Free Women, Free Men by Camille Paglia

Author:Camille Paglia
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2017-03-13T16:00:00+00:00

18

AMERICAN GENDER STUDIES TODAY

WOMEN: A CULTURAL REVIEW ASKED FOUR LEADING, VERY DIVERSE, AMERICAN FEMINIST CRITICS FOR THEIR PERSONAL VIEW OF THE SIGNIFICANCE OF PRESENT TRENDS IN GENDER STUDIES.

[From “Symposium” in Women: A Cultural Review

(U.K.), vol. 10, no. 2, 1999]

CAMILLE PAGLIA: At present, the women’s movement is in radically different stages in different regions of the world. Hence many misunderstandings exist, even between British and American feminism, despite their mutual influence and support in the historical campaign for suffrage.

There are, in my analysis, two primary spheres of future action: first, basic civil rights and educational opportunity must be secured for Third World women; second, the education and training of Western women must be better designed to prepare them for leadership positions in business and politics. Women’s studies programs, as structured in the United States, have not proved that feminist ideology helps women to understand life or to function in the real world, where men must be dealt with as friends or foes.

As a classroom teacher of nearly thirty years, I am committed to identifying and developing the factual material and practical strategies that the next generation of women will need to exercise power and, one hopes, to head nations. Military history, not feminist theory, is required: without an understanding of war, few women will ever be entrusted with topmost positions in government. In the United States, for example, the president also serves as Commander-in-Chief and thus must win the confidence of the armed forces.

American feminism has experienced cataclysmic changes in the 1990s. My wing of pro-sex feminism, which was ostracized and silenced through the long period ruled by anti-pornography activists like Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon, has made a stunning resurgence. As a free speech militant, my thinking is grounded in the 1960s sexual revolution. Most of the positions for which I was pilloried when I came on the scene a decade ago, with the publication of my long-delayed first book, are now scarcely controversial at all, so sweeping has been the victory of libertarian feminism, which is in tune with a younger, sassier generation of feminists.

Popular culture, particularly rock ’n’ roll, is no longer the enemy—as it was when I was at war with fellow feminists in the late 1960s for my admiration of the “sexist” Rolling Stones. Fashion and beauty are of interest again, instead of being automatically labeled as oppressive tools of patriarchy. Hormones and biological sex differences are slowly returning to the agenda, after a quarter century of rigid social constructionism. Labyrinthine poststructuralist feminism is increasingly recognized as an ahistorical dead end. The disintegration of the Soviet Union undermined the fashionable Marxism of bourgeois intellectuals like the propagandist Susan Faludi. Capitalism’s central role in the modern emancipation of women is starting to be seen.

American campus feminists, who rode high for twenty years, have been gradually marginalized in this decade: few played much role in the public debates that have raged about sexual harassment in the workplace, a vital issue that swept away the victim-obsessed date-rape hysteria of the late 1980s.

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