Camille Paglia - Sexual Personae & Vamps and Tramp - Booktalk

sixteen years old it was 1963 you opened up Newsweek magazine and you saw your name what was it like well one of my first publications a letter about Amelia Earhart who I had been doing a research project on for about three years at that point it was just after the first Soviet cosmonaut went up valentina Tereshkova I was indignant that no American woman was eligible yet for the space program as it happened coincidentally that the first woman had gone to space 35 years to the day since the newly Earhart had crossed the Atlantic so I wrote into Newsweek and they they published it now this is before Betty Friedan's book was out its before feminism had its resurgence of the 1960s so this is one of the one of the documentary proof 40 years old now in this year and that I'm a kind of kind of an or feminist one of the aboriginal feminists of my generation of the 1960s fast forward in 1972 you're traveling and touring with your mother in Washington DC you're watching on the Senate floor and you see Barry Goldwater for the first time in person what did you think of it I am an of amazing charisma he he had a kind of quality almost a kind of I don't know what to call it kind of a medieval warrior quality I mean I think he impressed me as an intellectual somehow he radiated a kind of mental force even from the straight distance and the in the from the visitors gallery do you remember him whether he ever had any impact on you did he have it did the fact that he was a Republican and where you were moving in your political life at that time well I I had been campaigning for John Kennedy 1969 I was I was 13 years old but but I come from an area of upstate New York that's very conservative Republican a lot of my family was I would say on the conservative side on the whole on the whole Republicans I think is the family I came from you've talked about the fact that you're very unhappy with the labels of conservative and liberal these days why I try I tried oh it seems just hopeless now but it for a brief shining moment in the early 90s it really seemed as if we were going to move into a new arena where there were less inflexible polarizations about about politics I feel that these these designations conservative and and liberal have long outlived their usefulness but I'm afraid that the the Monica Lewinsky affair repolarized the nation and now at this point with with so much disagreement about the Iraq war I think we're back to some of the worst and most strident kind of a discourse where they the nation is divided down the middle in ways I think will take decades to heal is it possible though for us not to put labels on people I would like more sophisticated forms of labeling if someone wants to call themselves a rock-ribbed conservative Republican that's that's fine but I myself am I am a libertarian who disagrees with the Democratic Party that I belong to on so many levels I despise the current direction of the of the Democratic Party it's I could go on for hours I was about that it's voted for Bill Clinton I voted for Bill Clinton twice and then became a severe critic of the Clintons and then voted for Ralph Nader for the Green Party and I'm looking I'm hoping some Democrat will come it to be an adequate presidential candidate it doesn't doesn't look like we're going going to get in any one to present moment at the same time I find that the Democratic Party is run out of ideas itself I mean it's version of liberalism is nothing but tag lines and and and the kinds of diminution of of the Republican or conservative position that I think is reductive and and it's just causing an endless inflammatory culture war in this country flashback 37 years here ten years old and it says in in some of the articles about you that you kind of had you came out you were a you were a very quiet child which some people watching this might be very surprised to hear a quiet child is I think I was fairly silent I was very active I had a lot of physical energy and I was always roaming around wildly outdoors but I remember once my mother was bringing me down to New York City for a visit on the train and she was complimented by other train riders for the incredible good manners this little girl wearing white gloves and then I sort of exploded my puberty I exploded but it's a classic story of the 1960s you know generation that I belong to we have some pictures here of you and some of your Halloween costumes of youth may be a little unusual at highly unusual in the middle of the 1950's for little girls to be disguising themselves and as military officers in this case a Roman soldier my my mother and father constructed that costume for me they would have preferred that I have chosen something else to be some other sexual persona to be but I wasn't madly in love with these images of heroic masculinity at a time when you know Doris Day and Debbie Reynolds were being forced down on us women now that's me as the toreador s cameo from Carmen I'm probably six years old there and again my mother and father constructed that customer we had no swords so that's my mother's umbrella actually I have that we're living in a small farming town of Oxford New York at that moment where my father was teaching high school but where did these ideas come from I'm here to do this I have no idea to some something's been surging in me since a tiny child here I'm Hamlet there that is at this point we're in Syracuse oh this is probably I'm eight or nine years old at this point I'd actually produced and directed eight a rather shabby of the production of Hamlet based on the classics coming books in my fourth-grade class what's good didn't know know that Hamlet I'm afraid kept forgetting his lines and so it was kind of a fiasco and what are you where are you here with fast-forwarding a little bit um I'm gonna see this photo okay go oh I do see that now that's it I'm in the classroom at my first job at Bennington College this 1973 I have my Keith Richards shag haircut Keith is an enormous Idol of mine from the Rolling Stones I'm wearing a Edwardian cut green corduroy jacket my trademark in that era when did you first decide that you were unhappy with the way that people expressed themselves through their gender in the 1950s it was a time of great repression in terms of sex roles there was a very definite way that a girl was supposed to be think that my father encouraged me to to aspire to whatever I wanted to to do he taught me how to defend myself you know with my fists if necessary my father did not raise me in the the I think the conventional way you'd expect an italian-american immigrant family as mine was but but there was something in me we'll just wanted to achieve what did you achieve for women I was constantly indignant about the the role since my subordinate role differential role that was assigned to women especially the need to be polite I like the way men could speak out men could be challenging that women were expected to to have soft feminine voices that kind of a thing so it was just a constant clashed with the with gender roles throughout the 1950s for me that's why I identified very strongly with the transgendered today I take absolutely understand what they went through on the other hand I never had any desire to change sex I I expressed my my problems with socialization through achievement through through writing I think my books are in some way my own form of sex change well that's what we're here all about to talk about and that is a to talk about your books what is it about you have you have said that the picture is very important for you in terms of explaining your views to people but what is it about the written word is that more important less important than the picture and what's your thought on that well I feel I'm in love with the English language which is new to my family has to be remembered my mother was born in Italy and all four of my grandparents so English is new and my parents made the decision to to have English spoken only in the homes and that's why I oppose bilingual education I believe in immersion in English English which is a very difficult language so I've been in love with English I've heard for example Lewis Carroll's I also want Alice books I'm more hearing those voices those British voices actually and being fascinated by mysterious almost come imperious statements coming out of it out of the characters of Alice's world and wondering what they meant and and and wanting to to speak like that so I I feel I've been studying English as if from the outside my entire life I'm always taking notes always taking out something I was always looking upwards always assembling materials they have to do with English now I'm also in love with with the image and that I knew from the Italian Catholic Church they had seen Anthony's sans near Padua Church in Endicott New York which was all the stained-glass windows and the the statues of Saint Michael and in st. Lucy that the iconic form of almost choreographic expression of the saints of the Catholic Church with their weapons or their or their emblems st. Lucy you're holding out a plate with eyeballs on it I found that very very odd very interesting so my whole interest in Hollywood actually and and in in dancers and in actors is coming from what I perceived as the is the ritualism and the gorgeous iconography of the Catholic Church so my career I've tried to blend these two things my love of language with my love of the of the image who taught you how to write I don't think anyone taught me how to write I just I think I taught myself how to write by whatever I would find a passage that struck me as unusually eloquent or interesting I would copy it out now that is that muscular copying copying I did that for years ever since I've been in probably junior high school copying out pastors keeping notebooks of passages and and that just that copying through and trying to understand the way the sentence works so to all the different voices in English actual are in my writing I don't have one voice people think that you know I I have I don't have a recognizable voice when I'm speaking but not when I'm writing there are probably a hundred different voices that I that I have that where I'm imitating or or combining in the kind of improvisational manner the the the right I particularly admired over over the years so what was the impetus for this first book 1990 hardback 1991 paperback persona is is an expansion of my dove my doctoral dissertation at Yale I got my degree in 1974 and the probably it was Simone de Beauvoir as the second sex witch a Belgian colleague of my father's had given me in 1963 and that is when I transferred my interest in it before that I didn't want to be an archaeologist or I was thinking of me perhaps going into literary studies but this idea of a producing a mammoth book a book something that could be a monument for in terms of women's achievement I felt that women did not aim high enough I wanted to do something massive you know for women in a Bible I want to say that something crushing crushing okay on a kind of grand scale I feel that men have for too long in history been the ones to make the epic statements or in in rock and roll I'm always complaining why is it Led Zeppelin who are geniuses who had a giant orchestral sound why is it that women will not make this big obnoxious you know like sort of almost like a military tank way of crushing the audience that's what I want to do to produce a massive book and that's only half of the book I actually wrote sexual persona there was a second volume that was on popular culture it was thousands of pages long this manuscript and I'm very grateful to a press for having taken a chance on it when seven other publishers had had rejected it and is that when Harold Bloom came into your life well Harold Bloom was my dissertation director in in graduate school he I had not studied with him at VL graduate school but he heard through the student grapevine what I was intending to work on which is this area of sexual ambiguity and moral ambiguity in in the whole history of the humanities he summoned me to his office and he said to me my dear I am the only one who can direct that dissertation okay I said oh okay right and there began one of the greats seems to me you know collaborations like I Oh Harold Bloom so much just for believing in my ideas believe understanding everything I wanted to do and and being my support through all those years when no one understood there are a few a couple of my friends I think understood what I was going to do but no one else did and I took that book in the face of a massive rejection of everything I ever wrote in terms of the pieces of the book it just took a level of persistence or mania I don't know I think few women have March 1991 what was the impact of this cover story on the New York well my book sexual persona a year earlier without my picture on it with no publicity no one knew who I was I was completely unknown working at an obscure art school in Philadelphia the University of the Arts and in the Francesca's stanphill who is a very sophisticated woman a writer and journalist in New York was interested in sexual persona for for its defense of art she felt that as I did that too much of feminism and an academic style was was suppressing the you know the the aesthetic qualities in art so she would she was attracted to my book and then sought me out and it ended up as this cover story where people saw me for the first time and on that cover I am posing with my Keith Richards face that's the one that that's in the armour room of the Philadelphia Museum of Art he won't see right here there's army right yes which is my military my halloween costume background she is there so that so there I was and I was taking positions that at the time were highly controversial highly controversial in feminism but now practically all of my ideas have are part of the cultural landscape thanks to a younger generation of women that came through who agreed with me I was taking a pro sex Pro pop Pro rock position about a feminism I was saying women are not victims all kinds of things now that people just accept but at the time it created a storm of controversy what were you saying about Gloria Steinem at this game well glorious time I admired Gloria Steinem when she first came on the scene I thought that she was a very good a very telegenic face for feminism but I should have been dragged into the movement by Betty Ford and for heaven's sakes I was