| |||||
|
Arts & Entertainment Books Comics Health & Body Media Mothers Who Think News  PeoplePolitics2000 Technology - Free Software Project Travel & Food  Columnists - - - - - - - - - - - - Salon People is sponsored by Lexus - - - - - - - - - - - -
- - - - - - - - - - - - Also Today For a full list of today's Salon People stories, go to the
People home page. - - - - - - - - - - - - Search Salon - - - - - - - - - - - - Salon Columnists - - - - - - - - - - - - Recently in Salon People Nothing Personal Nothing Personal People Feature Brilliant Careers Nothing Personal - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - |
Hillary, Naomi, Susan and Rush. Sheesh! | page 1, 2, 3
When asked by foreign journalists about the tortuous scandal preceding last year's impeachment crisis, I often mentioned the striking physical and psychological similarities between Monica Lewinsky and Naomi Wolf, who arrived on the scene tossing her hair and thrusting her bosom at hapless male journalists even as she denounced the cult of beauty as a sexist plot against women. Lewinsky and Wolf typify the bankruptcy of the liberal bourgeoisie in this country. Pampered, over-praised, yet neglected by busy, professional parents, they learned to use bratty flirtation and girly glibness to get attention from daddy. No nation in the world has ever produced shiny, hysterical, depthless women quite like these, who as they age find themselves in pitiable free fall. The feminist chickens sure have come home to roost this season. In separate messages, Salon readers Tony Austin and June Fabiani ask me to review Susan Faludi's book "Stiffed," which was released with thunderous P.R. in late September and rapidly receded into the cultural shadows within a few weeks. Lesson No. 1 for publishers: A million-dollar advance (what the neo-Marxist Faludi reportedly received) does not necessarily translate into a quality book. Faludi is the product of a very bad Harvard education: She has no feeling for culture, high or pop, and her grasp of history seems weak. She operates from a banal set of a priori theses borrowed from the old-hat Frankfurt School and from post-structuralist academic feminism ("writing from the margins," done to death in the late 1970s and '80s). Her view of working-class and lower-middle-class life is uncomprehending and grotesquely condescending. I've remained discreetly silent about "Stiffed" for several reasons. First, the book seemed, on the basis of a page-by-page scan conducted while I was casually perched on a footstool at Border's, just too tedious to actually read. (I'd rather be watching a Hedy Lamarr movie.) The second is that Faludi's failure to give due credit to a far better book on the same subject, Warren Farrell's "The Myth of Male Power" (which I favorably reviewed for the Washington Post in 1993), is outrageous and dishonest. Third, I suspected that "Stiffed" would flop without any help from me, so I stepped back up on the curb, as it were, and let the rickety, rattletrap Faludi hippie bus hurtle down the hill into the shrubbery and bougainvillea on its own. Of course, I'm gratified that mainstream feminism is finally catching up to me: I forced men back onto the gender agenda in my first book 10 years ago, and many were the piggy squeals from aggrieved feminist special interests on campus and off. But that Newsweek -- whose alienated "back of the book" female staffers were once credited by Faludi as the core cabal who pushed her first book, "Backlash," toward the bestseller list -- had the gall to devote a cover story (Sept. 13) to the commercial work of a newly hired contributing editor is a sign of the utter debasement of journalistic standards. Is it any wonder that the major media have lost power and credibility to online magazines and to fiercely independent Web news sites? (Stand tall, Matt Drudge!) Camille Paglia Camille Paglia's column appears in Salon People every third Wednesday.
There's no need for a review of "Stiffed" from me since there are such fine ones already out there: Walter Kirn's witty trouncing in the Oct. 4 New York magazine; Christina Hoff Sommers' even-handed dissection in the Oct. 4 Weekly Standard; and last but not least, James Wolcott's tour de force in the Nov. 15 New Republic, a remarkable performance by the leading American culture critic at the height of his formidable powers. Another point in my Faludi communiqué for Salon readers: "Backlash," a book filled with jumbled facts, rash overstatements and distorted reasoning, has become the bible of world feminism, notably in Scandinavia, where its dreary socialist undertone rings a bell. Faludi belongs to a smug clan of press divas like her former Wall Street Journal colleagues, Jane Mayer and Jill Abramson (now of the New Yorker and New York Times respectively and the authors of "Strange Justice," a propagandistic 1994 account of the Anita Hill controversy), whose partisan work is wildly overpraised by their pals in the liberal media elite. The fallout continues from the controversy over the "Sensation" show at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, which I discussed in an earlier column. On Nov. 1, Judge Nina Gershon of the U.S. District Court in Brooklyn ruled that Mayor Giuliani was unjustified on constitutional grounds in withholding city funding from the museum and in threatening to evict it because of the distasteful or sacrilegious nature of some works in the exhibit. I support the court's decision: No matter how noxious the apparent offense, civil authorities may verbally condemn but not harass or materially interfere with the activities of arts institutions, whether the latter rely on public funding or not. But fundamentally, Giuliani was right to make a stink, and he has risen in the polls because of it. My contempt for Brooklyn Museum director Arnold Lehman intensified with a surprise report about the court documents in the Oct. 31 issue of the normally p.c. New York Times. They proved not only that Lehman had lied to the press but that he had been involved in coercive manipulation during financial planning. The Times editorialized on Nov. 2 that the show's funding made it look like "an ethically dubious enterprise." That Lehman had already been accused of anti-Catholic bias during his tenure as director of the publicly funded Baltimore Museum of Art was revealed by Rod Dreher in the Oct. 5 New York Post: In 1996, Catholics protested Lehman's co-sponsorship of a film series containing a British TV program attacking Mother Teresa of Calcutta as a "ghoul" and a collaborator with totalitarian regimes.
| ||||
 |
 |
 |
 |
||
Next page |