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ОглавлениеINTRODUCTION
History moves in cycles. The plague of political correctness and assaults on free speech that erupted in the 1980s and were beaten back in the 1990s have returned with a vengeance. In the United States, the universities as well as the mainstream media are currently patrolled by well-meaning but ruthless thought police, as dogmatic in their views as agents of the Spanish Inquisition. We are plunged once again into an ethical chaos where intolerance masquerades as tolerance and where individual liberty is crushed by the tyranny of the group.
The premier principles of this book are free thought and free speech—open, mobile, and unconstrained by either liberal or conservative ideology. The liberal versus conservative dichotomy, dating from the split between left and right following the French Revolution, is hopelessly outmoded for our far more complex era of expansive technology and global politics. A bitter polarization of liberal and conservative has become so extreme and strident in both the Americas and Europe that it sometimes resembles mental illness, severed from the common sense realities of everyday life.
Our understanding of sexuality, a paradigmatic theme and indeed obsession of modern culture, has been clouded by its current politicization. Sex and gender have been redefined by ill-informed academic theorists as superficial, fictive phenomena produced by oppressive social forces, disconnected from biology. This hallucination has sowed confusion among young people and seriously damaged feminism. A gender theory without reference to biology is absurd on its face. But as a proponent of dynamic free will, I certainly do not subscribe to a wholesale biological determinism. As I wrote on the very first page of Sexual Personae, “Sexuality and eroticism are the intricate intersection of nature and culture.” Furthermore, my key idea is that art itself is a line drawn against nature.
My dissident brand of feminism is grounded in my own childhood experience as a fractious rebel against the suffocating conformism of the 1950s, when Americans, exhausted by two decades of economic instability and war, reverted to a Victorian cult of domesticity that limited young girls’ aspirations and confined them (in my jaundiced view) to a simpering, saccharine femininity. I have written elsewhere about my eccentric symbols of gender protest via transvestite Halloween costumes: Robin Hood at age five; the toreador from Carmen at six; a Roman soldier at seven; Napoleon at eight; Hamlet at nine. I took inspiration from wherever I could find it—from Classics Illustrated comic books and Courvoisier ads for Napoleon Cognac to the local church’s Stations of the Cross and my parents’ worn copy of Stories from the Great Metropolitan Operas.
But never in my passionate identification with heroic male figures was I encouraged by concerned but misguided adults to believe that I actually was a boy and that medical interventions could bring that hidden truth to life. On the contrary, by being forced to learn coping strategies for surviving in society, I was freed to develop my talents in other ways that have proved invaluable over time. When recently asked how I “identify” or describe myself, I replied, “Non-gendered entity.” However, except in very rare conditions of true hermaphroditism (a congenital disorder), the DNA of every cell of the human body is inflexibly coded as male or female from birth to death. While respect and legal protection are owed to anyone who for whatever reason seeks to shift positions along the intricate spectrum of sexual personae (the Latin word for theater masks), changing sex is scientifically impossible.
Social pressures on girls in the late 1950s and early 1960s were heavy and relentless. The cultural dictators were chirpy, all-American blondes like Doris Day and Debbie Reynolds, with their compulsive cheerfulness. At Girl Scout camp, I melted into the woods to escape the happy mass singing of Doris’s mega-hit, “Que Sera, Sera,” around the campfire. At school, teachers appreciated my academic efforts but were routinely exasperated by my blundering inability to fit into the sedate, deferential girl slot. After my role in some pushing and shoving in line, my fifth-grade teacher made me stay after school to look up the word “aggressive” in the dictionary—as if it were a heinous mortal sin for girls. My eighth-grade teacher irately pulled me out of class to demand that I sit at my desk without moving or shaking any part of my body—a then baffling shaming incident that has made me enduringly sympathetic to the plight of physically active boys imprisoned in a public school system dominated by female teachers.
