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
Fly girl as cry girl
The latest feminist poster girl is a disgrace to feminism.
Dear Camille,
Do you have an opinion about why the adulterous events
at the Minot Air Force base involving 1st Lt. Kelly Flinn, the country's first female B-52 pilot, and a local bounder have exploded into public
consciousness? Have the armed forces completely lost
sight of the relationship of the services to Real
Life? Is adultery in the armed
forces the real issue here, or is it just another
way to beat up on women?
Dear Scarlet, Air Force 1st Lt. Kelly Flinn is a strong contender for the 1997 Susan Smith Wring-a-Tear Award for Masterful Media Massage. After its canonization of Anita Hill in 1991, the feminist establishment (which extends from Ms. magazine and NOW to high-placed allies in the Democratic Party and the boondoggling federal bureaucracy) has very successfully taught any gal in trouble how to blubber and babble and blame all her mistakes on nasty men. When I first heard of Flinn's case, I indignantly assumed the issue was authoritarian intrusion by Air Force officials into what should be a private sexual matter. However, until I could learn the whole story, I wisely kept my mouth shut -- unlike a battalion of buttinskis from Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott to a harrumphing pack of bullying liberal congresswomen who tried to make sexist hay out of Flinn's unraveling ball of greenhorn yarn. The facts, as of this writing, appear to be that Flinn was involved in not one but two sexual indiscretions, first with an enlisted man and then with the husband of a fellow airwoman. Second, Flinn was not entirely truthful in saying she had no idea the latter man was married: If she didn't know it at first coitus, she surely did shortly thereafter but pursued the affair anyhow. Third, Flinn lied outright to her superiors in denying the relationship was sexual. Fourth, she disobeyed a direct order by choosing to continue the relationship after she was firmly told to terminate it. Fifth, Flinn has defended her lie by saying she had already decided to leave the Air Force -- to abandon her high-profile career for marriage with a person whom, in last week's resignation letter, she now labels "a detestable man." Why would anyone (much less ostensible feminists) make a heroine of such a woman? -- who had so little respect for her pioneering role as the first female B-52 pilot and who is also such a sniveling weenie that she can glibly trash a former lover and thus trivialize the whole idea of passion as something to fight for. When we finally had a chance to see Flinn the Penitent in context, rather than primly playing TV interviewers like trout, she was not impressive. On her way to her preliminary hearing last week, she scurried and scuttled up the walkway past the cameras while unprofessionally clutching a huge, rumpled paper bag to her chest. Her salute was weak and graceless, and with her ducking, dodging posture and darting eyes, she looked as devious as Peter Lorre in a Weimar-era murder mystery. Worse, we then got a gander at the male protagonist in Flinn's romantic brouhaha -- who proved to be a smirking little eunuch who could be her fraternal twin. The Air Force has apparently been convulsed by some weird exercise in gender alchemy, where Miss Blonde Butch (did you catch her old haircut?) waltzed off with Cinderfella and left his vengeful wife fuming. The military sex code needs to be thoroughly reviewed so that all service branches can modernize their rules without compromising good order and discipline. Gays should be paying close attention to the recent scandals, which may delay implementation of what seems to me ethically imperative: the right of gays to serve openly in the military without prejudice. If heterosexual relations prove so difficult to control, it's unlikely the military will be leaping into the even murkier gay morass any time soon. The widely repeated allegation that Kelly Flinn was more harshly treated than male adulterers has yet to be proved. It may well be that many men are content with the briskly efficient, wham-bam-thank-you-ma'am style of on-the-job hanky-panky, while the Flinn affair, with two keenly competitive young women involved, escalated into full-scale soap opera and tacky psychodrama that genuinely disrupted on-base business. The commander's order to end the relationship may thus be seen as less a moral than an administrative matter in an institution whose disciplined operations are critical to the nation's defense. As someone whose childhood idol was Amelia Earhart, I am furious at Flinn for blowing her golden opportunity for a distinguished Air Force career. Earhart, along with the scores of other courageous women pilots of early aviation, represented the feminist spirit at its best. The Woman Who Flies has made male technology her own, but the Woman Who Bombs automatically becomes man's equal on the embattled stage of world history. The military made Kelly Flinn custodian of nuclear warheads, but she proved herself unworthy of that high responsibility. On April 18, I was a guest of the Distinguished Lecture series at the United States Military Academy at West Point, where I was deeply impressed with the smart, sharp male and female cadets I met. My speech, "Militant Woman and Military Men" (filmed and broadcast by C-SPAN), addressed the public relations crisis caused by the ongoing controversies over sexual relations in the military. I deplored the widespread anti-military bias of the major media, as well as of mainstream and campus feminists. Great military men have always inspired me and are the model for my brand of take-charge, street-smart feminism, which I call "Amazonism."