out there doing my Amelia Earhart crazy things in the early sixties well Gloria Steinem was running around New York in a plastic dress doing a book called the beach book it you know at that period so I don't owe anything to Gloria Steinem I'm saying that feminism as it cohered is ideology in the 1970s turned against sex turned against men became absolutely for example Gloria Steinem said a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle all right now if the test same time as she was never seen without a man in parties in New York I found that I I thought it was appalling to indoctrinate young women to inoculate young women with an anti male bias I come out of an Italian culture where a strong man and strong women the men in Italian men were fabulous the men could do everything of every generation right from my my my my grandfather's generation my uncles and my father's generation do anything with their hands I they they were men of Honor okay men of ethics okay to have men being impugned as racist and oppressors and and and and you know imperialist sand and brutalizes and rapists and everything else seemed to me a terrible way to educate women and what was the backlash like when you were saying this stuff publicly in front of the feminine well in the early 90s it was people who who saw who people who were there will remember for example at Brown University in 1992 700 people turned out I mean probably half of them wanted to know who I was and the screaming and the yelling that went on now the reason up to this point okay up to this point such crowds to harass the speaker they had worked I had worked on people it didn't work with me because because I am a performer okay III do improv I do improv so I wasn't up there reading some prepared text that they could disrupt okay they would throw things from the audience right and I would go right back at them I use things I've drawn from films I had seen all kinds of things and I kept the audience laughing and in fact it was it wasn't probably the most famous one is when I gave a lecture at MIT in in 1991 and the Boston Police said it had to be I call that thousands of people turned out people who were tired of the political correctness of the 1980s and wanted something new because what I stand for is I stand for anti Dogma anti ideology the free mind and a free voice that's what I stand for I mean I am NOT I am NOT a part of any group I don't belong to you know any any circle whose ideology I'm trying to I trying to put forward you have said that probably the most notorious sentence that you have ever written is this one it's civilization had been left in female hands we would still be living in grass huts mm-hmm slap in the face to women no what I'm saying is that oh that women have been close to nature have had a kind of ecological view of nature perhaps from the very beginning and that it that we would still be living in grass huts meaning we would be in in in dwellings made of perishable materials organizer on the hearth okay you see because the grass that was organized on the hog that that the whole impulse toward building in stone toward breaking through the the barriers the boundary lines of the tribe of the extended family actions coming from men men like forced themselves out there and and and I are even slaughter I think it's it's men who who have caused you know the great migrations and he and human history they've expanded you know the range of the species and they're the ones who are always building the great bridges and building the great monuments risk-taking terrible physical risks that I think that throughout history you've had this you know the kind of magnetic symbolism of the hearth that is associated with with women and I think it's it seems quite natural women when they're pregnant or when they're nursing babies need to be still you can have identified with the Amazons the Amazons you know with their bows and arrows who ran with the men who went out with out with the hunting expeditions and and brought back the meat and did all the dirty work 1990 again this would have been the year that the sexual persona came out in in hardback you were writing in the New York Times yeah Madonna yes yeah and you wrote that she was the future of feminism there was the first op-ed piece I wrote was this defense of Madonna and not in the end of 1990 that was like the first thing that where people realized also who kind of who I was and at the end of that article I said Madonna is the future of feminism now this was in 1990 people said this is completely mad people a feminist wrote in and this is completely this is terrible this is awful sheep she prostitutes the image of women etc but it turned out to be accurate because a whole younger generation of women came forward influenced by Madonna who embraced their sexuality embraced fashion and beauty and and throughout all that anti male you know and anti-pornography kinds of obsession of the 1980s of feminism of Andrea Dworkin and Catherine MacKinnon so now when I was saying in the early 1990s that Charlie's Angels had had been too me power of the cutting edge of feminism moving forward people thought I was mad or the Bond girls I love the James Bond girls whoo-hoo-hoo feminism Norma thought of as sexist well here we are you know after a over a decade later and Charlie's Angels isn't remakes you know everything to them two movies The Drew Barrymore has put out you know with with them the Bond girls have documentaries about them you know on cable TV so I feel as if I just feel like like a paradise all of the issues that people were trying to Lynch me for in the early 1990s so those arguments are over and the younger women have won have they also won in that issue where you wrote a news day in 1991 about date rape you said the date rape controversy shows feminism hitting the wall of its own broken promises right now that might my essay for Newsday early 1991 is probably one of my most reproduced pieces of writing and have it in I should say in sex art in American culture which was your book from 1992 yes my essay collection now that that is today it's in it's in college readers it's in composition texts it's a and the reason for that is that teachers have found that it stimulates discussion among the students what I'm saying in that article is that women must take responsibility if they are emancipated for their own behavior in social relationships that we have to get beyond the period of the chaperone the dueña of the avenging male figures the the you know the brother who will come in and punch out your date for you I found that the that the the feminism of the 80s and early 90s was asking male authority figures back into sex that what that this was running to the authority figure come and and punish him for what he did on the day I felt that a strong woman should be prepared to negotiate her own social relationships and be ready to defend herself and I said for example about Madonna I said you know I said you know if you're gonna dress like Madonna you have every right to dress like Madonna but if you're going to just like Madonna at 3:00 a.m. okay if you're advertising you better be ready to sell that's the point I'm making that that the way you dress and the way you behave is actually what you actually there are these subliminal messages that are below the level of yes or no in sexual relationships I'm saying to women do not put yourself into positions from which you have to be rescued again free women must be ready to defend them at the time was a radical view but now again I think that it's seen as the sensible view and do you feel that today are you ready to when you go out to to support yourself to defend yourself even physically well I feel that no one has the right to put his or her hand on you without your permission okay that you are the total rule of your own body if you say no at any stage and in sex acts a that you know the person you know must stop nevertheless there are very crazy people out there there are people who are just mentally disturbed I always say you know like Ted Bundy lately that the rate murderer gay was an extraordinarily charming man that's the problem today with all this sort of strange or dating women should not be putting themselves under the control of strangers it's a women you know have to be you have to be aware that with freedom with modern masturbation come responsibilities Camille Polly has decided to be with us for three hours this afternoon we thank her for that and we're gonna open up our phone lines and invite you to join us here's how you can join in 202 5 8 5 3 8 9 0 if you live in the East or central time zone 202 5 8 5 3 8 9 1 if you live in the mountain or Pacific time zone you can also email a question if you would prefer to do it that way and the address is book TV at c-span org again that's book TV at c-span org and some people have already emailed in questions I'm just going to dig into them this first one by anne marie mcmahon from catholic university she's a major in music history and literature asked what your take is on Ann Coulter Ann Coulter well I think Ann Coulter is a I think she has a brilliant mind I I'd love to watch her trash all those little genteel ladies on the on network TV when she goes on she's uncontainable on the other hand I do feel that she should take more time with her written materials I think that there's an inflammatory and perhaps I'm afraid sometimes careless way that the books have been assembled that have allowed her opponents to criticize her and dismiss her work so I I wish that she actually I wish that she were a college teacher I mean I wish that she were more part of the institutional setting this email question asked you what do you think do you think that Hillary Clinton will ever be president I don't but I hope that Hillary will will run my history with Hillary is a long one I was sitting on the Phil Donahue show 1992 debating Susan Faludi on the very day that Hillary on the campaign trail made her infamous remark well I could have stayed home and Jake cookies so Donahue ran this tape for us it was the only thing that Susan Faludi and I agreed on we both admired Hillary very much we thought this is fabulous so a woman of the 1960s generation and you know I voted for the Clinton that I became so disillusioned with with the Clintons and wrote a notorious cover story for the New Republic in 1996 called ice queen drag queen they created an enormous storm okay there and then slowly I think many liberals came to my view became more suspicious of Hillary but I had a turnaround when I reviewed her her new book for The Times in in London recently and I felt that it was a credible statement that of the continuity of her thinking about about social policy from long before she met Bill Clinton I felt that even if she you know I I could I could hear her voice and even if others helped her with the book I thought this is a woman who knows how to hire a good staff because that is a well-put-together book now that book is selling and selling and a book like that doesn't just sell for PR its selling through word-of-mouth some people are enjoying the book and the pictures so I she needs to run but I would prefer a Dianne Feinstein okay I admired I find saying she's mature she's articulate she's steady she is deeply informed in intelligence issues about you know security issues and so on I do wish she were running for president now you did say in a Newsday quote and let's this is maybe more about Bill Clinton than Hillary Clinton anyone who stays married to an infantile drooling cereal groper deserves what she gets and by that I mean I don't care about their marriage I really don't care whether Hillary stays married to Bill or not that's irrelevant to me I I believe in private behavior in the private realm but then the public realm is where women need to achieve so I don't care what goes on I don't care if the crockery is flying lamps are flying I don't care okay I'm just concerned about Hillary's behavior in the public realm I hear I have to say you know I her to not be so insulated by by the security guards and and then a PR she's like always rolling like Evita perón and that's this kind of cocoon and she doesn't really deal get engaged with the people I think that's what she's missing that's why I just failed to see how she's gonna win many primaries aside from the the north east and the west coast she hasn't doesn't have the experience of just going out and that grueling way on the campaign trail and mingling with people in an improvisational manner well you don't have a security guy but how do you guard your own privacy I am extremely private person and people may see me on TV okay but I absolutely value my privacy above all I'm not out I don't schmooze I'm not out it's you know it's a fancy events movie premiere is always being invited all kinds of things I just I don't go there I just I I tried to preserve I'm a thinker and a writer and a teacher and I need to preserve my inner rhythms I you know I live in the suburbs like work downtown Philadelphia but I live in the suburbs I must have trees you know I feel like an ordinary person I go to the shopping mall I want to I want preserve that sense of ordinariness and always be responding to life as it occurs okay many of our writers have allowed us in to show our viewers where they write as a way of explaining to them you said no you should know because of your privacy and you also didn't want our cameras or any cameras and where you teach exactly from the moment I became known in the media in the early 1990s I that was that was absolutely a line I drew I will not let reporters into the classroom I think it's wrong to allow your students to be made somehow props of your off-campus prominence I think that's completely right now how we're getting a very large lecture that's different and then people there was a large audience they'll be quite different but no I mean I've never permitted that I think that that's very important to have a sign of privacy oh my god oh that where I work and you know how I work my desk Oh My heavens that's like I'm sort of my soul but you have you have a website of your fan your fans have a website free well they may have created it but I certainly done it there a number of them have been created over the years and the web is just a mass of something sometimes misinformation all kinds of things I mean people have-have created sites but I had to I do not have my own website they say that's electronically stalking you do you feel that