Camille Paglia on Feminism

Feminists Must Begin to Fulfill Their Noble, Animating Ideal

Some graduate students chafe at "requests" they receive from their faculty advisers
By CAMILLE PAGLIA

What is the future of academic feminism? As women's studies evolves into gender studies, how should we re-examine and strengthen it? Feminism is one of the great progressive social movements of the modern period begun by the French Revolution. Like the movements to abolish slavery and eradicate child labor, it is the fruit of the Western Enlightenment, which produced the concepts of individualism and civil liberties that have inspired insurgents against dictatorial regimes around the world.
Because of feminism's noble, animating ideal -- equal treatment of the sexes before the law -- one might expect the feminist movement to have the wholehearted support of every person of good will. That there is so much skepticism about feminism in the United States -- and that, as polls show, so few young women identify themselves as feminist -- can no longer be explained away with such facile formulas as "backlash" or "the war against women" (which are the titles of propaganda-filled books by Susan Faludi and Marilyn French). Instead, it's time for every American feminist to admit that both mainstream and academic feminism have been guilty of ideological excesses that require correction.
The reform wing of feminism to which I belong burst into public view in the early 1990s, but it actually has a long lineage. The most radically pro-sex of us began our struggles with the puritanism and groupthink of feminist leaders from the moment the women's movement revived in the late 1960s, after its dormancy following the winning of suffrage in 1920. The innovative, prankish dance critic Jill Johnston, for example, personified a feisty, libidinous, pugnaciously physical 1960s feminism that was erased from cultural memory. This process occurred both in the mainstream feminism of Ms. magazine and in the new bureaucratic-minded women's-studies programs of the 1970s.
To establish itself as a discipline and quickly prove its own academic legitimacy in the '70s, campus feminism became addicted to theory, which took two principal forms. The first, derived from Kate Millett's Sexual Politics (1970), reduced complex artworks to their political content and attacked famous male artists and authors for their alleged sexism. That atrocious book, which appeared while I was a graduate student, drove every talented, young, intellectual woman I knew away from the women's movement. Millett, who is responsible for the current eclipse of D.H. Lawrence, Ernest Hemingway, and Henry Miller in the college curriculum, did enormous damage to American cultural life. She made vandalism chic.
The second major theoretical style adopted by campus feminism was a French import, derived from the highly abstruse and convoluted deconstruction and poststructuralism. These approaches invaded literature departments in the 1970s and later spread to other fields in the humanities. While the practitioners of French theory professed leftist and even Marxist values, they had little connection to actual politics and none whatever to ordinary people, who were condescended to and excluded by theorists' elitist jargon. Why the shifty, cynical, and verbose psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan -- a classic white, European male -- became the idol of so many credulous Anglo-American feminists remains a mystery. Simple careerism may explain it: From the late 1970s through the 1980s, attaching oneself to feminism or to French theory guaranteed employment, promotion, and, at the top, huge financial rewards. The academic marketplace reinforced cutthroat ambition and herd behavior, eventually seriously compromising the direct, sympathetic study of literature and art that should be the humanities' proper mission.
In the 1980s, the feminist law professor Catharine MacKinnon's implacable opposition to pornography, as well as her advocacy of stringent sexual-harassment regulations, became a dominant strain in academic feminism. The increasingly powerful deans of "student life" and their proliferating subdeans -- spawned by expensive American colleges and universities trying to attract tuition-paying parents -- were converts to MacKinnonism and its dated scenario of male oppressors and frail female victims. By the end of the 1980s, MacKinnon's feverish rhetoric and totalitarian politics had helped produce an epidemic of date-rape hysteria, to which colleges nervous about bad publicity responded with secret kangaroo courts that suspended the civil rights of male students and faculty members.
Feminist theory of the 1970s and 1980s was, virtually without exception, social constructionist, attributing gender differences entirely to social conditioning. Hormones did not exist. Even the psychologist Carol Gilligan's hazy, sentimental, bourgeois notions of woman's innate moral superiority carefully avoided the taint of biology. Any reference to nature was buried in kitschy, sanitized "Goddess" figures or automatically dismissed as "essentialist" -- a sloppy term used by amateurish academics innocent of philosophy.
Women's-studies programs were thrown together in the 1970s and 1980s without the most basic consideration of science. Sweeping generalizations about gender were made by humanists with little or no knowledge of endocrinology, genetics, anthropology, or social psychology. The anti-science bias of poststructuralism worsened matters, producing the repressed doublespeak of Foucault followers (such as the derivative and unlearned "queer theorist" Judith Butler), who substituted turgid word play for scientific inquiry.