My only escapes from the repressive homogeneity of that period were through pop culture (wide-screen Hollywood epics and rock ’n’ roll) and archaeology: I adored the monumentality and megalomania of Egyptian sculpture and architecture. When my parents could finally afford their first TV set (I was twelve), late-night movies became my gateway to the past. I discovered Katharine Hepburn, who electrified me. Her early films of the 1930s and ’40s, where she often played hard-charging career women or lordly socialites, were a revelation. I had never seen a woman so sharply definitive and assertive, so fearlessly abrasive. What I did not realize at the time, given the scarcity of information about pop culture (still dismissed as evanescent trash), was that I was channeling through Hepburn the epochal defiant spirit of first-wave feminism: her mother and aunt had been nationally prominent activists for suffrage and birth control, and Hepburn herself had campaigned as a small child at suffrage events. I drew up a detailed chart of Hepburn films and studiously checked off each time I was lucky enough to see one, with broadcast date.
In high school, I went wild over Amelia Earhart, about whose mysterious 1937 disappearance over the Pacific I read in a 1961 article in The Syracuse Herald-Journal. For three years, to the puzzlement of my schoolmates, I feverishly pursued a research project about Earhart—systematically plowing through old newspapers and magazines in the sooty basement of the downtown Syracuse library, writing hundreds of letters of inquiry, and visiting spots associated with Earhart on side detours from family car trips. I was given access to Earhart’s archives at Purdue University and had a private appointment at the National Air Museum in Washington, D.C., where a curator opened a vault to show me Earhart’s medals and awards. I visited the house where Earhart was born in Atchison, Kansas, and the Opa Locka airfield in Florida where she left American soil on her last flight. I even briefly met her younger sister Muriel in a restaurant in Medford, Massachusetts.
Through Earhart, about whom I wrote a 77-page tenth-grade history project that I hoped to turn into a book, I learned first-hand about what would become my favorite period of feminism, the two decades just after American women won the right to vote in 1920. There were so many bold personalities and high achievers like Katharine Hepburn in every field—Dorothy Parker, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Dorothy Thompson, Lillian Hellman, Clare Boothe Luce, Pearl S. Buck, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Mary McCarthy, Babe Didrikson, Margaret Bourke-White. What was distinctive in those emancipated women—and here loom my later problems with second-wave feminism—was that they never indulged in reflex male-bashing: they accepted and admired the enormity of what men had accomplished and were simply demanding a fair chance to prove that women could match or surpass it. Their inspirational record of unapologetic ambition and plucky, resourceful self-reliance was the foundation for my later philosophy of equal opportunity feminism.
My Earhart project gradually receded after the thunderclap of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1949), the English translation of which was given to me for my sixteenth birthday in 1963 by a Belgian woman colleague of my father. I was stunned by de Beauvoir’s imperious, authoritative tone and ambitious sweep through space and time. I began to dream of a book on the grand scale, a magnum opus that would incorporate all of my intense fixations, from archaeology to pop culture. That book, Sexual Personae, would take shape in the early 1970s as a study of androgyny for my doctoral dissertation at the Yale Graduate School. Revised and expanded, it was finally published in 1990 as a 700-page illustrated volume by Yale University Press, after rejections of the manuscript by seven publishers and five agents.
The vicious attacks on Sexual Personae by academic and establishment feminists (who in most cases had plainly not bothered to read it) will stand, I submit, as an indictment of the sorry process by which important political movements can undermine themselves through the blind insularity of their ruling coteries. Blow-by-blow chronicles of my public clashes with leading feminists and their acolytes, including documentation of their outlandish libels against me and my work, can be found in my two essay collections, Sex, Art, and American Culture (1992) and Vamps & Tramps (1994). Gloria Steinem in particular surely stained her legacy by her baseless remarks.
Compiled in this new collection is a selection of my most representative articles, excerpts, lectures, and interviews on sex, gender, and feminism since the release of Sexual Personae over a quarter century ago. 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 behavior in our time. What is demonstrated here is the consistency and continuity of my libertarian feminist positions, which predate the publication of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique in 1963 and her co-founding of the National Organization for Women in 1966, universally considered the birth of second-wave feminism. In its July 8, 1963 issue, Newsweek magazine published as its lead letter to the editor my protest about the exclusion of women from the American space program:
Valentina Tereshkova has won the distinction of becoming the first woman to be launched into space 35 years to the day after Amelia Earhart was the first woman to fly across the Atlantic. Miss Earhart’s lifelong fight for equal opportunity for American women apparently still remains to be won.