way electronic hello electronic stalking not at all because because I was such a part of when I joined salon magazine I was writing for it from its inaugural issue on right up until 1980 1995 to 2001 when I left to join the I'm a contributing editor now at Interview magazine but you know I feel I was part of the construction of of a voice on the web for nonfiction for magazine articles and and so on so I feel I feel part of you know part of a pioneering quality of the web of the 1990s let's get to some phone calls for you Louisville Kentucky is first yes dr. peckler I'm a huge fan of yours and I certainly hope that you continue your would restart your column every once in a while thanks I've been a great fan of yours but what I'd like to ask you is the first time I heard of you it was like a kind of an intellectual explosion went off and and and someone actually talked about sexual liberation and but not being part of the the as you call it the a lot the radical left or something and I'd like to know as the conservative myself and someone who what sexual liberation how do we convince these people to be to understand that the two are possibly compatible conservatism and sexual liberation well I have detailed my philosophy in a long piece called no law in the arena in my book vamps and tramps and their I feel that there should be a strict line between the private realm and the public I feel that in the private realm that's that's you know the government has no right to intrude to it where people conduct themselves with other individuals as long as consensual and behavior I feel that the government has no business in crossing that line but in the public realm I think that is the area where we can ask for standards and for example you know Bill Clinton could have been could have had mistress's in a million motels in this world I would have applauded him but to use the the hallways off the Oval Office was a disgrace that's the public realm okay that should not be violated by private peccadilloes Vance's tramps 1994 this is what it looked like do you remember what it was like posting for this covered well I designed that cover okay that you know and I'm imitating okay a number of things diana rigg in the avengers at that point that's what came to mind when i yes i'm also imitating a favorite war Andy Warhol picture of Elvis Presley about to draw from the holster I mean I actually have a knife strapped to my hip and I have a an AR a jacket a military jacket from the army-navy store surplus jacket that I'm wearing and I'm this is what I'm saying is with again the free woman must be ready to make her own way in the world that's what it's like a division of the armed Amazon San Francisco yeah Camino I want to thank you for the further work you're doing and for the image of hemin ISM that you're putting out where women can be strong and can can partner with men instead of being against miss thank you the question I wanted to ask you is could you talk about broadly what what you think about sex work as you know prostitutes have been them both stigmatized by the mainstream culture and oppressed illegalized and also have been made made villains and victims by the by the feminist well in my writing I've taken a strong position of defense of of prostitutes of strippers of drag queens in fact that the title of my book vamps in tramps is an allusion to this aspect I feel that you see that that Western culture is actually a fusion of two traditions the judeo-christian which is I'm afraid often rather anti sex and and in many of its incarnations and the greco-roman going all the way back actually to ancient Babylon so what what the Bible condemns as Babylonian sexuality I have celebrated in my in my own work now I don't think that you know that prostitutes should be should be soliciting in the doorways of schools or churches or things like that I think there's room for for questions of public order but again I you know I am proud to say that I support I support prostitutes and I have a feeling of solidarity with them so Daniel Lewis from Washington DC asked this in an email question sex and sexuality has always had a role in American politics how is your role how is your view is how in your view is our time different from others so I guess bringing this the sexuality issue back to politics well we had this enormous explosion of the sexual revolution in the 1960s and in and in the the entire decade just went madly out of control so that so that there was a conservative reaction by the end of the end of the decade in Richard Nixon some election so then what happened is that you would think that the that the progressive or liberal side of a sexual equation feminism so on would take up the flag instead there was a odd kind of a fusion between a doctrinaire feminism of Andrea Dworkin and Catherine MacKinnon with with conservatives to drive for example Playboy and penthouse out of the convenience stores and and and in Dworkin and to and her people want which tried to pass laws that were later declared local ordinances that were later declared unconstitutional there were all kinds of statements and pornography causes rape things like that which I think if it knew absolutely never been proven so so again we keep on getting this strange eruption of our Aboriginal Puritanism again and again this even though the country itself is geographically so much larger the New England Puritan tradition seems to return again and again in it so that our arguments about sex particularly sex is a plasterer politics seem rather naive an idealistic to Europeans who don't care at all what politicians you know do in their in their private hours so I think that the Puritan influence is also though it's positive in terms of our our the way we work hard in America there's a sense of rigor self-discipline of of Independence and free thought that also was the Puritan influence I'm afraid it's built into our character I don't see how we're ever going to escape it because that whole issue of gay marriage just come up most recently planned I'm on the record on this question of gay marriage since the early 1990s and I speak about also and no long the arena in France and tramps and I feel that that that it's a mistake ever to use the word marriage for the marriage is a word associated with the sacraments of the church going back to to Latin the word marriage a sense from the Latin why gay activists have have inflamed situation further with this about using that word I prefer the idea of domestic partnership or civil unions I feel that that what needs to be investigated is any special benefit given to heterosexual married couples that is not being would not be given to to unmarried heterosexual couples or who are life partners and also a homosexual partners I think that's what we need we need the state and and church must be separated and wherever wherever we have any kind of intrusion of religious some assumptions in government process I believe they have to be removed and that that is in fact a thrust of the last 250 years of the development of the modern democracies is that have that played out in your own life too I guess the question is in your own life if you had time soon when your own relationship in which you felt like well I've been with alton maddox for 10 years now and we've discussed this i think you know if what we originally partner you have with my i'm lucky enough that my university you know offers that there aren't that many benefits that accrue to it but i do think there are things i mean this business about oh you know at the living wills or being excluded from from the room at the hospital or or property whatever that's a it's absurd a protest that any gays are making because you can you can make your own will and makes you make sure that all these things are taken care of however in cases of social security let's say where social security does not transfer to a homosexual partner that really needs to be looked at in terms of in terms of past precedent it mayn't me i take this opportunity may i dentists to say that a scoop for c-span our family expanded last year Allison gave birth to a son Lucien I have kept this completely out of the media very successfully he'll be a year old this fall and scoop what's been what has that done yeah well um it's been great I just been credible I mean it's been quite quite amazing quite an amazing how do you plan on bringing him up well I hope as a freethinker Alison is a free thinker as I am and she's a an artist and independent arts curator in fact she's a very productive year last year she produced a book called a Sex in the City an illustrated history of sex in New York and I wrote the introduction to that called American Babylon where I show all the very eerie kind of resemblances between between Manhattan and the Babylon of antiquity that now has to come back into the news so much because of the our incursion to Iraq let's go to Bowie Marilyn oh yes first every respect miss put on this speaker there and I had two quick ones first on feminism I think there's a split between what I would say were to reform and the revolution reform was just you know get rid of the bad degrading treatment and the abuse but they basically accept secondary treatment you know the chivalrous type thing and then there's the revolution who really want true equality and to me Sally I think there's not very many women who really want to be equal and I Winterthur than that but my main point is about a liberal I consider myself a liberal and I'm able to criticize anyone and and really bring new thought and I'm I want to know do you have a problem with the definition because most people that are referred to as Liberal Democrats they're really leftist who are conservative meaning that they have an agenda just to say a Tom DeLay is a religious person and he takes his worldview and tries to fit the facts to that there's plenty leftist who take their worldview and try to fit the facts whereas to me a liberal is someone who looks at all the facts and is informed by as many responsible sources as possible and didn't try to do what's best for as many people as possible and to me that's what a liberal is as opposed to a conservative who says well what does the Bible say well that's my view and and and I just wondering can there be a better is there a group for what I'm talking about or is it am i destined be called a liberal even though I'm I don't support the teachers union I don't you know people say do you support the teachers union you know there's a list that they call liberal when they're really just left you know they're on cooee thank you yeah well there was so much so much in there and so many yeah I mean I think in many ways the liberal wing of the Democratic Party has become a hostage to special interest groups and the teachers union everything else that that's but that is that is a serious problem but I think in general one can one can say that the conservative is someone who looks backward to a time when things were better when when a time of the of the forebears when where there were bedrock traditional values that we need to return to or as a liberal is generally looking forward in thinking how to remake society to - so the the liberal for example will see the Constitution as more malleable as a document that is in evolution that needs to be constantly revised from from century to century where as a conservative will say this is what the founders envisioned and we must not and they in their wisdom they must not be deviated from but right now I think all these terms are kind of a terrible muddle when I came on the scene in the early 90s it was a PC era the political correctness okay had was entrenched in the major media were utterly hostage to it the the there was a kind of doctrinaire liberalism that was quite automatic at that period and also in the university campuses and then over the period of the 90s you know it's almost reversed so at the beginning of the 90s I think in conservatives young younger conservatives in particular had a tremendous intellectual kinds of alertness because they were attacking all these old dinosaur like precepts of liberalism that that had they were now had no connection to contemporary life but now it's always kind of reversed I think that the word liberal is starting to come back again and to perhaps be rejuvenated it forward just what the caller said to bring it back to its old idea of someone who is I thought it was open-minded future-looking right but I don't want to do to abandon either one I think we have to build on on the great things of the past but always with a sense that's you know that that society is a human creation it's a it is an organism itself and it should constantly be revised and not allowed to ossify or to calcify Crescent City California hello mrs. Paglia I really will to express my admiration for your intellectual integrity and your adherence to rigorous academic scholarship scholarship thank you this is so so refreshing and it's so rare to have it degree that you have in my opinion thank you I would like to ask your opinion about two things about the professor Allen Bloom's book in the 80s they called the closing of the American mind whether you think it was accurate and helpful and is still pertinent and also what do you think of the National Association of scholars a group of professional professors are organized to try to fight political correctness that the correctness thank you so much for your efforts I thank you appreciate it a lot thank you oh well well the Ellen blooms book is usually thought to have inaugurated the culture wars it's an attack on the Academy and on the provincialism of American thinking and so on I I agree with Ellen Blum about about the need for for these selection of great works that students should be educated about I believe there is a continuity in Western culture that is attuned to much today on campuses has been sort of thrown out the window but but there is a kind of coldness or a kind of limitation to ellen blooms view of what culture consists of I myself am much more interested in in in in movies and and and media and also the visual arts and I feel that bloom is a philosopher and therefore there's just a kind of rationalism perhaps in his point of view that I felt as a member of 1960 generation is a little bit constraining because we are the rock and roll generation that are about emotional expression that's what I felt was need an academia Dean had gotten very desiccated by the time by that my mentor Harold Bloom