A massive sea change in the 1990s has begun to reduce the campus prestige and influence of the French and feminist theorists. Most undergraduate students are no longer paying attention to them -- even though our ossified system of lifetime tenure will allow them to drain the treasuries of their institutions and distort graduate education and department hiring for at least the next 15 years. What are the reasons for this recent cultural shift? The unmasking in the late 1980s of the deconstructionist pioneer Paul de Man as a Nazi sympathizer sent shock waves through the humanities and did much to discredit deconstruction. Sudden scrutiny by journalists sent star professors accustomed to conference high jinks scurrying underground. The present atmosphere in many humanities departments is cautious and demoralized. Still, some theorists continue to hurt themselves. For example, the recent brazen memoir by Jane Gallop, a leading Lacanian feminist -- with its casuistical defense of her sexual affairs with her professors and graduate students -- has cast a glaring light on the intrinsic amorality of French theory.
Academic feminism, as well as the mainstream feminist establishment, lost control of the discourse on gender when a series of controversial issues spilled into the media and became a focus of raging national debate on op-ed pages and radio and television talk shows. The first was date rape, featured in cover stories of newsmagazines in 1989 and 1990. The next was workplace sexual harassment, dramatized by Anita Hill's charges during Clarence Thomas's stormy Supreme Court confirmation hearings in 1991.
Such practical matters, for which campus theorists were ill-prepared, were discussed and developed with great speed as talk shows multiplied on CNN, CNBC, and PBS, amplified by the refreshingly unedited coverage of lectures and public events by C-SPAN. Scores of lively women across the political spectrum could now be heard, without the censorship of the New York-based network news shows, which had long been under the thumb of Gloria Steinem and the National Organization for Women, with their intimate ties to the Democratic Party. The free exchange of ideas on the expanding Internet was also crucial in ending the era of political correctness.
The election of the Southern centrist Bill Clinton in 1992 removed the Reagan-Bush Administration officials whom many academics, in their smug sense of enlightened leftism, loved to deride, and it also began to break down the outmoded polarity of liberal versus conservative. Again, academic feminism (which was overinvested in liberal, social-welfare doctrine, sometimes approaching overt socialism) failed to keep pace with changes in the real world, here or in the former Soviet Union. It completely missed the rise of libertarianism (my own philosophy as a Clinton Democrat), which opposes government intrusion into private behavior and combines endorsement of a modified capitalism with adamant support of free speech (no minor matter in the early 1990s, when campus speech codes were spreading).
Because they were locked into the slower pace and the exclusivity of academic conferences and scholarly journals, campus feminists also have had little to say on most other controversial issues and public figures of the 1990s: Robert Mapplethorpe's photographs and the attack on the National Endowment for the Arts; gays in the military and gay marriage; Hillary Clinton; Paula Jones; partial-birth abortions; sexual harassment and adultery in the military.
Arcane French theory, based on linguistic paradigms predating World War II, looks pretty foolish these days, when most people are concerned with bread-and-butter issues such as child care, the divorce rate, drug use, and decaying public education. And by a delicious irony, hormones are back, as the baby-boom generation hits menopause. Germaine Greer, the most wonderful of the early feminists before she turned against sex, has devoted an entire book, The Change, to declining estrogen levels in aging women.
Furthermore, science has ceased to be the enemy for women seeking earlier warning and intervention for breast and ovarian cancers and for career women who postponed pregnancy and are experiencing fertility problems as their biological clocks run down. And for H.I.V.-positive persons who are putting their faith in the new protease inhibitors and, beyond that, in a future AIDS vaccine. And for gays who (much too prematurely) claim that a handful of limited studies have confirmed the existence of a "gay gene," thus proving homosexuality inborn, natural, and not a moral issue. In view of these pressing developments, the absence of science in the gender-studies curriculum seems all the more outrageous.
The arrival on the national scene in the early 1990s of a new generation of young feminists has also helped shift the center of gravity away from academic feminism toward real-life issues. The early books of writers such as Naomi Wolf and Susan Faludi, despite sometimes haphazard research and skewed reasoning, at least addressed the real society we live in, with its omnipresent media and conflicted sexual relationships. As Ivy League graduates, both women were heavily influenced by academic feminist ideology, from which Wolf began to move away in her later books. As girlish new personalities with strong opinions, Wolf and Faludi made the older, established American feminists seem tired and out of touch. Perhaps inadvertently, they also tolled the death knell for absurdly idolized French feminists such as Helene Cixous and Luce Irigaray, whose tedious works had been forced down the throats of American women students in the 1980s.
