On the Freedom to Hate: A Review of Camille Paglia's "Free Women, Free Men"

If interested in seeing Ms Paglia speak about her new book and take questions 

on her work, then click here to watch an event at Brooklyn Public Library 

that was live-streamed on YouTube on 16 March, 2017

Self-confessed Sadean schoolmarm, Camille Paglia, has a new book out and depending on how well disposed one is towards Ms Paglia will determine how one receives this retrospective collection of articles, excerpts, lectures, interviews, and half-a-dozen photos taken in her prime that "visually transmit [her] philosophy of street-smart Amazon feminism". 

Those who can't stand her - and there are many such people - will dismiss it as little more than an exercise in nostalgia; a rather sad attempt by a woman of seventy to relive the past when, briefly, she seemed to have her finger pressed firmly on the pulse of contemporary culture. Those, however, who still find her a bold and brilliant - if sometimes bonkers - writer and critic, will doubtless accept her own assessment of the work and its value:

"I believe that my heterodox ideas and conclusions continue to have manifest resonance for many readers because they are based not on a priori theory and received opinion but on wide-ranging scholarly research and close observation of actual social behaviour in our time."

   

Quite! Only not quite quite ...

For when you start to read the book you soon discover that those heterodox ideas she refers to are often no more than a mishmash of secondhand and often highly suspect concepts and clichés borrowed from her favourite authors and TV shows and if they do continue to resonate it's only in the minds of those susceptible to her brand of messianic pop-philosophy.

Someone once compared Sexual Personae (1990) - the 700 page tome that established her name and for which she remains best known - to Mein Kampf. That's a little unfair, but you know exactly what they mean; the sweeping generalisations and violent assertions; the egomania and wild conflations of the personal and the political; the mix of vulgarity and rancour ... And then there's the bad points - ba-dum tss!

(Don't worry, Paglia loves witty one-liners like this and prides herself on her use of them "inspired by Oscar Wilde and innumerable Jewish comedians, including Joan Rivers".)

One gets the impression that Paglia, like Hitler, feels she's the victim of a conspiracy and that her entire career has been one long struggle against Lügen, Dummheit und Feigheit - or, in her case, poststructuralism, political correctness and the wrong type of feminism. Paglia argues that these forces curtail freedom of thought and expression and deny what she terms "the common sense realities of everyday life", such as gender binarism and the immutable laws of nature. 

Thus, Paglia wishes to make it perfectly clear in her introduction that whilst her "dissident brand of feminism" is grounded in childhood experiences of dressing up as Robin Hood, Napoleon, and Hamlet, this "passionate identification with heroic male figures" never for one moment encouraged her to think that she was actually a boy or that "medical interventions could bring that hidden truth to life".

For whilst perfectly happy to engage in youthful transvestism and to later declare herself a lesbian, Paglia doesn't have much time for transsexuals who, thanks to "ill-informed academic theorists", have been led to believe that sex and gender are "superficial, fictive phenomena" and that they can refuse their biological destiny. Such thinking has not only "sowed confusion among young people", but "seriously damaged feminism", she says - but without bothering to explain how or why, or provide any evidence for these claims.

Somewhat strangely, having just insisted on the fact that "the DNA of every cell of the human body is inflexibly coded as male or female from birth to death", Paglia then boasts of being a gender rebel who exasperated teachers with her "blundering inability to fit into the sedate, deferential girl slot" and stubborn refusal to sing along with Doris Day whom, like Debbie Reynolds, she dislikes for being a chirpy, all-American blonde. 

Her only escapes from the "suffocating conformism of the 1950s" and the "repressive homogeneity of that period", were cinema, TV and "the brash, body-based rhythms of rock 'n' roll, with its dual roots in African-American blues and working-class country music". Oh, and archaeology; for even as a nine-year-old, Camille was fascinated by the "monumentality and megalomania of Egyptian sculpture and architecture".

By her early teens, thanks to Katherine Hepburn and Amelia Earhart, Paglia had discovered a feisty model of feminism that she could make her own. Then, on her sixteenth birthday, she was given a copy of Simone de Beauvoir's classic and was stunned by the "imperious, authoritative tone and ambitious sweep through space and time". And so it transpires that The Second Sex - not Mein Kampf - is the literary source of Paglia's style and her inspiration to produce work "on the grand scale". 

Clearly, over a quarter of a century later, the "vicious attacks on Sexual Personae by academic and establishment feminists" still rankle with Paglia. It would be nice, for her sake, if she could learn from Nietzsche - one of her philosophical heroes - not simply to forgive (for that is merely Christian), but to forget all the "outlandish libels" written against her and her work. But, alas, one suspects she's a woman who never forgets anything, enjoys holding eternal grudges, and passionately desires to have revenge upon her enemies. Maybe this will to vendetta, like her fetishistic fascination with stiletto heels, is due to her Southern Italian ancestry ...