was having us call his clashes with it as well in the late 50s and in 1960s so I think Alan Bloom deserves credit he was an honorable man who I think did an enormous service by putting this thing on the in center stage for us just discuss but at the same time I would supplement his his work or his his educational model by about fifty nine thousand other things right then the second thing National Association Scotland thank you the National Association of scholars I wish they would I mean I they're doing good work but they're not as prominent yet I don't think they're quite as publicity savvy as I wish that they were I myself do not belong to that group I also was disillusioned with the MLA the Modern Language Association and I quit it in disgust okay to join the new and dissident media ecology Association that was founded by Professor Lance Strait str8 EE of Fordham University and the the great models of this organization are Marshall McLuhan a great hero of mine from the 1960s and Neil postman of NYU who is a severe critic of contemporary media and media ecology is an analysis of the entire environment that we exist in it's built books and Technology and and radio television all of those things that change us that become us and we know what's in the the whole point of this association is to find it is the to basis of it are Toronto in New York City a North American vision of the media that we created enough with the Frankfurt School from Germany the antediluvian thing enough with Lacan there Dan Foucault the French who know nothing about Bowdre there are nothing about American culture these people okay no these are the idols on campus so people who are interested in enjoying the dissociation please look at the website media ecology Association has its website and five years old now and booming Chattanooga yeah thank you I was wondering if you have any comments on the concept of the shadow I did not see it much in your works when I read it and also why do you think television hasn't been a more effective tool in the classroom thank you the shadow shadow you are you referring to the the radio show that is that what you're preferring to color I'm not sure caller is still there anyway I'm sorry I haven't written I think about the shadow but television in the classroom I am I'm a little bit skeptical about television in the classroom I think that students already have too much television outside the classroom they're raised with it now I I love television I have five televisions in my house and and and and so I can I can go through the whole house and not miss anything but I feel the quality of television is is declining enormous ly I think that what students need is much more training in the old fundamentals of how to how to read and write I think that that the students are graduating from from school these days with a clown pablum I mean the graduates of the Ivy League for heaven's sakes are like drifting into into jobs in New York City and they can they get you know they can't they they're general knowledge cultural knowledge it seems to me so limited they don't even have a sixth kills so I think they the the you know the even spelling I mean things that they have to do with lunch the kids know how to work the computer they're masters of the computer but what I'm worried about is a decline in book writing and art making if when when my university the University of the Arts has been teaching 20 years next next year has every kinds of the traditional fine arts major in it from illustration to ceramics to into new things like writing for film and TV it's jazz dance acting all kinds of things and so on and they also have a web design in a web work and I and people my students who are in this area are so forward-looking laid the people who are working in animation also but I'm worried about the about that whether the next generation and following generations are going to have any interest in or patience with the artifact the artifact of the book the artifact of the painting or the freestanding sculpture I'm afraid we're heading for kinds of cultural wasteland if education does not get back to basics okay and agree about a certain line the historical line of I don't just believe in Western culture being taught I am a multiculturalist and so far as I believe we must have a kind of global perspective in education but I have said for thirteen years now since I came on the public scene that we need to have since of tradition history chronology things moving down in time what the way kids are being taught today is very a historical thing kids know nothing there they've never taught a date they have no sense whatever everything is closer than the present they have no sense of the span of time or how large the world is so I'm afraid that as I would say television with very little television please I think in education it's too simple a crutch for teachers to gain student attention from Quito Christensen an email question to you we know from all of your books that Katharine Hepburn was an important influence on your thinking and behavior do you have any words on losing her even now Katherine happened it was my first great role model right what I saw a movie of hers on late-night TV in Syracuse New York in 1959 I was 12 I became mad for her mad for Hepburn why I she was I don't I didn't know what it was I thought what is it what is this an energy that's coming off of her I then realized that it was a spirit of these women of the 1920's 1930's it had been lost in the post-war era of domesticity after you know after the veterans came back and as the baby boom and so on and so forth so I became fixated on that period you know and we now know I mean we didn't know at the time that Katharine Hepburn's own mother had been an ardent suffragette had been head of the Connecticut suffrage association Hepburn herself had had marched in in these parades as a child giving out balloons nope and so on and that her aunt was even more radical radical feminist so I have I felt the feminist spirit from Katharine Hepburn leaping off that tea that TV screen these old movies and I constructed a graph of all Hepburn films ever made I got from the library and I checked I try to see them all and at that time you couldn't get much information about popular culture part of the culture was still dismissed okay so my passionate interest in the media okay was something in in old Hollywood films was something that I you didn't share I got no one to share with this happen gay guys I mean only gay guys we're interesting another thing so a Hepburn she lived a very long time but I absolutely agree with you who are saying now that she was one of the women of the century but but she's not a woman who was a mother she's not a woman who was able to to to bridge the roles of the professional woman with the woman who is the it was really a more traditional wife and mother I think it's very very difficult that's the tremendous difficulty I think facing women has still not been resolved how can the the child is so needy okay the child is this you know once as much attention as possible I don't agree with the old feminist position that we need an endless government daycare centers like I don't think that that kind of warehousing of kids is that it's the right model I came out of an Italian background where where children were made enormous attention did with the center of attention at the same time is they were very disciplined okay so the the Mediterranean cultures in general like Latino culture today or african-american culture is a very child centered I think that that's what we began to move away from that in feminism with the infatuation with the career woman through a very long period there San Francisco yes I just like to thank Camille for having the courage to be herself throughout his years thank you and my question would be is what will it take for society at large to see through the illusions created by our singular physical gender and into the dual sex domain of the psyche and personality of the individual well I believe that there may be a problem here that is that it's it the realm of art is where one explores the ambiguity of gender and also the private realm that I've spoken of earlier I'm not sure to what degree we can export these ideas into the public realm without disordering it and I worry because as a student of history I have seen that every time a culture gets supposedly sophisticated and open and tolerant toward alternate lifestyles toward homosexuality toward gay marriages towards sex changes it's usually a decadent culture that's on the verge of collapse like ancient Rome so I I'm worried about that it's a question I'm constantly asking in my book sexual persona which the subtitle of which is art in decadence okay from Nefertiti to vent to Emily Dickinson I love decadence I admire decadence as a complex historical mode but I'm worried I'm when when conservatives speak about the homosexual agenda they're right okay when they speak about the permeation as a fusion of our of the media with with you know pro-gay slogans and program messages they're right okay and at a time when knowledge of the Bible which I'm an atheist I do not believe in it and that the Bible is the Word of God but the Bible is a magnificent work of art when the greatest ever created it is full of messages and and and consolation for four times of life okay where if trouble and so on I worry about a culture where where knowledge of the Bible is slipping away even among the religious whereas we have these trashy shows that are entertaining glitzy about you know Queer Eye for the straight guy and all that kind of thing I mean it may seem like this is good this is progressive I worry about a massive backlash because Christianity rise of Christianity was that backlash against Greco Roman paganism okay and it's now 2,000 years later okay the idea that a progressive culture can sustain itself okay in this kind of theatrical way flamboyant way after all I dressed in my transvestite Halloween costume is one day per year I wasn't wearing it at wearing those costumes every day it was kind of Saturn alien thing I think that these questions need to be asked much more by people who are on the transgendered side on the on the gay activist side they must study history study history right nothing ever lasts and what comes after you may be far worse than what you're trying to reform right now how do you feel about the growing anti-americanism overseas oh this question oh this drives me crazy I mean oh my god this is one one of the one of my problems with the incursion into Iraq okay this is tremendous inflammation of anti-americanism around the world I think this is a terrible legacy that has come of this and I for example last year the Foreign Press tried to get me repeatedly to to write things or to comment to reporters about about the about the prospect of war in Iraq I refused okay I feel is wrong for American intellectuals to to foment in that anti-american feeling that's already abroad and so I would finally did express my feelings to David Talbott in an interview for earlier this year for salon but I mean I am highly critical of intellectuals like Susan Santa who have made a career a career of going around the world you can you are fetid okay you are you can be a you are a claim that the minute you sayings anything anti-american abroad way they people will late treasure your feet to do that so when the Dixie Chicks went over there what the Dixie Chicks have a right to say whatever they want whenever they wanted okay but I don't think it was right I don't think it was right for the Dixie Chicks to say that in England at a performance to get a good response from the audience I want the Dix chickens to come back here okay and say it everywhere in America and you're fine with that oh they had a right to say it in England too and they shouldn't be criticized for that on the other hand people who want to boycott them have also have a right but I think that it's just there is a deep anti-americanism in the way humanities are taught on campus now I was one the first people to raise this issue by the way in my essay in junk bonds and corporate raiders which which the progressive editor Herbert Gold are published in Orion it's like a long as they said my first book second at first I'll a collection sex art an American culture but I attack the anti-americanism you know of the theorists who are so enamored of Michel Foucault and said I said that it's something extremely wrong and in fact in the first chapter of sexual persona I also say it is utterly hypocritical for our intellectuals to be sneering at American capitalism well enjoying all the conveniences of American capitals and now my family came to America from the poverty of southern Italy and I went and we all loved America in my family I have a tremendous love of America tonight but I think that what's happening now in in because with the Iraq issue unresolved it's a terrible kinds of of a kind of American boosterism a sort of all of your your forests are against us they're coming out from conservative voices on talk radio and I mean people are not unpatriotic for criticizing the Iraq war it's not we know you're not pro Saddam okay an anti Bush okay by criticizing the you know government policy so I think that the patriotism issue has become more flame that anytime since since since the Vietnamese war well I want to get to this next caller but there is another email air here says do you think that broadcasting of your social messages are fueling Islamism as Lomb yours mine using well I have written since you know the early 90s I have talked about the you know might my proposal for a reform of education not just in America but on the global stage was comparative religion I believe that the religions you know I'm an atheist or I believe that that the study of world religions dear Christianity Islam Hinduism and Buddhism at that's the key to world understanding so I but I I'm afraid okay that's my confidence that you know in Islam was shaken by the by the absence of significant protest among is you know Muslims in the year following the attack on the World Trade Center I became very uneasy by that I could not I felt that the enormous mass of Muslims are peaceable they are peaceful but obviously the way Islam is constructed in this kind of non hierarchical and non centralized way as opposed to the Roman Catholic Church I that that what you have is an intense and inflamed minority ok the Islam assists re who intend the