Interview with the Vamp

Why Camille Paglia hates affirmative action, defends Rush Limbaugh, and respects Ayn Rand

Virginia Postrel from the August/September 1995 issue

(Page 2 of 6)

To say in effect: We uphold the great liberal and progressive principles of the '60s, which would be racial harmony, equal rights for women, toleration of gay lifestyles, and so on. But at the same time, to acknowledge the excesses of the '60s--the way there was a total breakdown of law and order, a self-destruction by drugs. (And I support legalization of drugs even while I can see the damage that was wrought to my generation through drugs.) How the sexual revolution ended in AIDS. Again, I uphold all pagan expressions of sex. And at the same time I say that this is the way nature reacts toward unrestrained promiscuous sex, that the evidence was there in the history of syphilis. It's not true that AIDS came out of nowhere. I feel that Clinton was beautifully positioned to lead a kind of national discussion on these issues.

Leftism should be about the people. That's how it began. Instead, what it has become in the last 20 years is a white upper-middle-class elitism which preaches to the people and says, "Oh, you don't agree with us? You're homophobic, you're so uneducated. You're in the darkness. You need us to bring light and truth to you." I hate that paternalistic, condescending kind of stuff that's coming out of this lawyer-heavy elite structure of the Democratic Party in Washington.

Reason: You also call yourself a libertarian. What do you mean by that?

Paglia: I consider myself not a conservative libertarian but a radical '60s libertarian.

Reason: How would you differentiate those two categories?

Paglia: I believe that government should confine itself to the public realm and that it should be as stripped down as possible, within reason. It should not be burdened by excess bureaucracy.

I feel that government has no right to intrude into the private realm of consensual behavior. Therefore, I say that I'm for the abolition of all sodomy laws. I'm for abortion rights. I'm for the legalization of drugs--consistent with alcohol regulations. I'm for not just the decriminalization but the legalization of prostitution. Again, prostitutes must not intrude into the public realm. I think it's perfectly reasonable to say that civil authorities have the right to say that prostitutes should not be loitering near schools, or on the steps of churches, or blocking entrances to buildings and so on. Prostitution should be perfectly legal, but it cannot interfere with other people's access to the public realm.

Furthermore, the public realm is not owned by Judeo-Christianity. It is shared by people of all cultural and religious backgrounds. Therefore, I'm arguing for the Greco-Roman or pagan line, which is very tolerant of homosexuality and even of man-boy love. I've argued controversially for a reduction in the age of consent to 14--there are some countries in the world that do have that. I'm open to considering even lowering it further.

That's the way I would be separate from a conservative libertarian, who would not necessarily take the position of the legalization of drugs or the very positive attitude I have toward prostitutes and pornographers and drag queens. I take a celebratory attitude toward them. Similarly, I think that most conservative libertarians would not agree with my idea of lowering the age of consent and so on.

Reason: Most libertarians, however you modify the word, would include other issues also, including free markets for things besides sex, drugs, and popular culture.

Paglia: In the first chapter of Sexual Personae, I made a defense of capitalism. I feel that capitalism has a very bad press with the pseudo-leftists who clog our best college campuses and that in point of fact capitalism has produced modern individualism and feminism. Modern capitalism has allowed the birth of the independent woman who is no longer economically dependent on her husband. I despise the sneering that our liberal humanists do about capitalism even while they enjoy all of its pleasures and conveniences. I just despise it.

However, I do believe that capitalism is inherently Darwinian and that a totally free market is ultimately inhumane, because you'll have what happened in the 19th century--a kind of piling up of profits at the very top, with working-class people falling way below. I do think that there should be some kind of safety net, that we should not tolerate, in an affluent society, extreme levels of poverty or deprivation.

At the same time, I think that the way that the welfare state has developed is just atrocious. It's part of the condescension and paternalism and the guilt of the affluent white upper-middle class to say: "Oh, they'll be taken care of." And so we have that huge culture of dependency which is suddenly, shockingly being broken, just like affirmative action. I never dreamed of the speed with which these issues which have been so long suppressed have come to the fore, and it seems like anything is possible now.

I think it's a very exciting time; I only regret it's not my party, the Democratic Party, that started this whole process. Because Clinton was elected for change. I wish that he had taken the aggressive tack the Republicans have of really investigating every single bureaucracy, stripping it down.

I despise bureaucrats. I despise administrators. That has been one of the most pernicious effects of the post-war years in academe. There has been an overgrowth of an arrogant master class of administrators on college campuses who are being paid twice the level of the salaries of the faculty and regard themselves as being in charge and everyone else as being their lackeys. What the Republicans are doing in Washington, looking at the federal government, I want people to be doing on the college campuses--to have a thoroughgoing review of this parasitic class of administrators.