A rich and dynamic popular culture also has overwhelmed the pallid, moralistic messages of academic feminism. For example, Madonna's embrace of pornographic scenarios and glamorous high fashion has subverted not "patriarchal hegemonic categories" (as tone-deaf humanities professors still like to say) but puritanical, MacKinnon-style feminism (which by this point is close to comatose). Since Madonna, younger women no longer feel that makeup and sexy outfits are incompatible with feminism. Progress has been especially striking in the gay world: The "lipstick lesbians" of the early 1990s, who first emerged on the West Coast, broke the stereotype of the dour, preachy, overall-clad, granola-eating lesbian feminist. The cover of Hot, Throbbing Dykes to Watch Out For, the latest book by Alison Bechdel, a lesbian syndicated cartoonist, says it all: The erotica shelves of a feminist bookstore are shown bulging with titles perused by eager shoppers, while the small section labeled "Feminist Theory" is nearly bare and filled with cobwebs.
We are left, then, with the duty to restructure gender studies to bring the field into line with recent cultural changes and the educational needs of the next century. It is an unhappy fact that women's-studies programs sprang into existence without the most elementary intellectual or scholarly oversight. Furthermore, many of them have been conducted as autocratic fiefdoms, insulated from critique on their own campuses and connected to each other nationally by a network of self-interested operatives who control hiring, grants, and publications.
Reasonable, well-intentioned feminists do exist on campus, but they cannot pretend that they are typical or that, before I launched my attack in 1990 in my book Sexual Personae and in the media, they dared to speak publicly about their discontent. Those who believe academic feminists are tolerant and open to dissent have never challenged the thought police, as both the philosopher Christina Hoff Sommers and I have done, walking into hostile mob scenes that no sane person would think possible on an American campus. Sommers's 1994 book Who Stole Feminism? How Women Have Betrayed Women has been subjected to malicious and baseless attack by politically correct academics.
What should be the credentials for an instructor of women's studies? Faculty members and administrators have been utterly cowardly in their refusal to confront this question. Because women's studies as an academic entity was a product of the 1970s, its senior practitioners reflect the already hardened, male-bashing ideology of that period, with its disrespect for science as well as great art. Those whose feminism predates the 1970s have been out of sync with and often ostracized by academic feminism from the start. Critics who claim that I am anti-feminist, for example, ignore the fact that my own feminism goes back to my letter published by Newsweek in July 1963, demanding "equal opportunity for American women."
A foundation in basic science should be required of anyone teaching gender issues to undergraduates. Familiarity with traditional, rigorous research techniques in history, sociology, and anthropology is also necessary; the literary training of many of today's academic feminists is simply not enough. Postmodernism, a glitzy, game-playing style promulgated by incestuous humanities centers and that rubbish factory, Routledge, is a terrible preparation for gender studies, which requires patient, accurate observation of ordinary life.
A first step that colleges and universities can take to reduce cronyism and insure accountability is to insist that gender-studies courses honestly represent all sides in the debate. If dissident feminists and conservative critics of feminism are not included in the readings, students are getting indoctrination, not education.
Second, gender studies must break out of the ghetto of academic publishing. Faculty members should consider assigning the kind of general-release books whose sales in the many millions indicate that they have struck a chord with the mass audience: Deborah Tannen's You Just Don't Understand: Women and Men in Conversation; John Gray's Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus; and even the comedian Tim Allen's Don't Stand Too Close to a Naked Man.
These popular books, with their quirky humor, draw upon the wisdom of actual experience to present a picture of sexual relations far more persuasive than anything current academic theorists have yet produced.
Copyright (c) 1997 by The Chronicle of Higher Education, Inc.
Reprinted in the newsgroup paglia-l July'97.

Camille Paglia - Feminist Fatale
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Feminists Must Begin to Fulfill Their Noble, Animating Ideal

Some graduate students chafe at "requests" they receive from their faculty advisers By CAMILLE PAGLIA

Camille Paglia - Feminist Fatale HOME

Some graduate students chafe at "requests" they receive from their faculty advisers
By CAMILLE PAGLIA

Camille Paglia - Feminist Fatale
HOME