destruction of Western civilization being essentially uncontrolled within that religion so I had become extremely uneasy about by the trends in Islam I and again I'm someone who reads history so I I look at things in terms of 200 or 300 years cycles like the history of Byzantium or something hundreds of years of cycles and so I'm looking down the road and down the road I see our Iraq incursion okay as causing a perpetuation of the kind of Islamic terrorism that attacked the World Trade Center and I I don't I don't think that this was the way to go to put our tanks into Baghdad okay I don't think was the way to defuse the anti-americanism in Islamic fundamentalism now let's get to that phone call San Antonio thank you for waiting go ahead you're on with Camille Polya doctor partly yes yeah I love you you're uh well my favorite columnist there's a hundred Thompson's Orson Scott Card Rush Limbaugh on you thanks but ever since the you stubborn persona no idea where to read you right now well what are you what are you doing I guess in terms of a regular column well I think thank you very much for your remarks I I just found it too exhausting I need to write books okay so I'm currently finishing a book on poetry for Pantheon books I've been running it for three years because I feel it's really important for me to go back to books but I'm writing an occasional column for for Interview magazine where I'm a contributing editor but you know occasionally I do things like this Hillary in a book review and and so on but I'm afraid that um you know thank you very much on but in Russell may say about Rush Limbaugh yes I special my you know his views and mine are quite different particularly I recently about the Iraq war and so on but I respect him as an independent voice and I think that the the definition of Rush Limbaugh by liberals and by the Democratic Party is atrocious because this is this is a man who created an entire program out of nothing to say he's a person okay for came from the the Midwest who through his own independent mind is this for this this very active imagination of his managed to create an empire for himself and he and he - he is no stooge for any group he's independent man yes now he's relaxing a little more he's joining golf clubs you know that's good more power to him he deserves you know to rest more but I think I I have gotten so much a pleasure I've gotten more it's intellectual stimulation from listening to Rush Limbaugh often when I'm driving my car then then then all those theorists and a khadeem Arian people can read you there now yes now another example from the viewer yes here is my most recent essay which is it's called cults and cosmic consciousness religious vision in the American 1960s is a cover story of the the most this a winter issue of Orion again Ryan excuse me I mean I think well I think it's her wear gold or is the editor it's a it's a classics journal Journal of classes and humanities at the Boston University and in this essay I speak of the I hope that the web web link will available to the viewers so that they can read this very very long article it's an overview of the 60s from the point of view of religion because I feel this is one one aspect of the 60s that is too much neglected conservatives attack the 60s with you know it whatever kind of a cudgel and I think that they're missing the spiritual impulse that I think motivated so many of the people that I remember from from that era I feel but but it's been a model I mean the New Age movement that's that is the result is a terrible model it's tremendous new New Age movement has tried to revise your day of Christianity by removing the judgmentalism the anti sex you know aspects of it but I think that people are lost I think that Western culture is it's not an ingrate shape it's not in great shape many of the worst things said about it by by Islamic fundamentalists are are in fact true people are questing questing for their sexual identity questing for for for personal relationships in perhaps ways that none of those those two things can sustain I mean maybe we need to return to the great fundamentals you know to just the study of nature the study of great books I mean the study of religion so that's why I feel that that even even though I don't believe in God I believe in nature I feel that the world religions are great complex symbol systems far more interesting and illuminating sustaining that anything produced by European post-structuralism or post-modernism and that this in that whenever I teach talk about religion to students no matter what background they come from their craving at their thirsty the kids today are thirst of their wandering this utterly been no media environment with us these trashy shows we're not in the period of great Hollywood anymore we're not in the period of great stars anymore even Madonna is on the decline I mean there hasn't been a a major star performance and Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct 1992 okay so we're wandering this desert wasteland of enough media people are just in and we look like I mean we look like hedonistic you know you know materialistic empty-headed imperialist or people abroad I can understand the anti Americanism that's happening we've just got to pull ourselves out of this you can see that website on your screen right now that camille polly was talking about and you can go to it at dot edu / Orion next call for her in San Diego yes hi I hate to burn the lovefest here and while I respect you as the most rational of sort of conservative point of views I've heard on c-span you're it's just swelled with so many falsehoods this is your interpretation I'm in anthropological archaeologists so of course I learned history I don't know what you're talking about it universities that's all we learn is history and I teach fundamentals I teach basic writing and what I have are a bunch of conservative kids and you're right they don't know history but they certainly they have some longing for a traditional past that their conservative Republican parents have taught them that never existed I mean first of all back to your gender roles this is so I'm glad your ancestors we're good with their hands what does that say about men that's absurd second of all it's an anthropologist if you look around the world gender roles are specific and you should know this as a historian that our gender roles are specific to a post-industrial revolution America they are not shared if you go to the IJ and the Philippines the women are using bones and arrows if you go to the market and after cutting a zombie women are the toughest minded women you'll ever see are gender roles are specific to our time in my place this ridiculous thing about gender roles women are it is so historically and culturally bound and Americans part of white people hate it is we think our way is the only way because we don't have any sense of ourselves and that it was different and that before the Industrial Revolution gender roles were different and it totally changes over time and the other thing in this idea of progress there is no such thing that is why Darwin did not publish his book when he was afraid of wasn't that we evolved from apes what he was afraid of is the implication that there is no such thing as progress things just change that's what I learned as an archaeologist what is a constant in archaeology is not the ideology but elites manipulating ideology in order to control people and what I'm worried about is this idea of fundament what your what fundamental I keep hearing about traditional values is that lynching black people that's a traditional American value is that what we want San Diego thank you oh well I'm not sure why she was disagree with me because apparently everything she said after the lynching part I agreed with absolutely everything I think I've been absolutely clear that I in that I've talked about the the way gender roles have changed radically from for example the 1920s and 30s whoa the Katharine Hepburn and Amelia Earhart era was quite different than the social role being imposed on me the gender role in the 1950s oh my gosh yes these things are very much in flux nevertheless in my work I do believe that there is some basis in in biology for for gender roles and you know my book sexual persona begins with the the vegan of the Venus of Willendorf which is a cult object found in an Austrian site that dates perhaps from 25,000 years BC and I talked about what this very this obese object which is blind with with it was hardly it like sort of flipper arms and no fee what that means about the image of woman understanding of woman that was projected at a time of the survivalist life where people were desperate for in times of famine for food and so on and then I in sexual personally I go on to the the bust of Nefertiti and look at the division of woman that had was transformed in Egyptian aristocratic society where all of a sudden now we don't have the large breasts of the Venus of Willendorf or that are like milk sex but are the small elegant breasts of these of the upper-class women so it adds that what I call the you the birth through the Western I where we there's a migration from from the from the solar plexus to the to the I into to this to this projection that that's what Western culture has been brilliant at this the projection of ambition and illusion and yes the delusion of progress Western culture has had been has been diluted with the idea of progress when the Star Wars Hinduism does not believe in that it believes in the great wheel of reincarnation is moving so I mean actually I just hardly anything I disagree with in that in that color Alexandria Virginia professor Polly I've enjoyed hearing your ideas for many years I especially enjoyed being on c-span a speech she gave the geopolitical Union several years ago where you talked about the change is a name of storms from just female names to including both male and female and I thought that was hilarious but more importantly you've identified yourself as a libertarian but then you also said that you voted for the Clintons twice and you've identified yourself as a member of the Democratic Party and I wonder with so many libertarians or people that believe that people should make their own choices unhindered by government how those people have mainly gravitated towards the Republican Party although obviously there's a split with the religious right why you identify yourself with the Democratic Party ah yes thank you so much for that wonderful question because I I do not belong to the libertarian Society not in many libertarians are indeed rather conservative it's because I believe in this sharp demarcation of the public versus private realm but I believe that there should be a safety net for the for the poor and the weak I believe there are legitimate areas for government activity I think that in the area of public clinics of upkeep of roads and so on I do believe that in the shrinking of government I believe that we have a sprawling government bureaucracy that survives administrations it doesn't matter whether it's a Republican or Democrat in the White House we have this endless number of laws laws and more laws I think there has to be a kind of Gordian not cutting way down in terms of regulations of intrusion into people's lives on the other hand I am well aware from the Industrial Revolution on of the tendency of capitalism that I which I believe in because I believe that capitalism has produced the modern independent woman the woman who is no longer dependent on father or her husband okay for her for her sustenance but I do believe that capitalism is Darwinian and that that government regulation government oversight is necessary one of my favorite poems that works so well in class and I've talked about it in social persona is William Blake's chimney-sweep poem where you see the atrocity of child labor and the you know that's the short lives of these poor children that were made to go up chimneys and to inhale that carcinogenic dust and so on it's only government action which always debated for decades saying to what degree did government have the right to come in to regulate a private industrial workplace it was a huge argument they went on for like 4050 years and in in in England so I I do feel that as that there's this kind of dynamic going on in modern industrial culture and that is that is we have I believe in entrepreneurship I believe that the vitality of business and so on but what we have today we have sprawling you know a you know a global kind of corporate entities and this and the you know the there's a kind of melea fossilization happening in the very mechanism that was invented in the industrial revolution in england has produced so much wealth and has produced our high standard of living so i think that again there is a role for government a great role for government but but i do not believe in the big government solution or the endless the micromanaging of social policy okay bye bye spy which is endorsed by so many members of the democratic party our emailer patricia Roy wants to know what you think of William F Buckley Jr well in Buckley Jr well I respect him as a great mind originally okay but I think that one but once he I think one once he he was like he was such a controversial list and he was such a he was such a an opposer to Kern orthodoxies beginning when in his college career at Yale and so on so I really respect him but I feel that by the time the 90s came around when I came on the scene okay that I wish that he had been a more active in the reform of campus politics I feel that he would make kind of lordly allusions to the matter and dismissive manner on his show but I became rather vexed over the period of the nineties I felt that if he had used his way to really you know wade into the issues that we wouldn't have this kind of lost generation which we have today I mean in humanities the situation is a disaster on college campuses some of our most you know brilliant and promising young people who did not go into the humanities were driven out of the graduate schools over the last 15 years and so we have wait there's a period now or it's trying to recuperate it so the bet the greatest activity that's been done at every forum has been done by David Horowitz on his site front even front page magazine dot-com I mean David Horowitz has done more in the last three years okay to to prod along campus reform then William F Buckley did throughout that period of the 90s when he