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Dear Camille: Would it not be useful for all levels of government to prohibit describing people, individually and in groups, by racial classifications? -- Color-blind Dear Color-blind: I completely agree with you. Racial classification was born in the era of slavery, whose fascist assumptions are simply perpetuated in the government's clumsy attempts to repair injustices. As a libertarian, I am suspicious of all government intrusion; however, it is indisputable that without federal action African-Americans would still be waiting for their civil rights in the South, where terror and intimidation were once a fact of life. For all its noble aims, liberalism was asleep at the wheel in the 1960s, when it failed to see that progressive goals cannot be won by authoritarian means. Federal legislation and surveillance became liberals' quick-fix ticket to utopia now. Busing and affirmative action -- neither one carefully considered -- were over-optimistically hailed as the solution to racism by white upper-middle-class technocrats, few of whom had to suffer the consequences of their plans. Court-ordered busing destroyed neighborhood schools and created a firestorm of racial hostility in white working-class neighborhoods that will take several generations to subside. The money and time wasted on shipping students around like color-coded parcels would have been far better spent on massively upgrading the schools themselves. Affirmative action (which has primarily benefited white middle-class women instead of the disadvantaged blacks for whom it was intended) is directly responsible for the present, nightmarishly hyper-acute race-consciousness in the United States. My blood boils every time I see a government form demanding to know my racial identity. It's appalling that biracial citizens are forced to artificially choose one lineage over another. Or that Chicanos, Puerto Ricans and Portuguese-speaking Brazilians -- with their hugely different cultures -- are all lumped together as "Hispanics." Or that Italian immigrants and Jewish refugees are consigned to the same homogenized "White" category as the privileged WASP elite who came over on the Mayflower or fanned out from Virginia to create the slave-holding plantation system in the first place. Racial classification of any kind is poisoned at its source. Genuine affirmative action begins at the bottom, not at the top. Strong, well-funded public education (without the cop-out of vouchers) is the only way to guarantee equal opportunity and job training to citizens of every race and ethnicity. But right now, inner-city schools are in a scandalous state of disorder and neglect. This is a national emergency. Not one more penny of taxpayers' dollars should be spent on foreign aid or peacekeeping junkets by our troops until American public education is restored to its former high standard. Dear Camille, As a second-generation feminist, I have had several lively debates with my mother on pornography and sex workers. My mother feels that pornography belittles women, capitalizing on sexuality in a degrading way. I feel quite differently, as I have watched several of my friends supplement their college scholarships with excellent money made from stripping. But she's my mother, so she wouldn't let the family pick up a burger at Hooters. What's your opinion on this subject? -- Hooters-bound Dear Hooters-bound, I'm sure your mother is a well-meaning woman, but she belongs to the most repressive strain in Western culture. Her allies are Judeo-Christian censors and Islamic fundamentalists. In the 1990s, the feminist establishment, whose rigid ideology she cites, has finally lost prestige. After 25 years of culture war, the pro-sex, pro-porn wing of feminism to which I belong has rebounded from the wilderness and taken center stage. Those who feel pornography "belittles" women or "degrades" sexuality are word-obsessed moralists who lack complete responsiveness to the visual and sensory realms. The pagan tradition -- in Egypt, Greece, Rome, India, tribal Africa or the Pacific islands -- understands explicit depiction of the sexual body as sacred, a glorification of natural energy and power. I celebrate erotic dancing as a pagan art form that demonstrates woman's dominance, not her servitude. Men must pay to gaze at the goddess or to win her momentary attention: Their money is not their instrument of exploitation but their humiliating badge of weakness. Mainstream feminism has been dead wrong about nearly every aspect of pornography, stripping and prostitution. The fullest account of my views of these matters is in "No Law in the Arena" in "Vamps & Tramps." A stunt I particularly cherish is when I had Penthouse send a copy of its October 1994 issue -- featuring my exuberant visit to a fancy New York City strip club -- to the heads of the women's studies programs at Amherst, Brown, Berkeley, Harvard, Princeton, Smith, Wellesley and Yale. Attached was a taunting letter from me. "Hey, ladies!" it railed at the professors in their "stagnant cultural backwater": "Come on down to the strip clubs, where Babylonian beauty lives and thrives!" We are still waiting for Hollywood to intelligently document the gigantic revival of erotic dancing in this decade. "Showgirls" and "Striptease" were stupid, boring films that had nothing new to say about either sex or art. Where is the libidinous young Fellini among our new crop of independent directors? And why can't that he be a she? Dear Camille, I find you to be one of the most interesting women of the '90s. I love the way you get under the skin of the "powers that be" at NOW headquarters. Which leads me to my burning question of the day: I am an Army veteran who has gone back to school to get my degree (in nursing). I feel I've waited long enough and have worked hard to get into nursing school, and yet I am still consumed with guilt over not being able to do all the "mommy things" I am supposed to be doing. (My husband is still in the Army and overseas at the present time, so I have the added burden of doing "daddy things" too.) I have two children , ages 13 (boy) and 5 (girl). Any advice or words of wisdom you want to share? Thanks! -- Needing a sage in Alabama Dear Needing, Thanks for your remarks about my tense relations with the haughty high-muckety-mucks of NOW. Yes, it's so rewarding not only to get under their skin but to tweak their humorless blue noses. NOW was a very important organization when Betty Friedan founded it in 1966, but it has become a narrow, dishonest, self-serving, relentlessly male-bashing operation that is merely a covert annex to my own Democratic Party. The enormous problem you face trying to balance your responsibilities to your children and to yourself is a very modern one. In every century before ours, it was automatically assumed that motherhood was a married woman's destiny and highest fulfillment. Working outside the home was a financial necessity, never a path to self-development. The industrial revolution that opened professional careers to women also broke down the large extended families that used to provide for child care. In our transient culture of upward mobility and rapid job turnover, parents can also no longer rely on trusted neighbors to look after their kids. Hence the dreadful isolation and daily pressures and conflicts that women like you are experiencing. Even state-sponsored child-care centers, which some feminists endorse, would not resolve the guilt you feel because of reduced contact with your children. But even with a self-sacrificing, stay-at-home mom, the nuclear family cannot satisfy all of our children's spiritual and intellectual needs. Perhaps the best you can do is to encourage independence and resourcefulness in your children by providing every opportunity for self-expression -- artistic, literary or athletic. Most American children (outside the dangerous inner city) still enjoy tremendous advantages over millions of others in the world today who are struggling to survive amid famine, disease and war. March 18, 1997 Troubled? E-mail Camille at AskCamille@salonmagazine.com and tell her where it hurts. A R C H I V E S How do you handle a hungry man? (03/04/97) Why does female homosexuality turn me on? (02/18/97) Politically incorrect desires (02/04/97) Should I support Paula Jones? (01/27/97) Of transvestite pharoahs and afrocentrism (01/13/97) Bookmark: http://www.salonmagazine.com/columnists/paglia.html