CAMILLE A. PAGLIA
Syracuse, N.Y.
The letter was headlined “Cosmonautka and Aviatrix” and accompanied by a dramatic photo of Earhart in her leather flying jacket, captioned, “After Earhart, orbit.” I was 16, two years into my Earhart project and newly energized by Simone de Beauvoir, who was the ultimate and too rarely acknowledged source of Friedan’s principal ideas.
Cultural histories of the mid-twentieth century have vastly overstated the role of the second-wave women’s movement in the transformation and liberation of modern women. That tremendous change had already been in motion for other reasons from the early 1960s on. In the United States, my baby-boom generation was awakened and propelled forward by a great surge of optimism and idealism with the election in 1960 of the youthful, charismatic John F. Kennedy (for whom I had campaigned in Syracuse). Popular culture was an even more powerful force: the brash, body-based rhythms of rock ’n’ roll, with its dual roots in African-American blues and working-class country music, were our percussive anthem, breaking into general cultural consciousness when Bill Haley’s “Rock Around the Clock” was blasted at high volume over the credits of The Blackboard Jungle in movie theaters in 1955.
It was young women who were most jolted by Beatlemania. I have a reel-to-reel audio tape of a girls’ party at my house on the night the Beatles appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show in February 1964. The noise level of our ecstatic response overwhelmed the microphone. That was the moment, nationwide, when American girls slew forever the decorous conventions of the 1950s. At their Shea Stadium concert the following year, the Beatles could not hear each other onstage and security guards covered their ears, so massive was the nonstop shrieking of girls exhilarated by their collective new freedom.
Barbra Streisand has never received due credit for her pioneering role in shattering female convention and laying the groundwork for second-wave feminism. Emerging from bohemian nightclubs where her campy patter and vintage costumes were shaped by gay male sensibility, Streisand embodied a scrappy non-conformism and confrontational toughness that strikingly contrasted with the emotional depth and elegant beauty of her singing. Her uncompromising ethnicity was career-risking: she refused to bob her prominent Jewish nose or moderate her harsh Brooklyn accent. A frequent guest on TV shows of the early 1960s, she was catapulted to fame by the Broadway musical, Funny Girl, which landed her on the covers of Time and Life in 1964.
As a huge Streisand devotee (I saw her onstage shortly before Funny Girl closed), I hailed her as a radical new woman who was smashing the genteel feminine code of the uber-WASP Doris Day–Debbie Reynolds regime. Entering Harpur College (the State University of New York at Binghamton) in the fall of 1964, I was amazed by the verve and audacity of the huge cadre of Jewish-American women students from metropolitan New York. They were politically progressive, mordantly funny, brutally blunt, and sexually free. Their unsparing realism often came from the harrowing experience of their grandparents’ generation during the Holocaust. Streisand’s rise from obscurity to stardom was a bellwether for a revolution stirring among American women well before the founding of NOW.
Young British women were also riding the zeitgeist in Swinging Sixties London, as England recovered from its post-war economic slump. Throughout my college years, I viewed the scintillating London of music, movies, and fashion as my distant spiritual home. In Binghamton, I somehow dug up gender-bending knockoffs of Carnaby Street–Portobello Road style gear—flowing Tom Jones or paisley shirts; men’s chevron ties; flared, pin-striped hip-huggers; a sailor’s maroon pea coat with gold military buttons; zipped Beatles boots with Cuban heels. Harpur’s laid-back hippies, who affected a tattered, thrift-shop look, didn’t like it one bit but prudently kept their distance. When I got to graduate school in 1968, I foolishly kept it all going—even adding a purple suede vest and a psychedelic orange-and-green stained-glass pendant on a leather thong from Greenwich Village. Needless to say, the tweedy Yale professors weren’t thrilled.
