A S K C A M I L L E
| Camille Paglia's online advice for the culturally disgruntled |
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Illustration by Zach Trenholm
The phallic guns of July
O Wise One,
I love the elaborate summer ritual of Hollywood rolling out its
super-macho, pyrotechnical showbiz fare for manic schoolboys free from
their class work. Glossy fan-magazine journalists jerk up their prissy
noses in their condescending "Summer Movies" issues, but I think it's time
to celebrate. I can't wait to see Stallone with his sexy paunch in "CopLand"
and Glenn Close as the tough-as-nails vice president in "Air Force One."
Please grant us your less-than-humble opinion: Is our civilization better
or worse for the spectacle of the Summer Movie?
--Sticky Sneakered in Chicago Dear Sticky Sneakered,
American culture, like the American fashion industry, is organized seasonally. Fall and winter, with their austere colors, are for the Big Think -- weighty public policy tomes and bleak PC films about bourgeois angst. Thanksgiving and Christmas movie releases are heavy on family treacle, which leaves mountains of calcified sugar deposits that must be blasted to pieces by the phallic guns of July.
As proper parents study the prettified "Summer Books" supplements, which tell you exactly which beach books are lightweight enough to float when dropped overboard, kids rush off to the theaters to be creamed, smashed and walloped by the deafening, blinding, lobotomizing juggernauts of thrill-a-minute summer movies.
You're quite right to connect this "super-macho, pyrotechnical showbiz fare" to boys breaking free from the school regime, which has become such a repressive feature of modern life. One of the best depictions of the tension between social institutions and raw, young male energy is the deliciously lewd Van Halen video "Hot for Teacher," where a cowering nerd is bullied, a teacher turns stripper and the rock star as Dionysian Pied Piper leads his children to freedom.
In the old days, when children worked on the family farm or left school in their early teens to take factory jobs, school did not have so central and dominating a role. Today, disturbingly, it's the only thing young people know, and in its current, diluted, touchy-feely form, it's a mess of fragmented information and liberal pieties. Kids are physically imprisoned and then injected with mush -- thanks to the gross hypocrisy of a self-serving public-education establishment.
Summer movies are pure pagan spectacles, for which critics have little vocabulary and less sympathy. The great Pauline Kael (she and the gay Parker Tyler are in my view the best modern film critics) had instinctive rapport with the popular audience, but as a tartly literate urbanite, she wasn't particularly interested in high-decibel, testosterone-drenched demolition derbies.
Summer movies are the revenge of the seething id, after the long school year of the paralyzing, castrating superego. If their special effects sometimes seem ferociously fascist, it's just a reflection of the intensity of those natural youthful energies that have been caged for the past nine months. Summer movies are our Saturnalia, temporarily overturning the hierarchic order and plunging us into a restorative bath of the senses. As always, popular culture rebalances mind and body in this rootless yet overcontrolled society of ours.
Dear Camille,
For years I have been waiting for you to give a serious analysis on
America's zaniest social custom: infant male circumcision. Can we add
your eloquent voice to those calling for an end to this horrible
injustice?
--Cut and Unhappy Dear Cut,
You raise a very interesting question. In the last few years, there has been a lot of publicity about female circumcision in Africa, but male circumcision goes unmentioned. As usual in the age of feminism, men get the short end of the stick! Actually, it's only fair to note that Alice Walker, the African-American feminist writer, should be fully credited for focusing Western attention on this barbaric ancient tribal practice, where girls' clitorises are chopped off with rude, unsanitary implements. The unspoken irony here is that all-accepting multiculturalism is conveniently forgotten when Western concepts of human rights, civil liberties, feminism and the protection of children are invoked to critique Third World customs.
"Zany" it may be, but male circumcision is not an American but a Near Eastern custom of prehistoric origins. In the second chapter of "Sexual Personae," I review various forms of penis mutilation. Castration in bloody fertility cults (surviving in the castration of the priests of the Anatolian goddess Cybele) may have been modified over time to circumcision. Ancient Semites -- Hebrews as well as Arabs and later other Muslims -- made circumcision the identifying mark of their tribe. The sacrifice of the foreskin indicated subordination to God as well as obedience to strict rituals of cleanliness (which included dietary rules: The Hebrews banned pork because the pig was considered unclean).
In the rough, brutish life of nomadic early man, the foreskin had a protective purpose, which eventually was supplied by clothing. The latter in turn, through friction and trapped body heat, may have aggravated sanitation problems with seminal residue. In America today, circumcision is performed on infants by parental demand and not through medical necessity. The evidence remains ambiguous about whether uncircumcised males and their female partners are more or less prone to various diseases, including cancer.
