Susie Bright's Sexwise by Susie Bright

Author:Susie Bright [Bright, Susie]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: Gender, Sexuality, Feminism
Publisher: Bright Stuff
Published: 2008-09-20T04:00:00+00:00

Camille Anonymous

GLORIA STEINEM CAN relax. Tell Naomi Wolf there’s no reason to feel singled out. Feminists and sensitive intellectuals around the world can just let their hair down because I, too, have received my very own hate mail from Camille Paglia. I won’t hide the fact that Camille has dressed me down in two blistering pages of her own handwriting.

“Why you?” you may ask, and so did I. I was even flattered at first, because I couldn’t imagine why she had spent her precious time reducing me to a loathsome little worm. But now I realize I am common. My plight is banal. So many people have received hate mail from Paglia that we are now ready for our own recovery group. Our first step: admit we are powerless over Camille.

I’m sure I’ll be attending C.A. meetings with her ex-car mechanics, her ex-hairdressers, her ex-lovers, and of course her chain of intellectual nemeses.

I’ll get up from my little wooden folding chair and tell the naked truth: I couldn’t stop reading Camille — not only her books, which can only be completed on drugs, but her incredible media blasts, her screamingly funny retorts to everything from Monday night football to kiddie porn.

My friends tried to warn me; they said, “Camille Paglia is not a laugh. She is not a wit. She is a tool of the right wing.”

“Hey, you are dead wrong.” I told them. “Camille is not a tool — she is a weather phenomenon.” And if you think Pat Buchanan calls up Hurricane Camille for strategy sessions, you’ve got another thing coming. This is the woman who championed man/boy love on Philadelphia daytime television.

Monkey wrench, maybe; tool, never.

When I first met Camille, she was an unknown face. She came to a reading of my book Susie Sexpert’s Lesbian Sex World, a couple of months after she released her own Sexual Personae. She popped up during my lecture like a jack-in-the-box on meth, saying she was my “only friend in academia” and laying into the fragile institution of liberal humanities like she was punching the Pillsbury doughboy right in the kazoo.

Her ferociousness took me aback. Of course I’ve had my own battles with a certain Prime of Miss Jean Brodie atmosphere that turns women’s studies undergraduates into soldiers against pornography. But I’ve also made allies in the ivory tower who are sexually adventurous and thoughtful. I wondered how Camille could imagine she was the only one.

I interviewed Camille almost a year later, in a two-hour phone call, was delighted to learn that she was willing to discuss how her theories about sex intersected with her own sex life.

Sometimes she’d hold up a fig leaf of privacy to my more outrageous questions, but I thought it was a great improvement over the time I asked Susan Sontag at a lecture what she thought of lesbian pornography, and she turned her head away like someone had taken a dump on the carpet.

Camille, on the other hand, was candid about her life and childhood, and how they influenced her ideas.

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