when he should have been you know full full council's on him Philadelphia Polly's home city hi dr. paglia it's a it's a thrilling and honor to speak to you thank you I the few years back during the OJ Simpson murder trial you had made a comment about the nine one one tape recording that Nicole Simpson had made and your comment if you I hope you remember it was that what you were listening to what you were hearing was a woman playing a game mm-hmm and I found it so interesting because you know up until the time I hadn't really considered her role if you will in her own demise however minor it might be and I was wondering if you could either expand on that specifically or maybe just about women in abusive relationships in general mm-hm well I think one doesn't want to blame the victim and in any situation what an atrocity is committed are they even the death penalty by the way I might point out I believe that you know anyone who commits an atrocious murder or particularly you know torture merges of children these people should be executed I am in my opinion so I'm not excusing the assailant whoever it wasn't in this case although you know somebody must have suspected was a J himself I have said that that that was an example of this when the police are starting to be drawn in to private relationships whether through restraining orders okay or E or whatever where you're calling making 9-1-1 calls what you have then is a combat that starts to be a competition between the man and the police okay I think that women actually end up endangering themselves further by this because the may end up getting killed sometimes the the man wants to defeat the police I'll show you I can get to her that kind of thing so I think that that what we need much more of is a sense of psychology oddly enough psychology despite all of our talk shows that without always talking about personal relationships and so on a real psychological analysis seems to me to be receding over the last 10 years we need I think much more talking about relationships what what do people look for in sex I think there's a lot of symbolism in sex so what what are people seeking for when you have an unstable relationship pretty if it relationship has been abusive and it was with Nicole Sims of course she was young when they started going together the young Nicole but his his abusiveness to her his controlling of her him pushing her around physically was was was an item already in that relationship my my attitude is if someone does something to you now it's gonna continue don't think you're ever going to cure that that there is a a process of a psychological need and control in certain men that I have analyzed as having something to do with the mother complex ok some it's some shadowy game that the man is playing with the poor the wife or lover as proxy for his problems with his with you know with a feeling um you know over controlled or his identity obliterated by an older generation I think that there's a lot of these questions of psychology operating in gay identity - but you haven't for a bit anyone should mention anyone know there is such a thought police right now on this question okay for 20 years you cannot ask any questions okay about the psychological developments of either gay or actually heterosexual identity that's off the table right now the only problems for anyone are an oppressive public system that needs to be revised but many of these these these in these inner ambiguities and people inner drives are illuminated by art art is the best way to to actually discover who you are in my view okay it is not through passing more regulations having the police come in and and and and create order in a relationship that is unstable Mesa Arizona yes my question is about gun rights I loved what mr. Pylea wrote about in so on a couple of years ago that the right to bear arms is a protection against the tyranny of government and because governments always tend to accept and abuse people and the only thing that's protecting us is the the protection of individual gun rights and I have a second question as well and I formulated this as I was listening waiting online and that was you said that since Sharon Stone there's no be no real big breakout star may I suggest that in the recent movie swimming-pool looted beam Sonnier is somebody to take a look at I don't know if you've seen that movie I haven't had a chance I sure will well she's French of course and naturally non-american that shows that perhaps the European culture is revitalizing itself yes yes I do I don't I don't own guns I'm not interested in guns but all of my uncles you hunt they have a right to it to have guns no matter how liberals want to dice and slice it I believe that that it is very clearly stated in our Bill of Rights that there is a right to bear arms now that does not mean of course that people should be having assault weapons okay and having stockpiles of weapons in an urban environment I'm not sure exactly how to approach this except to to to Reese stabilize the social structure of the inner cities I think it's I think we can't be intruding into the rights of law-abiding gun owners outside the urban centers merely because of you know of pathologies that that are have nothing whatever to do with guns actually there's an emailer here who says have you noticed that all of your colors are male I think he's wrong I think there were two females so far but he says how much of your following how much of your following is male as opposed to female I haven't noticed a a spy it's usually men who like to call I mean the men like to call there's like this don't like to get in in time County but I've gotten a lot of letters over the years from from women who particularly the ones I just mentioned that were driven out of graduate school wants to go into the humanities and then and it just could not swallow that this diet of totally useless and jargon choked post-structuralism that they weren't they were forced to to study instead of real literature and art but I think that you know when I came on the scene in in 1990 okay I was speaking for four men in a way that hadn't been done I mean the Warren Farrell in his book the myth of male power a former member of now actually it was writing about these issues but but you know very few other people down Christina Hoff Sommers was out in the in the late 1980s when I was still unpublished you couldn't get my work published she was out there boldly challenging a feminist rhetoric in so many areas and she deserves a lot of credit for having initiated a you know something so much of the reform that has happened has happened I think very well within within feminism but no one was saying a good word about men okay at all and I thought it was ridiculous the point I was always making was that the world that we women enjoy now that allows us to be to be free and independent careers right what's created by men is this huge invisible structure and so many of the upper middle-class professionals don't even notice the kind of physical labor that goes into the production of their space okay that people who are put who are laying the roof you note are doing all the dirty work who are the plumbers and the you know the people who who are who are doing the construction of you know of our of our physical environment so coming out of an immigrant family that was originally a working class they my family came to work in the Endicott Johnson shoe factories in upstate New York I tend to have a a more positive view of Industry okay it also by the way but this is actually addresses something from a prior colonist I have a view of enlightened capitalism too because the the the Johnson family they were the owners of the Endicott Johnson shoe factory believe in taking care of the workers there was free medical care there was a help with housing we and where there was a freak freight cars full of citrus fruits cents up from from their Florida about whatever every winter and so on I thought this is there was a kind of caring a personal relationship that the Johnson family had with it with her with her immigrant you know Italian speaking for the most part workers I thought it was a kind of model of what what a enlightened businessman you know should be behaving like I think Oakland California girl to find you here on a Sunday morning Camilla died when I first heard you and when I started reading your books just stirred my blood the blood flowing between my ears here and all right thank you born in America and being a native English speaker I've learned to appreciate a little Italian through music study in film and I'm wondering if you've had any occasion to use it in your research or just casually and have your works been translated into Italian and how are they received and you have any favorite Italian movies oh my gosh there's so many questions there okay let me a favor Italian movies I don't know about current telling movies like my favorite ones are like la dolce vita eight and a half and um you know Monica Vitti and love insurer movies like the great classics of art film but yes my works up minute translated into Italian I'm I'm you know treated well I'm a kind of I guess icon in certain areas like I've written quite a bit for Corriere della Sera when I when I came on the scene it was at the same time as Madonna was becoming this world phenomenon and we were often tied linked together because I was kind of explain or explicator of Madonna at the time her background is an italian-american was very similar to mine I I certainly thought use Italian in terms of opera I mean E is a huge influence on me I was listening to Puccini operas throughout my variety of my Emily Dickinson chapter actually in in a sexual persona and actually there's music I different music for different chapters actually for my book I'm very influenced by but by music my my my my two sides the family spoke different dialects in in my childhood my mother's family comes from the small town called Chicano in Lhasa about 20 miles north of Monte Cassino and they speak Czech anaise it's completely different than the napalitano dialects spoken by my my Polya side grandmother who came from the small towns inland Benevento Caserta and so on so I actually in my childhood a lot so much is body language okay and child to that I think that's one reason why I have I say have such a instinctive understanding of dancers and why I have such a rapport with dancers and dance teachers and the whole dance school in my own school there's some there's a way that it's has live in their body I think that's almost some it's beneath the level of language Marissa and Silver Spring wants to know what you think of The Sopranos I love The Sopranos I go warpath warpath warpath I joined the National Italian American Foundation and protest against the soprano sorry I am I'm active also now with the order of the Sons of Italy that actually had its headquarters in Endicott right next to my own grandmother's house there I love The Godfather films I thought they were masterpieces I revere do Mario Puzo I interviewed him actually for the New York Times so on but the Sopranos I loved and the reason being and has to do I think not only for the way it portrays italian-american those buffoons right but the way it portrays working-class life I think the Sopranos is wildly out of date it actually has to do with a 1960s style okay of North Jersey not nineteen late nineteen eighties or like 9090 1990s and I coming is like I teach in Philadelphia now you know and there is a style okay that working-class people have a self-expression right that I feel is character on that show okay I feel that show is a favorite of of upper middle class viewers right who it's almost think they're getting an anthropological perspectives is something that doesn't exist anymore and in fact is being is it being a cartoon it's a cartoon vision I've tried to watch I haven't gotten through a whole program okay I could try to watch it okay and I become furious absolute fears I know many people who are who are great fans of the show so I don't want to you know you know my take on it shouldn't influence anyone else and this or at anything Chicago thank you um sexual persona which I read for the first time when I was in high school I'm 24 years old now and then I reread as I was studying in Florence Italy sitting under the great Duomo was the central formative text I think of my intellectual development and I'm happy to hear that you're focusing again on writing books I think that much more than columns the book is really the right genre for your ideas which have always been on a grand scale thank you along with sexual persona I your essay junk bonds and corporate raiders was essential in my decision not to attend graduate school in the humanities but rather to study law which is a profession in which I think honorable men and women can still adjust the intellect to real questions of society as you know thinkers of the Italian Renaissance and and Montaigne and people like that did in the past my question is given the current situation in academia especially in the humanities where should intelligent young people today direct their energy thank you I think actually that the theory boom thank God is waning yeah I feel that things think that situation is much better than it was in in 1991 when junk bonds and corporators was published and that by the way that is a long piece it's in sex art in American culture it is that is a very long piece that that de sex two books that I Ryan sent me to review about they were by two gay academics so Foucault admirers of classical antiquity and I was shocked when I actually read them when I saw the trashing of the all the generations of great scholars who had come before and who had like done this back-breaking work to put together all these great editions and gathered all this archaeological information that was being thrown out the window by these trendy careerists going from conference to conference so when I came on the scene in the early 1990s Lacan Gary died for Coe we're like God's dairy Dahl was slightly starting to fade because he had been revealed as a Nazi sympathizer oh I'd love that but but like ah was deeply entrenched in feminism and Foucault was like a god all right so I went after them and I and I show in that piece which I stand behind today I think it's just this is true today of all the insufficiencies in the thinking particularly of Foucault but I think that everybody knows now parently even the New York Times was