Nevertheless, to witness her continuing feuds and bitching about long dead opponents, such as Andrea Dworkin, reminds me of Johnny Rotten still slandering Malcolm and moaning over his supposed mistreatment from forty years ago. You just wish they would let it go, but, like Lydon, Paglia probably believes anger is the source of her energy - that and the "uncompromising ethnicity" of Barbara Streisand who destroyed the "genteel feminine code of the uber-WASP Doris Day-Debbie Reynolds regime", but never received due credit, according to Paglia, "for her pioneering role in shattering female convention and laying the groundwork for second-wave feminism".

When not in awe of Funny Girl Babs and other Jewish-American women from NYC - all of whom were "politically progressive, mordantly funny, brutally blunt, and sexually free" thanks to the "harrowing experience of their grandparents' generation during the Holocaust" - Paglia was getting herself worked up over the "vivacious young women" of Swinging London, as well as the sexy Bond girls, Mrs Peel, and the lovely cave woman, Loana, from One Million Years B.C. (1966) who, like Honey Ryder, deserves to be "incorporated into the history of women's modern advance".

Not that Raquel Welch is the living person most admired by Paglia; even when wearing a "ragged hide bikini" she can't top Germaine Greer, about whom Paglia has written extensively and, for the most part, positively. It's a shame there's room in this present collection only for one piece on Greer - a review of her 1995 book, Slip-Shod Sybils - as it makes such a pleasant surprise to see Paglia saying nice things about another woman who doesn't happen to be a singer, a film star, or a member of Charlie's Angels.

Of course, we get her notorious New York Times article on Madonna from 1990, in which the Material Girl was declared the "future of feminism". And Paglia's piece written shortly afterwards on date rape, that caused "a huge backlash" at the time and remains one of Paglia's most controversial statements, although she insists that she stands by every word of it, including the claim that women "infantilize themselves when they cede responsibility for sexual encounters [and presumably this includes rape] to men or to after-the-fact grievance committees".

Paglia also happily repeats and reaffirms her recent decision to endorse "the ethical superiority of the pro-life argument in the abortion debate" and I have to admit to finding it disappointing to see a woman who at one time subscribed to chthonic feminism suddenly use cant phrases like the moral highground.    

Ultimately, one gets the impression that, like Judge Judy, Paglia has never changed her mind on anything. Indeed, the point and purpose of this book is to not only show she's right - but that she's always been right. In other words, it's a vainglorious display of the "consistency and continuity" of her libertarian ideas which reach all the way back, as noted, to a precocious childhood, thus pre-dating Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique (1963); a work usually credited with initiating the second-wave of American feminism, rather than Paglia's letter to Newsweek protesting the "exclusion of women from the American space program", also published that year.

I fear that what I've written here makes it sound as if I don't like Ms Paglia very much, or, worse, don't take her work all that seriously. But, actually, I do feel a certain degree of affection for Camille and would hope that the fact that I continue to read her books indicates I find them interesting, important and amusing. This sentence alone, for example, makes me smile and justifies the price of the book:

"The freedom to hate must be as protected as the freedom to love."     


See: Camille Paglia, Free Women, Free Men: Sex, Gender, Feminism, (Pantheon Books, 2017). All the lines quoted above are taken from the the author's introduction, pp. ix-xxvi. 

Portrait of the Führer as a Young Artist (Or How Hitler Helps Us Counter Aesthetic Idealism)

 Adolf Hitler, Self-Portrait (detail), 1910

Hitler had a long and passionate relationship with painting; one that swung from the love and devotion of his early years as a would-be art student in Vienna where he produced hundreds of sketches and water colours, to his notorious rejection as Führer of almost all modern work as degenerate.

In Mein Kampf (1925), he confesses how his youthful ambition was not to become a great statesman, but, rather, a great artist. Indeed, even in the dark days of 1939, just before the outbreak of World War II, Hitler told a somewhat bemused UK Ambassador: 'I'm an artist, not a politician. Once the Polish question is settled, I want to end my days as a painter.'      

Unfortunately, however, most of Hitler's pictures - whilst technically competent and not lacking in a certain charm - displayed only a mediocre and all-too-conventional talent; one that failed to convince the examiners of the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, who twice rejected his application to enrol as a student (first in 1907 and again a year later).     
  
But some - particularly the faceless self-portrait above in which a 21-year-old Adolf sits on a stone bridge and dangles his feet over a colourful stream (possibly contemplating his own failure and growing sense of alienation and anonymity) - really have something intriguing and challenging about them.     

At any rate - and as Peter Beech, a freelance journalist and subeditor on the Culture and Review section of The Guardian (a paper not known for its Nazi sympathies) concedes - Hitler's work, whether we like it or not, isn't that bad. It's certainly superior to most of the outsider art produced by the criminal and/or criminally insane. Beech writes:

"I'm no expert, but I sense that the putdowns of the art world are overstated. Hitler's paintings are amateurish, but they certainly aren't an abomination - that came later. In fact, they're quite sweet. The man who dreamed up the death of the Jews proves to be a surprisingly dab hand at sunlight on stone walls. They show him nearly getting it right, or at least not getting it very wrong. This is much, much worse. Looking at these pictures, it's not enough to say they are something Hitler tossed off during his brief, early masquerade as a human being. The artist quite clearly has a grasp of a very nuanced and very human proposition: what is beautiful."
   