The vivacious young women of London were photographed by John D. Green for a 1967 large-format book, Birds of Britain. In his introduction, Anthony Haden-Guest called “the new British girl” a “shock genetic mutation” produced by “the London Scene” and crossing social classes, from salesgirl to debutante. She was the mercurial, coltish Julie Christie in Darling (1965) and the volatile, enigmatic Vanessa Redgrave in Blow-Up (1966). Among the 55 sparklingly kinetic British girls in Green’s book: Susannah York, Charlotte Rampling, Hayley Mills, Mary Quant, Jane Asher, Sarah Miles, Pattie Boyd, Cilla Black, Lulu, Dusty Springfield, and Marianne Faithfull.
The British youthquake, with its flamboyant “unisex” trend in clothing and hair styles for both men and women, proves that second-wave feminism was only one strand in the ongoing gender transformations of the 1960s. The formidable Diana Rigg was already in her black leather cat suit and throwing karate chops as Emma Peel in the hit British TV series, The Avengers, in 1966. The first and most influential militant female persona of the period was probably Ursula Andress as the fierce conch-hunter Honey Ryder in the first James Bond film, Dr. No (1962), where she steps from the sea in a dazzling white bikini and with a knife strapped to her hip. (I borrowed her heraldic knife for the Amazonian cover photo of Vamps & Tramps.) That bewitching scene, with its mythic evocation of an armed goddess born from the waves, would inspire the enduringly iconic poster for a 1966 British film, One Million Years B.C., for which Raquel Welch as a cave woman in a ragged hide bikini spontaneously struck a combative, athletic pose. But the early hostility of second-wave feminism to the great sex symbols of film—indeed to all blatant eroticism in the entertainment industry—prevented those spectacular images from being incorporated into the history of women’s modern advance.
Among my many quarrels with second-wave feminists was my enthusiastic admiration for the sexy “Bond girls” and Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders, as well as for Francesco Scavullo’s glossy, glamorous, plunging-bodice covers for Helen Gurley Brown’s Cosmopolitan magazine. (Feminist protestors, led by Kate Millett, staged a sit-in at Brown’s offices in 1970.) Similarly, the hugely popular Charlie’s Angels TV series (1976–81) was contemptuously dismissed as “jiggle” or “tits and ass” TV by feminist puritans. Hence my delight at the return of Charlie’s Angels after the triumph of pro-sex feminism in the 1990s: thanks to producer-actress Drew Barrymore, there have been two successful Charlie’s Angels films (2000 and 2003) and a TV series (2011).
Betty Friedan, a tireless, outspoken advocate for women’s rights, was incontrovertibly the primary figure in the historic revival of organized feminist activism. But Betty Friedan did not create the formidable Germaine Greer in Australia, and she did not create me in the snow belt of upstate New York. I have repeatedly called Greer one of the emblematic women of the twentieth century. She remains the living person whom I most admire. Feminism would not have gone so wrong so fast had Greer retained the exuberant, slashingly satirical, all-conquering, and openly libidinous persona of her international debut after the publication of her first book, The Female Eunuch, in 1970. I have written and commented extensively about Greer, but there is room here for only one piece—my review of her 1995 study of women poets, Slip-Shod Sibyls.
The present book opens with half of the highly controversial first chapter of Sexual Personae, “Sex and Violence, or Nature and Art.” Most feminists who fumed about it were usually reacting to out-of-context quotation of my signature one-liners (inspired by Oscar Wilde and innumerable Jewish comedians, including Joan Rivers). This chapter, with its dark overview of biology, is a protest against the omnipotence of nature and the outrage of gender. It is written from a trans-gender or should I say supragender point of view, like that of Tiresias, the invisible observer of sexual mores in T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. Chapter One is merely an overture, inspired by Wagner. The rest of the book is quite different in tone, with chapters inspired in whole or in part by Bach, Chopin, Brahms, Rimsky-Korsakov, Debussy, Puccini, Satie, and Delius, in addition to movie music by Max Steiner, Miklós Rózsa, and Bernard Herrmann. Real readers, as opposed to lockstep ideologues, appreciated the sudden emotional shift (as in Hollywood soundtracks) into Chapter Two, “The Birth of the Western Eye,” where art rescues humanity from the abyss of nature. Two excerpts are reprinted here: my diptych of a Stone Age statuette, the Venus of Willendorf, contrasted with the Egyptian bust of Queen Nefertiti. These passages are odes in the prose-poem style of the Oxford aesthete, Walter Pater, one of Wilde’s principal mentors.
