X , A R T , A N P ' CAMILLE PAGLIA SEX, ART, AND AMERICAN CULTURE Camille Paglia is Professor of Humanities at the Uni- versity of the Arts in Philadelphia. She is the author of Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson, Vamps £sf Tramps, and the forthcoming Break, Blow, Burn. SEX, ART, AND AMERICAN CULTURE E S S A YS C A M I L LE P A G L IA Vintage Books A Division of Random House, Inc. New York A Vintage Original, September 1992 FIRST EDITION Copyright © 1992 by Camille Paglia All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Paglia, Camille, 1947- Sex, art, and American culture : essays / Camilie Paglia. — 1st ed. p. cm. "A Vintage original." Includes index. ISBN 0-679-74101-1 (pbk.) 1. United States—Popular culture—History—20th century. I. Title. E169.12.P33 1992 306.4Ό973—dc20 91-50933 CIP Pages 336-337 constitute an extension of this copyright page. Design by Maura Fadden Rosenthal Manufactured in the United States of America C987654 CONTENTS INTRODUCTION VII MADONNA I: ANIMALITY AND ARTIFICE 3 MADONNA II: VENUS OF THE RADIO WAVES 6 ELIZABETH TAYLOR: HOLLYWOOD'S PAGAN QUEEN 14 ROCK AS ART 1 9 HOMOSEXUALITY AT THE FIN DE SIECLE 22 THE JOY OF PRESBYTERIAN SEX 26 THE BEAUTIFUL DECADENCE OF ROBERT MAPPLETHORPE A Response to Rochelle Gurstein 38 THE STRANGE CASE OF CLARENCE THOMAS AND ANITA HILL 46 RAPE AND MODERN SEX WAR 49 THE RAPE DEBATE, CONTINUED 55 CLEOPATRA SOLD DOWN THE RIVER Lucy Hughes-Hallett's Cleopatra: Histories, Dreams and Distortions 75 ALICE IN MUSCLE LAND Samuel Wilson FusselPs Muscle: Confessions of an Unlikely Bodybuilder 79 THE CRITIC AT GRACEFUL EASE Wendy Lesser's His Other Half: Men Looking at Women Through Art 83 THE BIG UDDER Suzanne Gordon's Prisoners of Men's Dreams 86 VI CONTENTS BRANDO FLASHING Richard Schickel's Brando: A Life in Our Times 91 WHAT A DRAG Marjorie Garber's Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety 96 SEXUAL PERSONAE: THE CANCELLED PREFACE 101 MILTON KESSLER: A MEMOIR 1 25 EAST AND WEST: AN EXPERIMENT IN MULTICULTURALISM 1 36 JUNK BONDS AND CORPORATE RAIDERS: ACADEME IN THE HOUR OF THE WOLF 1 7O THE MIT. LECTURE: CRISIS IN THE AMERICAN UNIVERSITIES 249 APPENDICES 299 A Media History 3O1 Cartoon Personae 3O9 Profiles, Interviews, Debates, Exotica 315 INDEX 326 INTRODUCTION The essays in this collection are united by common themes. I want to rethink American cultural history in order to clarify the heritage of my generation of the Sixties, which heroically broke through Fifties conformism but which failed in many ways to harness or sustain its own energies. Popular culture is my passion. It created Sixties imagina- tion. I define pop culture as an eruption of the never-defeated paganism of the West. Its brazen aggression and pornographic sexuality are at odds with current feminism, whose public pro- ponents are in a reactionary phase of hysterical moralism and prudery, like that of the Temperance movement a century ago. We need a new kind of feminism, one that stresses personal responsibility and is open to art and sex in all their dark, uncon- soling mysteries. The feminist of the fin de siecle will be bawdy, streetwise, and on-the-spot confrontational, in the prankish Sixties way. My essays often address the impasse in contemporary pol- itics between "liberal" and "conservative," a polarity that I con- tend lost its meaning after the Sixties. There should be an examination of the way Sixties innovators were openly hostile to the establishment liberals of the time. In today's impoverished dialogue, critiques of liberalism are often naively labeled "con- servative," as if twenty-five hundred years of Western intellectual history presented no other alternatives. My thinking tends to be libertarian. That is, I oppose intrusions of the state into the private realm—as in abortion, sodomy, prostitution, pornogra- phy, drug use, or suicide, all of which I would strongly defend as matters of free choice in a representative democracy. Similarly, VfΠ INTRODUCTION I oppose the meddling of campus grievance committees in the issue of date rape. We should teach general ethics to both men and women, but sexual relationships themselves must not be policed. Sex, like the city streets, would be risk-free only in a totalitarian regime. We need a new point of view that would combine the in- spiring progressive principles and global consciousness of the Sixties with the hard political lessons of the Seventies and Eighties, sobering decades of rational reaction against the arro- gant excesses of my generation, who thought we could change the world overnight. In other words, we need a fusion of idealism and realism. Social justice and compassion are compatible with an intelligent respect for private enterprise and law and order. But first, history and economics must be directly studied, without the posturing and simplistic cliches that masquerade as political thinking these days among liberals in and out of academe. I sometimes call my new system "Italian pagan Catholicism," but it could more accurately be called "pragmatic liberalism," with roots in Enlightenment political philosophy. It is a synthesis of the enduring dual elements in our culture, pagan and Judeo- Christian, Romantic and Classic. One of my central concerns is the reform of education, which has degenerated since my generation made "relevance" a quickie standard of judgment. Education has become a prisoner of con- temporaneity. It is the great past, not the dizzy present, that is the best door to the future. While I often felt stultified and im- prisoned by my elementary and high-school instruction (I was always plotting to get out of the classroom and roam the halls), I now recognize that it was the basis of my present skills as a thinker, researcher, and writer. The rigorous, no-nonsense Amer- ican public schools that provided free education for a hundred years to the immigrants, including my mother, have been allowed to degenerate. Contemporaneity is an even worse plague upon the "best" higher education. The most interesting and daring minds of my generation did not, as a rule, go on to graduate school or succeed in the academic system. Hence our major universities are now stuck with an army of pedestrian, toadying careerists, Fifties types