This, as Beech points out, is problematic - not least of all for those beautiful souls who think art has something important to teach us; that it's morally instructive and uplifting:

"What is the link now - if any - between aesthetics and morality? We all accept that our creatives needn't lead impeccable lives, but it's something else to admit that true monsters are capable of taste. ... Hitler's paintings, if we look at them, hard, should help us dismiss any lingering belief that we can learn in a moral sense from something that demonstrates technical accomplishment. They confirm, if we needed confirmation, that there has never been any relation between form and content, between what is pretty and what is right. ... If Hitler can do loveliness, then it has nothing to teach us. Beauty is simply beauty - and that's the truth."

Many have come to accept the banality of evil. But it's only a few as yet who admit also the superficiality of art. 


See: Peter Beech, 'Face it, Hitler's art isn't that bad', The Guardian, 29 April, 2009.

Heterosis

Luma Grothe: the lovely face of fashion 

and Irma Grese: the ugly face of fascism

Nazis are obsessed with blood: both spilling the blood of others deemed racial inferiors and preserving the purity of their own blood, which is thought to possess superior qualities and derive from a divine origin. For the Nazis, therefore, the most dreadful thing in the world is the prospect of interracial sexual relations between people of Nordic stock and those who are of non-Aryan descent. They described this as a form of Rassenschande - an infringement upon the laws of Nature which Nazi policies of racial hygiene were designed to vigorously uphold and enforce.

German girls were warned that should they commit blood treason and choose to fuck with racial inferiors, not only would they be forever lost to their own people, but any unfortunate child that resulted from the illicit union would be a lamentable creature, fit only for extermination. Such irresponsible actions also had a far wider consequence: Hitler identified miscegenation as the sole cause of cultural destruction; "for men do not perish as a result of lost wars, but by the loss of that force of resistance which is contained only in pure blood."

Despite the pseudo-biology used to provide a scientific basis for these beliefs, they are, of course, little more than pernicious fantasies. The fact is many mixed race individuals exhibit not only extraordinary beauty - as in the case of Luma Grothe, pictured above - but what is known as hybrid vigour. In other words, certain traits are enhanced as a result of the dissimilarity in the gametes by whose union the organism was formed.

Now, this is not to say that all such unions produce supermodels. But, by and large, it’s inbreeding that’s genetically problematic rather than outcrossing. For it’s the latter practice that increases diversity and promises heterotic wonders, such as Miss Grothe, born under sunny South American skies to a German mother and a father of Japanese and African descent.

Ultimately, if given the choice between the above and Irma Grese - the blonde, blue-eyed Beast of Belsen - I know whom I’d choose to share a world with ...

Note: The line quoted from Hitler can be found in Vol. 1, Chapter 11, of Mein Kampf, trans. Ralph Manheim, (Hutchinson, 1969), p. 269. 

On Not Taking Any Shit From Magicians

The fact that there is a dark and primitive religious subtext to National Socialism is surely indisputable. Many top-ranking Nazis clearly had esoteric obsessions and controversy only arises when we try to assess the influence of these obsessions upon their political thinking.  

Hitler's position in relation to this question remains somewhat ambiguous however - despite the huge amount of serious research and often crackpot speculation in this area. On the one hand, he did have some knowledge of Ariosophical ideas and did seem, in part, to endorse views first advocated by racial mystics such as Guido von List.    

On the other hand, however, Larry David is right to say that one of Hitler's more admirable traits is that he didn't take any shit from magicians, occultists, or the preposterous and posing völkisch crowd with their neo-pagan pretensions. This is clear from the following passage in Mein Kampf:

"The characteristic thing about these people is that they rave about old German heroism, about dim prehistory ... but in reality are the greatest cowards that can be imagined ... they make a ridiculous impression on the broad masses ... For all this, these people are boundlessly conceited; despite all proofs of their complete incompetence ... Especially with the so-called religious reformers on an old Germanic basis, I always have the feeling that they are sent by those powers which do not want the resurrection of our people." 

 
  - Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, trans. Ralph Manheim (Hutchinson, 1989), pp. 327-28. 

Whilst Hitler may share in the reactionary politics, revolutionary dreams and Wagnerian fantasies of the above, he ultimately wants nothing to do with them. Lanz von Liebenfels may have regarded Hitler as one of his pupils, but the latter did not acknowledge him as one of his masters; in fact, he never even mentioned his name in any recorded speech, conversation, or written document. I think this is evidence of more than mere ingratitude. Hitler may have read Ostara whilst a young man in Vienna and it may have helped shape his Manichean and apocalyptic worldview, but ... well, I refer you again to the Larry David line above.  

We must conclude that Hitler was always more concerned with Realpolitik and exercising industrial and military muscle, than with mystical fantasy and the impotent posturing of magicians. The NSDAP under his leadership and control became a powerful war machine radically different in character to any of the secret societies or occult orders that are sometimes said to have paved the way for it.  

Note: This post is based on a revised and edited section of a paper presented at Treadwell's Books on March 18th, 2008 and which can be found in Volume IV of The Treadwell's Papers (Blind Cupid Press, 2010). The original artwork for the paper appears above.