Sexual Personae was reasonably well-received by most reviewers. It was my piece on Madonna in The New York Times later in 1990 that made me instantly notorious. Background details of the circuitous genesis of this and my other articles in that inflammatory period can be found in “A Media History” in Sex, Art, and American Culture. In 2010, The New York Times featured this piece as one of its most significant and influential op-eds in the 40 years since it had invented that now standard form. What caused a storm was first, my open attack on the normally protected feminist establishment and second, my closing sally, “Madonna is the future of feminism,” which was widely ridiculed as preposterous. But that prophecy would come true in the rise and resounding victory of long-silenced pro-sex feminism in the 1990s. Furthermore, my cheeky use of slang, which was debated by the editorial board, broke long-standing rules of decorum at The New York Times and opened the way for later writers like Maureen Dowd. Finally, the piece started a stampede for op-eds among humanities professors, who had previously considered writing for newspapers beneath their dignity. It was mainly historians, economists, and political scientists who had been doing op-eds before.
Six weeks later, New York Newsday published my op-ed on date rape, which remains the most controversial thing I have ever written. Syndicated in regional newspapers from coast to coast in haphazard truncated form, it caused a huge backlash. There was a coordinated campaign, evidently emanating from feminist groups in the Midwest, to harass the president of my university with demands for my firing. That article, often reprinted in freshman-composition course packs at state universities, caused me endless trouble throughout the 1990s. It led to picketing and protests at my outside campus lectures and to my own walk-offs (to avoid fisticuffs) from Austrian and British TV talk shows and even from the stage of Queen Elizabeth Hall in London. My lecture for the latter 1995 event, “The Modern Battle of the Sexes,” was commissioned by the BBC and is reprinted here.
I still stand by every word of my date-rape manifesto. Women infantilize themselves when they cede responsibility for sexual encounters to men or to after-the-fact grievance committees, parental proxies unworthy of true feminists. My baby-boom generation demanded and won an end to the in loco parentis parietal rules, and it is tragic indeed how so many of today’s young women seem to long for a return of those hovering paternalistic safeguards. As a career college teacher, I want our coddling, authoritarian universities to end all involvement with or surveillance of students’ social lives and personal interactions, verbal or otherwise. If a real crime is committed, it should be reported to the police. Otherwise, college administrations should mind their own business and focus on facilitating and funding education in the classroom.
Many pieces in this book critique and lampoon prominent feminists, on campus and off. (My first scholarly publication, written in grad school, was “Lord Hervey and Pope,” which appeared in Eighteenth Century Studies in 1973: Alexander Pope’s scathing mock-epics, especially The Dunciad, remain a heavy influence.) My long 1991 review-essay for Arion, “Junk Bonds and Corporate Raiders,” was primarily a hostile dissection of post-structuralism, which has in my view distorted gender studies and effectively destroyed the humanities. That was still my theme more than 20 years later in “Scholars in Bondage,” my in-depth 2013 review for The Chronicle of Higher Education of three flawed new books by women academics on bondage and domination. Notable is my use of “corporate” in the Arion title: I was one of the few voices at the time denouncing the escalating corporatization of American universities, which was being exploited by careerist academics masquerading as leftists while obscenely driving up their own star salaries on the competitive national market. Similarly, in my 1992 essay, “The Nursery School Campus,” for The Times Literary Supplement, I fired a prophetic warning shot about the takeover of American universities by an expanding class of intrusive administrators, leading to today’s disastrous loss of faculty power.