Most heterosexuals don't spend much time thinking about this issue, but of course it waxed larger and larger in the wild free-love era of male homosexuality following Stonewall, when bath houses became museums of voyeurism. "Cut or uncut?" is now as basic a rubric for gays as "Cream and sugar?" is for toffs at tea time. Some gays have expressed resentment at an alleged reduction of sensitivity in the penile tip due to circumcision.
You are quite right to call the compulsory circumcision of infants a "horrible injustice." It is clearly a gross infringement of basic civil liberties and human dignity. The issue needs a full public review, so that parents no longer automatically follow an outdated religious code. The fashion for radical body-piercings that began on the West Coast and has swept the nation in the last decade demonstrates that human beings have a great appetite for painful rites of tribal identification. But free will is crucial. In ethical terms, the circumcision of helpless infants is a form of torture and therefore categorically wrong.
Dear Camille,
I am a 21-year-old Visual Communications student from
Sydney, Australia. Having been deeply frustrated by the pathetic whining
feminism of Naomi Wolf, Susan Faludi and the like, it was electrifying to
discover your books -- finally someone who espoused what I had always
believed in, streetwise feminism, "drag-queen" feminism.
My problem is that I am a working class, bisexual hell-chick
enrolled in the most horribly upper-middle-class university course
imaginable. I love the course content, but my classmates are
predominantly WASPy, rich, bratty, bigoted Daddy's-girls whose families are
paying for their degrees, and they are driving me CRAZY! They are juvenile
and pampered and shun those who are not from their privileged world.
What can I do to stop from stomping on their heads with my beloved
army boots? What the hell is wrong with young women of today?
--Feisty in Oz Dear Feisty,
Thank you very much for your kind words from Down Under. It's distressing to hear that Australians, whom I have always admired for their bold, brash energy and no-nonsense candor, are evolving toward the same old boring bourgeois conformity as the rest of the Anglo-American world. The wonderful Germaine Greer, when she first burst upon the scene in 1971, brought an exuberant Australian spirit to feminism whose loss I still mourn.
The university course of which you complain -- I assume you mean a program or course of study (in the British sense) rather than a single semester-length course (in the American sense) -- seems less compromised by its substance than by its peripheral flora and fauna, whom I encourage you to regard as mere gnats. Silly and spoiled as your classmates may be, I suspect they can't be worse than the cliquish sorority queens of my school days in the 1950s and early 1960s, when individualism of dress, behavior or thought was far more severely penalized. In the decades since the cultural and sexual revolution of 1960s, there has certainly been a rich variety of dissident role models, promulgated worldwide through books and mass media.
You zero in on one of the main problems with establishment feminism -- its inability to understand that it bitterly blames on men many problems that in fact come from middle-class society in general after the industrial revolution. Susan Faludi, a typical Harvard graduate, makes Marxist-socialist noises but has no feeling whatever for class analysis as it relates to herself and her privileged, upper-middle-class milieu. In "Vamps & Tramps" I called her "the Mary Tyler Moore of feminism" -- to illustrate how entrammeled Faludi is, in manner, body language and worldview, by stifling, prefeminist, middle-class decorum. As for Naomi Wolf, despite the many positive steps she has taken to distance herself from her initial, Steinem-style victim feminism, she hasn't gotten around yet to her own middle-class dilemma: Her latest book ascribes her difficulties to her parents' bohemian permissiveness, which seems to have been only a passing phase.
My advice to you is to ignore the rich-bitch airheads and rejoice that you have access to the education that was denied to women for thousands of years. Concentrate on that. Education is an individual responsibility. And even when teachers are bad or biased, the library remains as the great treasure house of knowledge. The many encyclopedias, dictionaries and handbooks of the reference collection -- on every subject from art and religion to politics and science -- are still largely untouched by the last quarter century of political correctness and postmodernist folly. Good luck to you in your studies!
Seek guidance. Ask Camille.
*Alice Walker's tale of the South, "The Color Purple" (1982), won the Pulitzer Prize and was made into a movie (1985) directed by Steven Spielberg. That book is central to the culture wars that exploded in the United States in the late 1980s, since, on a massive scale, it became the token text for liberal literature teachers aiming for quick and easy racial diversification of their class reading lists. Though essentially little more than a sociological soap opera, "The Color Purple" helped to displace complex, major world texts like Dante's "The Divine Comedy" from introductory courses -- a process that I, as an Italian-American, am ethnically entitled to protest. Walker is a longtime personal and professional intimate of Gloria Steinem, who is godmother to Walker's daughter, Rebecca, who in turn was a partner of fellow Yale graduate Naomi Wolf, among others, in founding Third Wave, a small, New York-based organization of younger feminists. In college, Rebecca Walker was known as Rebecca Leventhal (no comment).
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