Unfortunately, the current troubles of the military have opened the door to
the inevitable academic parasites, misguided do-gooders like a prominent
female Pentagon advisor (from the most noxious cliques of politically correct Duke
University) who wants to eradicate the "masculinist" values of the military
in order to achieve gender equity. Well, guess what: An army of Gloria
Steinems will never defeat an Adolf Hitler. Those who think a conventionally
strong military is now unnecessary are compromising the security of the United
States in this very dangerous and unpredictable world.
Dear Camille,
What do you make of the way the New York legal system came down on the Danish woman for sitting in a cafe with her husband while the baby sat outside in her carriage (within view of the parents)? Apparently parents do this all the time in Denmark. But now the poor woman is about to be deported and the courts are all over her American husband. Was this a flagrant example of child neglect, or a tragic cultural misunderstanding?
Dear Shaking National news reports were unclear about the sequence of events leading to the pillorying of the hapless Danish mother. Did concerned passersby make a fruitless attempt to locate the baby's parents, or were the police immediately, punitively called by holier-than-thou liberal vigilantes patrolling the streets on hiatus from the Spanish Inquisition? The worst part of this story is that the baby was seized by the authorities and taken into "protective" custody for four days. That enforced separation from the mother was far more shocking and brutalizing than the alleged original offense. It's the Vietnam War strategy of bombing the village in order to save it -- but of course, Janet Reno brought that back at Waco, with horrific results there and in Oklahoma City. As Oscar Wilde said, "Philanthropic people lose all sense of humanity. It is their distinguishing characteristic." On Bill Maher's "Politically Incorrect" show several weeks ago, actress Laura Dern (fresh from her appearance as the charming but to me somewhat antiseptic Streep Lite heartthrob on "Ellen's" coming-out episode) boasted that she had recently made a "citizen's arrest" and called the police on a woman who had "backhanded" her 2-year-old child in a Los Angeles grocery store. Telling this grotesque story, the childless Dern, whose credentials for ad hoc family therapy are questionable, positively beamed with beatific, yuppified self-satisfaction.
Verbally confronting and publicly shaming any malefactor seems fine to me,
but this escalating trend for calling in the authorities is further evidence
that liberalism has lost its moral compass and is degenerating into Big
Brother fascism. As a libertarian, I don't want a nation of priggish
tattletales who think police power, hand-in-glove with sanctimonious
social-welfare agencies, is the answer to every private sexual or family
problem.
Dear Camille,
What do you make of the disgust so many men felt about the recent birth
of a child to a 63-year-old woman? Why do men fear a sexually
powerful older woman?
Dear Thrilled in Austin, Your use of the word "disgust" is interesting. Perhaps Texas men, with their lingering frontier ethos, would logically have a more extreme reaction to a 63-year-old woman giving birth than would the nerdy, henpecked media men of the urban Northeast, who drink saltpeter-laced feminist pabulum for breakfast. I myself feel, in regard to cloning, contraception, abortion and postmenopausal childbirth, that human beings have the right to use technology to shatter every natural limitation. Medical ethicists do need to be concerned, however, about potential infringements of the individual autonomy of the weaker or nonconsensual parties in all these procedures. Science's rapid advances have left psychology way behind. Our emotional responses remain primal and unevolved, which is why we need dreams and art to sort things out. Mythologically, the aging woman is a witch and vampire, seizing immortality by feeding off the energy of the young. William Blake's hallucinatory poem "The Mental Traveller" is one of the most vivid depictions of this sadomasochistic pattern.
Men who feel "disgust" at a 63-year-old first-time mother may be reacting
normally: The soft, sensuous, glowing, fragrant nubility of teenage girls
is, after all, a direct function of their newborn fertility. Men rightly
fear the cold claw of a willful, middle-aged woman (their own mother, in the
unconscious) who will not let her son go. In "Sexual Personae," I reproduced
Michelangelo's amazing Sistine Chapel fresco of the Cumaean Sibyl: She is a
formidable, wrinkled crone with the full, heavy breasts of a wet nurse and the
bulging biceps of a male weightlifter. There is legitimate terror in the
enduring idea of a female stranglehold on nature's cycle of birth and death.
The Oracle is in. Ask Camille for enlightenment.
Is Anne Heche another vampirish Yoko Ono? (05/13/97) Why I Go For Women With Big Beaks (04/29/97) The Purity of Allen Ginsberg's Boy-Love (04/15/97) The Heaven's Gate castrati community (04/02/97) More cleavage and glitz! Less Crystal! (03/25/97) Bookmark: http://www.salonmagazine.com/columnists/paglia.html |