Articles here where I took a contrarian position against the feminist establishment include my denial that Anita Hill was a feminist heroine; my attack on Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin as Stalinist fanatics; and my defense of unconstrained reproductive rights while also acknowledging the ethical superiority of the pro-life argument in the abortion debate. Although I voted twice for Bill Clinton, I appear to be the only feminist who publicly condemned him for his abusive treatment of Monica Lewinsky and who protested the casuistry of feminist leaders like Gloria Steinem in hypocritically refusing for partisan reasons to apply basic sexual harassment rules to this deplorable case.
A recurrent theme in these pieces, as in my dissection of gender propaganda in the United Nations documents for its 1996 Conference on Women in Beijing, is the privileged bourgeois assumptions, self-preoccupied and status-conscious, in too much feminist thinking. (Attention to this long-standing problem has finally come to the fore as “intersectionality.”) In the 1990s, when most other feminists were focused on policy matters, I was virtually alone in pressing the issue of the first woman president, for whom I insisted that military history rather than gender studies was the proper college training. I steadily protested the anti-male bias of second-wave feminism and took up the cudgels to defend men’s wrestling and football (as in my sports credo, “Gridiron Feminism”).
Female body image in art and popular culture is addressed in my lecture, “The Cruel Mirror,” as well as in pieces on plastic surgery and the stiletto high heel. My celebration of Bravo TV’s Real Housewives series is predictably oppositional: Gloria Steinem repeatedly criticized and dismissed the show. My 2014 University of Mississippi lecture on Southern women, published here for the first time, examines three female stereotypes: the old mountain woman, the mammy, and the Southern belle. In op-eds written for Time, I call for fertility issues to be addressed in school sex education; for an end to young women’s frightening naïveté about sex crime; and for a repeal of the unjust Age-21 law regulating alcohol sales, which I connect to the sudden date-rape crisis of the 1980s, when riotous fraternity keg parties filled the social gap. My interviews with Deborah Coughlin for Feminist Times and Ella Whelan for Spiked Review highlight the ongoing common concerns of British and American feminism.
Ending the book is my essay on Robert Mapplethorpe’s brilliant, half-transvestite portrait of Patti Smith for the album cover of Horses (1975), which I hung like a sacred icon on my wall at my first teaching job at Bennington College. Mutual friends who frequented CBGB’s music club on New York’s Bowery had recognized the cultural parallels between Smith and me and tried to bring us together. (We were briefly introduced in passing one afternoon when I was at the deserted CBGB’s for a later performance by the proto-punk band Television, but it would have made no impression on her, given that I was unpublished and unknown.) I deeply admire Smith’s respect for great male artists as well as her rejection of feminist rancor toward men. In a 2007 interview with Bust magazine, Smith said, “I never was really concerned with the idea of feminism. As a humanistic person, I’m interested in the human condition. I’m interested in men’s rights just as much as women’s rights. … I’ve never limited myself as an artist or as a human being to a genderized position.”
The Mapplethorpe photo was a major inspiration for my 1991 New York magazine cover photo (reproduced here), taken in the armor room of the Philadelphia Museum of Art for Francesca Stanfill’s very discerning profile: I am doing my glowering best to imitate my idol, Keith Richards, the original model for Smith’s raffish 1970s rock-star hair cut. Also reproduced here, along with the covers of two gay magazines, are several examples of the theatrical scenarios I devised for routine photo shoots requested by magazines and newspapers to illustrate interviews or profiles. I sometimes brought props (whip, chains, sword, switchblade knife) to visually transmit my philosophy of street-smart Amazon feminism directly to the public, bypassing whatever untruths might be planted in the articles themselves by biased journalists or editors.