reporting recently that there was a whole glum Conference of confab of theorists who got together and who said we're now with her now theory is over where are we gonna go now well yeah you trashed a khadeem you trashed it okay great art and literature K was diminished and then only for undergraduates who went through but in the eyes of the nation okay and now you we have this a wasteland okay it's being of the humanities again only didn't happen in the sciences okay and not in history property too much except in the most PC places so now I think it's actually a good moment and perhaps for graduate students to start rethinking about the humanities I mean my mantra is always hate Dogma I hate dog mind do not accept or affirm any way including me okay I've seen you for myself I'm simply a free thinker okay that's what I'm saying do not follow the the dogma of any institution any body of theory okay you must respond yourself to great literature and art I think we can I think the thing will be reconstructed but Harold Bloom said on this very program doesn't think it's going to happen in his lifetime and it may not happen in my lifetime but I'm convinced the humanities will rebound everything always rebounds in the long run the long run I think but the colleges are in a period now for retrenchment an obscene period of course of a extravagant you know tuition charges by the major universities I mean an enormous scam that the major media has ignored a scandal bankrupting middle-class families right so there's going to be a period of retrenchment it's being reported now all kinds of cutbacks at Stanford at Duke at Bryn Mawr and so on so I think after we go through this period okay what I'm worried about is that the humanities have been marginalized or the humanities have shown themselves worthless okay when I entered graduate school in 1968 poetry and literature and art we're at the high point of prestige what did the humanities departments do of in America okay to trash that and no no one cares what goes on on campus great no one believes that literature in our r.v any interest thanks to the mishandling of these issues okay bye on campus so anyway I would encourage young people who are watching this is a good moment okay to enter into into important put your impress your interpretation on the whole cultural tradition I think there is a great future in teaching if only we could liberate the public schools okay oh if all these unemployed PhDs and mas and the humanities what we can't employ them in the public schools okay why because of the of the you know this terrible parasitic teacher union thing and then we've got to have an education degree a worthless education degree okay put it put the PhDs to work in the classroom for heaven's sakes our inner cities our schools are a mess the scandal Utah you said next year will be twenty years twenty years and University of the Arts this title is actually a fairly recent one we would if it was a merger of the Philadelphia College of Art with the Philadelphia College of Performing Arts in the late 80s and both of those institutions go all the way back to the 19th century in terms of their forerunners the where the the art school was associated with the Philadelphia Museum okay and the and there was a conservatory funded by musicians from composers from from Leipzig okay they was the Philadelphia musical Academy so this is the the Incarnation now that's expanded into all kinds of areas they would jag and jazz and dance you know animation all kinds of things before that at Bennington I was at Bennington for my first job for eight years the 1970s and I got into one problem after another I was still I was in a state of delusion still I was a 6i I didn't take drugs in the 60s I don't take drugs I'm against drugs I don't believe in sophisticated use of alcohol with meals this is what I believe but I was an equally a state of delusion I don't know what what what dementia we sixties people were in ok bite so I did one stupid thing after another at Bennington I had a wonderful experience there are brilliant students some of whom I I still have like Heidi John Schmidt who was a writer and novelist her novel cut is coming out of the bride of catastrophe from Picador in a few months I just didn't Kristin Lippincott who is now the now the director of the of the Greenwich Observatory Museum and in London and so on so I hate if students at Bennington was it was a wonderful time but everyone was mad it was as if madness after the 60s you know one of your detractors said you left there after a fistfight yeah oh no I said oh yeah oh yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah well it's a long story okay it's a very long story but yes there's accommodating instant but that was only one gonna look every couple of years was some big thing okay like where I I kicked the student in the rear end and the this feminist students gave me the award the golden boot you know for I mean it's a long it was a one drama after another finally there was a fistfight at a dance now I was too young when was I doing at the dance okay I shouldn't be there but it Bennington there were no ranks and it's you know everything supposed to like be called by your first name and everything was very like so yeah I mean there so there was a culminating drama okay I was always a very physical person I've learned a lot about life okay one of the big things I learned it but I feel like grew up at Bennington I really do I mean I my first job and one of the big lessons I learned okay is that institutions change slowly and that if you if you want to affect change and this is true of government - okay it must be incremental change that by that we of the 60s were too impatient and that we had this we were in this narcissistic megalomaniacal idea that change would happen overnight and that we were the ones to do it this kind of sense of the elect you know that we had and some of the most brilliant minds that I knew they all screwed up they also put through drugs or through misjudgments or they died of AIDS or whatever okay so I feel that some of the I'm the greatest the points of view of the 60s never found the book they never got as far as leaving the book leaving something for posterity which i think is it's very important you cannot just sixties things experience experience be experienced no you can't just be an experience which is what you're taught actually in Buddhism or even Hinduism okay in the Western tradition okay there is this this this impulse is proportional to create something that will last nothing's going to last nothing will last but this impulse to create the thing that we hope will last has I think produced our kind of pyramiding achievements that is one of the great glories of the West Oakland California you're next with Camille Talia go ahead Oakland oh yes I have a question well love your work thank you I'm interested in your take on an exclusively male organization like the Hells Angels Motorcycle Club gonna leader like Sonny Barger whoa well well getting everything well the Hells Angels were such oh they were likely with tremendous culture icons to us in the nineteen sixties perhaps excessively of course that whole motorcycle ethos was launched for us by Marlon Brando's of in appearance in the in the wild one which had which you know which had had its roots and and some sort of held early Hells Angels incident that happened in a town in 1948 or something in Northern California if I if I remember correctly but the image of Brando and with his motorcycle and his leather jacket with Sun posters on our walls you know at that time well I mean I the Hells Angels thing is like it's so American sort of be free they're like Vikings you know they're Vikings in the open air they don't course the the disastrous error made by the Rolling Stones and having them be security guards for the for the consort of Altamont it's chronicles of course in Gimme Shelter anyone who hasn't seen that movie must I don't think that the Hells Angels our model okay for for social developments because they're so isolationist and you know an anarchic they're they're kind of a tribal unit and in today of course it's not the same the today's Hells Angels is a far more genteel organization than it once was but they will live forever in in terms of American cultural models even for the world at large I think the the motorcycle used to be for europeans quite a quite a proper and kind of an official bike used by by military officers and so on but it was Americans in food hells angels who turned that the motor the motorbike into the hog until kind of a modern horse moving over the open plains there are people who might find this picture of you or this just a graphic of you they might not appreciate it and or they may not like it and so I'm gonna tell them that ahead of time in case they don't want to see it but this comes from one of your books you mentioned marlon brando we're talking about motorcycle this was the graph this was the picture of you a caricature of you rather that was that was not allowed to be put in a San Francisco Examiner what how did this come about how did this caricature come about well well it is exact on home did this Minh I guess they were doing a profile of me or something in this and forcing examiner and he did this and he guess there are I hesitate to say sexual devices yes for handlebars and is that correct yes okay there it is okay and they found that it was not suitable for a family newspaper okay but it's a wonderful caricature and I told him I would like to put it in a future book of mine there it is Raleigh North Carolina Oh dr. pol yeah it seems that one of the most needed things in early education pre-collegiate education is green or emphasis on developmental psychology seems that there's since we're not being taught Bloom's taxonomy and Maslow and things like that to help them order the lives and their education you comment on that and comment well in that line it seems that well maybe we don't need so much history early on that history is really an advanced kind of thing penny well I'm not sure what can you tell me you're saying that developmental psychology is being neglected in what would area within your experience we're in grade school in grade school you me one of the teachers you mean students aren't taught it and parents haven't been taught it so they're not able to take control of Education as well as they should mm-hmm well I mean a couple of things mean I think that a lot many there are a lot of problems in American life in terms of you know I think that children are arriving at school with discipline problems are not that the school should not have to deal with I think that the schools are you know of my parents day were a much firmer in preserving an orderly environment so that the working class kids could could learn and then so yeah I think it also that parents are not taking responsibility for what they can impart to the child before the child ever reaches even preschool on that the basis of my education really is my parents reading to me we didn't have any money if I ever sighs you know my father was still in college when I wouldn't when I was born my parents simply read to me and I think that that is absolutely crucial particularly in this in this modern media age and the way that he asked that was the second question I'm sorry they missed it sorry wait the second one was oh no I do it something they want I wanted to get to actually first oh dear oh dear oh dear educate it happens every once in a while dear baby I think of it we'll come back hopefully we'll come back to I'm so sorry Nevada California yes hello I admire your books and and my husband is a fan of yours and he's the one that recommended I read your book he loved them I wanted to question you about the feeling of the mass cultural I idols that were and you mentioned Madonna then Sharon Stone and I want to put forth a new candidate for the younger generation Jennifer Lopez she has her own industry money she's a sexual icon for the younger generation she's in relationships with men that when they don't suit her she doesn't like him she's gone and also the movies that she did were very powerful for women for instance Selena and the movie enough where she gets martial training and defends herself as you have said on the program earlier is what women need to do so I wondered what your thoughts were on Jennifer Lopez well I have been following her career since Selena I thought Selena was a what a piece of work that is a piece of acting I'm a little disappointed that the kind of the look that she projects now is a little bit bleached out I mean I like that very very sort of sun-ripened Latin look that she had an in Selena what Oh her emotional range and that in that film as well as her dance moves are just simply sensational I loved her early albums I think that part of the problem now is that she's becoming a diva and we do need divas I mean as cher is approaching the end of her long run and and so on it's really quite hilarious yes the way that Jennifer Lopez seems to be in total total control of men and has is now a spokesperson for so many products I I think she may be hitting a rough patch though right now is the same one that maybe Madonna the hit her but her watch her current movie is getting a slam the new movie with with Ben Affleck Julie or whatever it is is I'm afraid getting some of the worst reviews of you know probably of the year well oh no we have to remember Madonna's swept away was equally a terrible disaster but yeah I think that Jennifer Lopez yes she is a New York she's a you know from being from the Bronx she definitely projects that street-smart feminism that I was talking about in the early 90s and in vamps and so thank you for that question here's a caricature of Camille Paglia as diva in the Harvard Gay and Lesbian review of 1994 from one of your books question from Leigh Martinez email question what do you think of President Bush's re-election chances well as a Democrat I think disappointingly I think his chances but wishes transyl are very good because I don't think that they that the Democrats are going to be able to show that they can be relied on for security in military issues and this is something that I have heard you know 10 years been talking about in the beginning of the 90s I have criticized the domestic preoccupation obsession of the Democratic Party and particularly of the women politicians who were so involved in caretaking issues that when in fact to be commander-in-chief