any particular theory of genius. The word
has grown vague from misuse over time, as have its satellites like
"brilliant" and "masterpiece." Are there qualities that you
consider the particular domain of the genius? Do you believe in unconscious
genius, or do you think someone like Dante knows what he is all along?
And how can one distinguish between the fools for whom arrogance is
insight and the true Einsteins in our midst when the two are
increasingly treated as one and the same?
Vivian Darkbloom
Dear Ms. Darkbloom: The idea of artistic genius descends from paganism: The Romans saw a "genius" or generative spirit dwelling in a man or house or natural locale. The classical Greeks envisioned a semi-divine "daimon" that guided a man's path through life; it descended in turn from the mysterious forces of nature propitiated by early Greek religion. Although the Greeks venerated Homer and honored tragedians, painters and sculptors, it was the Italian Renaissance that invented artistic genius as we understand it: the prototype was the brooding, misanthropic Michelangelo, a titanic creator in many genres. Romanticism, with its flamboyant personae from Beethoven to Byron, revived the Renaissance model and laid the groundwork for modern pop stars. Yes, indeed, the word "genius" has been lamentably overused. Today, when there are so few major artistic innovations, our idea of greatness has shriveled -- helped along by shallow postmodernist academics who disguise their own mediocrity by denying that greatness has ever existed at all. Geniuses there certainly have been in this century -- Pablo Picasso, Igor Stravinsky, James Joyce, Martha Graham. Claims could also be made for Duke Ellington, Miles Davis, Alfred Hitchcock, Jackson Pollock, Ingmar Bergman and Bob Dylan. And there are scores of performers we must call "brilliant" in dance, theater, opera and film. A "masterpiece," on the other hand, should be a large, definitive statement but may be too difficult to make in this commercialized era of fragmented, niche audiences. If critical coinage seems debased, it's partly because criticism has waned along with the high arts over the past 35 years. Criticism is now dully content-driven on and off campus: Aesthetics have been superseded by strident politics and mushy therapeutics. Cultural energy has moved into other areas like technology and the Internet, where fluid interactive communications are antithetical to perfection of a finalized object. As for the hypothesis of "unconscious" genius: Yes, I believe that the initial inspiration and primary ideas of much important work have come from an obscure, subliminal area of the artist's dream life. The drive to express is often rooted in the artist's need to work out and to clarify painful internal conflicts. The material form of paper, paint, sound or gesture externalizes, fixes and exorcises, as in ancient pagan ritual. (My theory of art was partly influenced by the Cambridge School of Anthropology, notably Sir James George Frazer and Jane Harrison.) But unconscious impulse is not enough. There must be a strong foundation in the discipline of the genre. Dante was dogged by nightmares, visions, guilt and a lust for vengeance, yet he also possessed the formalizing framework of medieval scholasticism. Dante surely heard his intricate terza rima stanzas taking shape in his head and may have sometimes felt as if he were taking dictation. There is some form-making faculty buried deep in the creative mind -- but it must be nurtured through practice and hard work. Dear Camille:
I had the misfortune the other day to witness Wendy Shalit on
C-Span discussing her book "A Return to Modesty," and I must say I came
away with the impression she is one of those affluent children born out
of the East Coast colleges with pussy-whipped boyfriends who have no
idea of reality. I was most infuriated by her advocacy of no sex
education in schools, a counter-sexual revolution and her wish that
birth control ideally be only used by people who are married. I was just
wondering what you thought of her.
Todd Isler
Dear Mr. Isler: I've leafed through Wendy Shalit's book and snorted at George F. Will's fulsome overpraise of it in the Feb. 1 Newsweek, where he calls Shalit "a prodigy at cracking the codes of culture" and dubs her "Katie Couric with Edith Wharton's mind." While Shalit's premise is a promising one -- the sexual revolution, as I myself have argued, has removed all kinds of protections from young women that male gallantry once provided -- her book is meandering and impressionistic, as might be expected from a 23-year-old prematurely awarded a big book contract. "A Return to Modesty" is a pastiche of breathless anecdotes, magazine clippings and sonorous quotes from the collegiate reading list. Although Shalit lists my books in her bibliography, she has apparently only skimmed them for lurid excerpts to prove her case that she and her fellow shy maidens are lost lambs in the wolf-filled pornographic woods planted by witches like me. A good example of her haphazard research is her bizarre extended riff on the bodyguards she alleges I hypocritically use, despite my Amazon doctrine, to protect myself from potential rapists on the street. She, on the other hand, poor dear, "cannot afford" such bodyguards, which is why she must depend on men being nice to her. "What the hell is she talking about?" I asked myself when I spotted this passage in the bookstore. I guess they don't teach fact-checking at Williams College, Shalit's pricey alma mater. The Centurions -- my dramatically leather-clad bodyguards, Rennard Snowden (the boyfriend of a former student) and his friend Brian Roach -- accompanied me on precisely two occasions seven years ago: to deal with crowds at a book signing in New York City and at a lecture in a Cambridge, Mass., church where there was no on-site security. I needed protection not against randomly lusting men but against overeager fans and rabid PC ideologues, who then overran the elite schools. The addled Shalit must be thinking of the one-day filming of "Glennda and Camille Do Downtown" in 1993, when I asked Rennard and Brian to come into Manhattan from New Jersey to guarantee that the director and star, Glenn Belverio (in full drag as Glennda Orgasm, 6-foot-1 even without her heels), would not be hassled on the streets as we made our cinéma vérité tour from Washington Square to the Hudson River piers. When I alerted Glenn about Shalit's charge, he tartly responded: "Tell that little bitch from the affluent family (God, I'm sick of those types) that we needed bodyguards because I HATE being bothered by autograph hounds while I'm working (at other times it's OK, like at a film screening where it's more appropriate) and that I was wearing a priceless, one-of-a-kind gold-sequin-and-beads designer creation by Sylvia Heisel and I didn't want it to be damaged by crazed fashion groupies who might have tried to rend it from my nubile body."
Brainy but maleducated baby prepettes seem to be the latest thing in
publishing. Dewy, doe-eyed innocence gets on my nerves. Give me sardonic
Babylonian drag queens any day!
Shed your false modesty. Ask Camille.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Become a Salon member. Click here. |
|
|
Arts & Entertainment | Books | Comics | Life | News | People
Politics | Sex | Tech & Business | Audio
The Free Software Project | The Movie Page
Letters | Columnists | Salon Plus
Copyright © 2000 Salon.com All rights reserved.