Like Mapplethorpe and unlike most feminists, I viewed fashion photography as a major modern art form. My longtime favorite photographers were Richard Avedon, David Bailey, and Helmut Newton, each of whom had a unique flair for capturing the essence of personality via moments of random choreography. Another inspiration for my outré photo shoots was David Bowie’s stunning sexual personae during his Ziggy Stardust period of the early 1970s. (I regret there is no space to reprint my catalog essay, “Theater of Gender: David Bowie at the Climax of the Sexual Revolution,” commissioned by the Victoria & Albert Museum for its 2013 exhibit of Bowie costumes in London.) It must be stressed that my flamboyant media presence lasted scarcely four years and was boosted by the official book tours for three bestsellers in a row (1991–94). After that, like the Roman general Cincinnatus returning to his plow, I simply resumed my cherished seclusion as a teacher and writer. As I often say, I’m just a schoolmarm!
The title of this book exalts freedom as an indispensable condition for the incubation and flourishing of individualism. My libertarian feminism, which takes the best from both liberalism and conservatism but is decidedly neither, places freedom of thought and speech above all ideology. I am an intellectual first and a feminist second—an ethical commitment to truth-seeking that I urge aspiring young writers and artists to adopt. The Free Speech Movement, led by a fiery Italian-American, Mario Savio, erupted at the University of California at Berkeley in 1964, the year I entered college. It was a cardinal moment for my generation. The anti-establishment stance of the Free Speech Movement represented the authentic populist revolution of the 1960s, which resisted encroachments of authority by a repressive elite. How is it possible that today’s academic left has supported rather than protested campus speech codes as well as the grotesque surveillance and over-regulation of student life? American colleges have abandoned their educational mission and become government colonies, ruled by officious bureaucrats enforcing federal dictates. This despotic imperialism has no place in a modern democracy.
Erosion of liberals’ fidelity to free speech can be partly traced to the Civil Rights Act of 1968 (following the landmark 1964 act), which imposed federal penalties for crimes committed because of “race, color, religion or national origin.” The demarcation of certain groups for special protection, later extended to gender and sexual orientation, split them from the general populace by defining them as permanent victims, burdened by an inescapable past. I strongly oppose the categories of “hate speech” and “hate crimes” that arose from that law and others throughout North America and Europe. The laudable attempt to make reparation for past injustice unfortunately created segregated zones of new privilege and drew government into curbing the exercise of free speech. As I argued in Vamps & Tramps, government has no right to intrude into or speculate about the thinking or motivation of any citizen, except during the sentencing phase after criminal conviction.
The freedom to hate must be as protected as the freedom to love. It is only when hate crosses over into action that the law may properly intervene. Without complete freedom to explore the piercing extremes of human emotion, we will never have great art again. Even comedy, a genre descending from the bawdy fertility cults of antiquity, has always been predicated on the violation of taboos. The free speech idealism of the 1960s was galvanized by the daring, sardonic culture-hero, Lenny Bruce, who transformed stand-up comedy into biting and often profane social commentary, leading to his repeated arrest for obscenity. On today’s campuses, students’ rowdy natural instincts for mischievous transgression are being policed by dour, neo-Victorian agents of coercive compassion. Comedy has become yet another victim of political correctness.
Freedom in the gender realm means the freedom of each sex to define its history and destiny without blame or harassment. If women seek freedom, they must let men too be free. Men who demean or subjugate women are not free, because they are signaling their secret fear of female power, which remains near total in the still murky and anxiety-ridden realm of procreation. But men have every right to claim credit for their vast achievements in conceiving and constructing the entire framework of civilization, from the great irrigation projects of ancient Mesopotamia to today’s global electronic grid. Impugned and silenced by feminism, men stoically go on doing the dirtiest, most dangerous and thankless work in modern society.
Feminism must end its sex war, which is stunting the maturation of both girls and boys. Upper-middle-class career women in the Americas and Europe blame men for their unhappiness. But the real cause is systemic. In the shift from the agrarian to industrial and now technological era, women have lost the daylong companionship and solidarity they once enjoyed with other women when they ruled the private sphere. In a new world where men and women share the same ambitions and workplace, perhaps a mutual incompatibility or creative tension between the sexes may have to be tolerated. But what is indisputable is that women do not gain by weakening men. An enlightened feminism, animated by a courageous code of personal responsibility, can only be built upon a wary alliance of strong women and strong men.
