R E C E N T L Y Revisiting "The Golden Bough" (03/10/99) Broaddrick charges are 21 years too late (03/03/99) Butler vs. Nussbaum (02/24/99) Three-way sex with death (02/17/99) Gender whores (02/10/99) ___________________ Do you love Camille Paglia? Worship at her altar at barnesandnoble.com ___________________ A L S O About Camille Paglia Ask Camille archives - - - - - - - - - - C O L U M N I S T S Sexpert Opinion By Susie Bright Erotic wasteland (03/05/99) The Reluctant Capitalist By Heather Chaplin Big Apple pickpocket (03/05/99) Left Hook By Joe Conason Honor thy geezers (03/09/99) Unspun By Steve Erickson Why Elia Kazan should not receive an Oscar (03/17/99) Right On! By David Horowitz Walking the walk (03/15/99) Mr. Blue By Garrison Keillor Should I worry about my boyfriend's pornography habit? (03/16/99) Word by Word By Anne Lamott Didgeridoo (03/04/99) Media Circus By Susan Lehman Kiddie-porn trafficker -- or crusading undercover reporter? (03/11/99) On Television By Joyce Millman "Strange World," "First Wave": The Xerox Files (03/08/99) Under the Covers By James Poniewozik Strange fruit (03/16/99) Let's Get This Straight By Scott Rosenberg Amazon vs. the ants (03/10/99) Home Movies By Charles Taylor "That Thing You Do!" (03/15/99) Second Thoughts By Sallie Tisdale Lost in the supermarket (03/11/99) Salon Columnists - - - - - - - - - -

HARVARD'S DATE-RAPE IDIOCY | PAGE 1, 2 - - - - - - - - - - Dear Camille: You must have an opinion on the '60s' most fabulous English voice, Dusty Springfield. I haven't read a single obit that captures whatever it is that I hear whenever her smoky voice is spinning on a disk. Can you do her justice? Rhine Ruder Portland, Ore. Dear Rhine Ruder, Tragically, Dusty Springfield died at 59 from cancer only two weeks before she was to be inducted this week into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. The music industry failed to utilize her talents as it should have in the past two decades, given that the complex, diffident Springfield had trouble sustaining her career on her own. In an earlier Salon column, I did indeed hail her and recommended the 1998 release "The Very Best of Dusty Springfield" (Mercury CD). Songs like "I Just Don't Know What to Do With Myself" (1964) and "What's It Gonna Be" (1967) show Springfield's phenomenal range of moods and tones, which peal out like instrumental flourishes of the oboe, clarinet, alto flute or Baroque trumpet. I love her distinctive combination of dynamic power and supple melismas with grainy edge and piercing melancholy. It's disturbing that ambitious young women today are growing up with the crass, flat, monotonous vocalizations of pseudo-hipsters like Courtney Love, who sings from the head and not the heart. Dusty Springfield was one of the great voices of my college years, and I absorbed her artistry like a sponge: As a writer, I have learned just as much from music as from books. I feel very thankful to have been exposed at a formative moment to the disciplined and yet profound Dusty Springfield, whose high rank is assured in the retrospective canon of modern popular music. Dear Camille: I've searched through your archives for guidance and wisdom. Many, many thanks. However, I've found no reference to "Bears," those big, fat, hairy gay men who meet in their own bars, have their own porn mags and even star in their own porn videos. A decade ago, the lean, smooth, muscular body was the gay ideal of manly perfection. Now it's acceptable (and sometimes more desirable) to be fat and hairy in the body-conscious gay world. What do you think about that? Yours most humbly, Bearmuffin Dear Bearmuffin, You raise a fascinating question. What is the subliminal symbolism of sexual attraction? Any gender theory worth its salt would deal head-on with these issues instead of dallying in the choking thicket of poststructuralism. Depilation has become highly fashionable in the gay male world, as shown by the many ads in the gay press for total body waxing and tweezing. Pinpoint shaving of the genital and anal areas has become a gay beauty profession unto itself. Not since Greek athletes scraped their oiled, sandy bodies with the strigil (see Lysippus' fourth-century B.C. statue, "Apoxyomenos") have men had such a fetish for girl-smooth skin. The current fad has come from competitive bodybuilding, where depilation clarifies the outline of well-cut muscles. In their defiant hirsutism, gay bears are more virile than the generic bubble-butt junior stud, since body hair is stimulated by testosterone. But the bears' fatness resembles not the warlike Viking mass of a Hell's Angel but the capacious bosom of the primal earth mother. The gay bear is simultaneously animalistic and nurturing, a romp in the wild followed by nap time on a comfy cushion. The Greek-style pretty ephebe is a cold visual icon, tauntingly remote and ultimately ungraspable. The bear, however, offers warm, soothing regression to what Freud calls the polymorphous perverse, the whole-body tactility of early childhood. My working theory is that the gay bear as a sexual persona is a mythic father-mother, a parental fusion like the androgynous Egyptian river god Hapi or the Roman Father Tiber, bearded and jovially recumbent amid his swarm of rollicking cherubs. SALON | March 17, 1999 Lost in the PC swamp? Write to Camille on Campus. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Become a Salon member. Click here.