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 5 of 7)

That's one of my criticisms of Naomi, that she's so WASPized. She has adopted this WASP manner, OK? It's a completely bland, white-bread, upwardly mobile manner, OK. There's nothing Jewish about her. That's one of my charges against her--that she's simply a yuppie.

Meanwhile--in fact, I couldn't believe Playboy put this in--they cut my whole philosophy of feminism to leave space for my theories about Naomi Wolf's hair! I'm saying that without her hair she would never have gotten attention at all. There were a million books like that, The Beauty Myth--a lot of books. It was only her hair that gave her cachet. People remembered her hair, and the male reporters thought she was hot, and she spent a lot of time sticking her boobs in people's face. She's done this seductive number on men for her entire career. Her primary style of approach is seduction.

Her thinking is completely incoherent, as opposed to someone like Katie Roiphe [author of The Morning After], who in my view is a true intellectual who has a very, very fine book. She is the first intellectual of her generation, and I hope she can survive psychologically after the devastating and malicious attacks on her by the feminist establishment, like that bitch Katha Pollitt, the biggest Stalinist of them all, in The New Yorker--a lying piece of defamatory prose that I hope she burns in hell for. I have constantly said that Katie Roiphe's book is a wonderful description, from the inside, of the American bourgeois mind. I think that's the way she should have been packaged by her publisher.

Naomi Wolf--whatever the prevailing wind is, Naomi Wolf will go with it. So she was pushing P.C. feminism, and all of a sudden it turned out, "Gee, the Paglia brand of anti-P.C. feminism is more popular. I think I'll go in that direction now!" So then her next book completely reverses the last book. No one notices, because her readers are all nincompoops--they don't notice anything.

So when New York magazine did a story on her and asked me about my many ideas that are running throughout her work now, I said, "As a teacher, I am happy to be completing Naomi's education, which was so deficient at Yale." And I said, "Look at what Yale and Harvard are doing to young women! They produced Naomi Wolf--a Rhodes scholar--and look at Susan Faludi: Her mind is a mess, and she's a Harvard graduate."

Christina and I--we are in despair, really, about the younger generation, because we thought that women were moving forward. I have worked and worked, and so has Christina, to hone our analytical skills; again by absorbing the great masters of rhetoric and analysis, whether they're male or female.

We have truly mutilated the minds of a whole generation of young women, and it's going to be another generation before we can recover.

Reason: You shouldn't exaggerate. It's a very small percentage of young women who are going into these women's studies programs. Lots of young women are studying science, economics, or they're pre-med, etc.

Paglia: I mean in the humanities. The women's studies influence is not just concentrated in women's studies courses: It really has passed throughout the curricula of humanities departments. I'm telling you it is a disaster. People who are in economics or law, fine. Medicine, fine. I'm talking about the arts. The arts have been poisoned by the P.C. rhetoric everywhere.

Reason: You say that your 1960s generation, of which you are very obviously proud, failed to appreciate the positive role of institutions. What do you mean by that? What institutions?

Paglia: When I got my first job at Bennington College in 1972, I still believed in the '60s idea, "Do your own thing." I believed in full self-expression. I was very impatient with institutions, I hated procedures, I hated Robert's Rules of Order, I hated the committee work we were talking about. I was just totally disrespectful of all those processes. I thought, "Oh, these old fuddy duddy things sitting around for hours in boring meetings." I began to learn the hard way about institutions by the fact that I was in such conflict with them from the first semester on of my first job.

It's a small place in the middle of nowhere in Vermont, so everything was magnified. I caused crisis after crisis up there. I would say something--obviously, I have a great skill at soundbites, that's clear, but I didn't know it at the time. Everything I said was instantly quoted, instantly inflammatory; I would get involved in scrapes and scandals, and the institution would come to a halt. The parents would call to complain, or there had to be a committee where I was brought forth in front of the committee and people had to meet on me and what happened and have the people come in and testify. It was, like, endless.

And at one point during one of these inquiries, I said to the committee, "Well, look, I'm an Italian. I'm not going to stand for slights to my honor, insults. We have to avenge things!" And an elderly faculty member said, "Maybe there's a conflict between being Italian and being a teacher that you have to face." I thought, "This is very interesting."

I was forced to realize that even though what I was doing was in the '60s ideal of doing your own thing, total flamboyance, I was causing a great deal of trouble to a great many people. These faculty members were forced to take time from their busy lives to sit for hours and days in taking this testimony and in weighing judgment.

So I began to realize the degree to which I was diverting the institution from its educational mission. That what I was doing, being myself, was obstructing something that I had an idealism about--that is, that I have a vocation as a teacher. I was forced to face this in ways that many other members of my '60s generation did not, those who did not go on into a profession.

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