and I am so committed to the idea of getting a woman into the White House to be commander-in-chief you have to command the Armed Forces and so the one thing we should be preparing are ambitious young women for from the 70s to the 80s to the 90s is military history and these Raylan said that was completely neglected okay in this anti-war anti-military anti-american bias of the of the elite universities so right now therefore there's this vacuum in the Democratic Party we have carry who does have you know his experience the Vietnamese war but then he became a protester against the war after that I mean are there any one of these people that you that that even and I said Democrat have to say that I would you know give the security of the nation over into us and despite despite all of my criticisms and I have many of the Republican administration okay for including the what I feel our intrusions into into civil liberties by a by John Ashcroft I still feel that way that the voters are going to say okay who are you going to feel safer with in the White House and this Terry the age of terrorism okay President Bush or one of the one of the twelve dwarves what is the best thing that George Bush has done as president in the opinion President Bush has restored dignity to the White House okay which was treated like Animal House like a frat house by the president I have to help to relax by Bill Clinton although those young twerps okay going in there and behaving I mean the picture on the front of a National Enquirer of the Clintons friends bouncing with their feet on the Lincoln bed in the Lincoln Bedroom okay a disgrace okay those people did not take seriously okay what the the August nature of the mission of the presidency and I so I think that that's one thing and I love the way the one thing I love is the way the President Bush doesn't care about socialites doesn't care about the immediate bigwigs doesn't care about Hollywood celebrities the Clintons always schmoozing with the Hollywood celebrities okay in a way that's servile and the president of United States in the first lady shouldn't have been so servile to the Hollywood elite and I love Hollywood I'm a great admirer of Hollywood but I think they should know their place again the great scheme of things New York City hi dr. Paul yeah it's an honor to speak with you hi um thank you for your master works I miss your salon columns that we should bring them back if you could comment on two things one when your follow-up to sexual persona will be out and the Kobe Bryant case whoo all right well the the second volume of sexual persona which is a popular culture has been sitting in a bar since 1981 when both volumes were done for the first time I took forever to get to get the first volume into print and now I mean now it clearly if both volumes had to come out in 1990 europress couldn't have done that it would need a wheelbarrow okay this is this is already a 700 page book the volume 1 now so much else has happened that I need to you know I'm rethinking the volume too because I no longer am quite the Evangelist of popular culture that I was in 1981 or even 1990 because of this of the precipitous decline in quality of popular culture so I now realize that my volume too when it comes out will have a very elegiac cast to it and snapped it's not what I would hope and then there'll be Brian oh the Kobe Bryant well I you know I I'm not sure obviously the facts of the case no one does know right but it has been interesting to see that it from the very start the the automatic belief in Kobe Bryant's view of it rather than this girl's view of it in the media and I thought what a reversal it was since the time of a 1989 1990 when we had all those like this was a date rape cover stories and people and Larry King was having date rape victims on the show and so on I thought that's you know it's very interesting but you know whether or not this girl has mental problems okay is irrelevant to whether or not an assault occurred in that room and we must wait the facts facts of the case but I will say this that anyone who has has stranger sex whether they're straight or like Kobe Bryant or they're gay men or whatever anyone um you pick up a stranger okay you are importing right next to your body they every kind of psycho drama and that person's head and you don't know what what they are you don't know if they're a knife murder or you know a deranged person so Kobe Bryant has been made a serious miss judge month that's pretty obvious no matter what here because I believe that his you know his his commercial endorsements at least are certainly in serious jeopardy if not already dead as a doornail Ferdinand Geiss of Cleveland wants to know how you feel about iron rands writing people have often asked me about iron Randy there's the people have people notice its similarity I never actually read her in in college when the great period was actually the 1950s you people in the 1950s who are just in beat writing and then we're kind of bohemian we're very into iron ran so I heard her name and then when I came on the scene in the 90s all of a sudden she was back again and people began asking me and I think that I that so then I actually looked at her work I went oh my god there are passages in Iran that sound like my writing and they sound like sexual persona I went this is so interesting and I think the thing is that her influences were similar to mine that is she was very interested in the romantic writers she was she liked it and I think she absorbed Nietzsche in many ways but that the difference between me and Iran she believes in the strong individual but I believe in in government I but I don't just believe in the individualist going out and being able to be all things Santa - into the world I mean I do believe that the government has a role to protect the poor I'm not just Darwinian saying oh the poor and the weak have to have just a false ID and another thing is that Iran like Simone de Beauvoir is a rationalist okay and I don't just believe in the power of a rational mind I believe in the power of dreaming of imagination of art I believe in the irrational and there's looks kind of a bias that I ran in Simon de Beauvoir had against religion I take religion very seriously I think I think it is the most the most both fully developed of all in comprehensive views of the universe that the human beings have yet yet produced so I am NOT I don't have a dismissive quality Simone de Beauvoir and Iran were very disdainful of people who were religious and felt that they were like weaklings okay they just get over it okay all those those those children's stories those fairy tales I think that's quite wrong I think it's that is a limited view and it's in its own way we're gonna take two more calls and then take a short break okay next is Mill Valley California yes I'm a big fan of yours for at least 10 years and I own the DVD Basic Instinct with your commentary on it which i think is brilliant thank you I consider myself a kind of sort of DVD commentaries by the way the best way to watch DVD commentaries is with the subtitles on much more complex but I have a question do you have any plans to do more also in Basic Instinct I've watched Sharon Stone many times I think her performance actually harks back to Kim Novak in Bell book and candle well mentioned on my favorite films I adored Kim Novak in Bell book and candle okay that whole mystery she's like a witch in the occult and so on oh that cut in this little of that quality that Kim Novak also has in vertigo which I think even Hitchcock the director didn't appreciate yes I think actually Sharon Stone's picking up all the great blonds know Sharon Stone's performance she did she's been on the scene for like 18 years or something before she made Basic Instinct and she worked her way up to that role and you can feel you can feel in it actually Dietrich you know you can feel in a Lana Turner definitely definitely Kim Novick and I think a little Madonna Sharon Stone doesn't Madonna better than Madonna has ever been able to do herself on the screen in terms of doing other yes I would love to do other documentary or other you know other commentaries on DVDs of classic films like that and I also have done you know cameo Saigon cameos satirizing myself in various films like it's Pat I'm is a cameo Hal Hartley is Henry fool Sheryl done yeas film a watermelon woman I just sort of pop up and satirize myself you know in them I enjoy very much doing TV work I've done programs and you know in England as well I love the the whole production quality so as a professor as a an analyst of media I've been very fortunate in the last 13 years be able to get behind the scenes of media and see actually how things work behind the stage behind the screen Deerfield Illinois hi I do enjoy your work professor Paglia I just want to I have two comments one was you made an earlier comment about LOC Hall Derrida and Foucault that I what is that you misspoke Derrida is actually Jewish it was demand Paul de man who was the Nazi sympathizer I there were two cases well not do Dairy Dairy dollars is an Algerian he's from Algiers and he's Jewish born Jewish and never was a Nazi sympathizer the second thing it was Paul de man the second thing I I do take issue with some of your comments about theory I'm I've been in graduate school and I'm now a teacher of the reasons that theory gained strength in the Academy I believe is that that was a concern for the Enlightenment and you know people do not realize that these theorists are really commentators they're just trying to describe say postmodern world a postmodern condition but many of the people influenced by post structuralism take the Canon you know contours so Hobbes very seriously and I wonder what you thought about that I think I think you're quite right that earlier I did I actually met suss Cote ssin about Paul demand from my own junk bonds incorporated told him I Nazi sympathizers I'm I apologize the but there was a scandal over Derrida not remembering it too clearly now that began around 1988 in 1989 okay in addition to Paul Daman and there was something I knew was it was it was involving Nazis something and I'm sorry I'm not pulling it up right now off it's like 15 years now since they have no derrida's star was already sinking when I came on the scene 1991 because of this it was it was it was a scandal in its own right but I apologize for missus peeking earlier now in regard to the the other matter like ah Derrida and Foucault are important within French culture in my view because they are critiquing the the the Cartesian and rationals heritage in France it you could not in my view it was absolutely illegitimate to export that to America and particularly to be making many American students read those texts in English translation I mean especially the ones that are very labyrinthian already in like like ah in in French without the problems that the post structural structuralist are complaining about in France never were the case in America we have never had okay this this them purush burden of a of a fine art or canonical tradition in in America for heaven's sakes for affront to your culture well there's no fine arts tradition here okay we've been trying to implant it okay wait this is the this is the you know the the culture that created Hollywood right and we do not we are not rationalist so it in the French language is extremely limited in the number the number of permissible words that go back to the plays of Ross scene and so on so these arguments have this is it was mad okay I'm the part of American academics - breathing seems over the person who started it was Edward Saeed whom I do admire okay a man of great learning a leftist a member of the Palio Palestinian Liberation Organization and but you know he when he was first talking about Foucault already saw the limitations in Foucault in his first writings on him but he's other academics we just went into it I mean there there are academics so I mean any academic who says Foucault is so learning Foucault is not learning anyone who thinks Foucault is learning okay does not know what true learning isn't they have not done their history lessons what wasn't there was a problem in American literary criticism the new criticism had gotten to two formulas in too focused on the individual texts apart from biography or historical context it was a reaction against the bibliographical excesses of an earlier generation so what was needed was to supplement new criticism by bringing in historical context history and psychology because new criticism was also anti Freud I felt that was part of that movement to supplement to bring it in what what these what these post-structuralist did okay what's to abandon the whole thing and in poetry they can't read a poem okay they can't this this style of theory works only on narrative it does not work on poetry okay so we have a bunch of Philistines okay and and provincials who are teaching at very high cost humanities to our undergraduates okay and there is a a desert landscape I keep I must keep on repeating in the elite schools okay in the humanities okay that it's not going to be cured it's gonna be another generation okay before it before the before we root out all of this this theory that was such a dead end when we come back we're gonna be able to ask you some questions that our emailers have asked about Noam Chomsky Michael Moore Jacqueline Kennedy and also take up a few of the your critics okay people like Molly Ivins who have written the sweeping generalization is Polly is signature in fact her work consists of damn little else and also will take up Naomi whoops what she said about you Polya is the nipple Pierce two persons Phyllis Schlafly who poses as a sexual renegade but is in fact the most dutiful of patriarchal daughters and finally we'll also get a list from you people want to know some books that you might read they read we'll be back in just a few minutes we'll have one hour left with our guest Camille Talia I just think that the full range of italian-american types has never yet been portrayed there really is a kind of got a condescension in the portrayal of working-class types in general by that by the film industry not in the 1930s when people were closer to the working-class roots but we have a kind of a liberal bourgeoisie that runs the runs the showbiz from LA many of them now are refugees from Ivy League schools which are which are I guess are who I would want to go there these these arenas of a kind of desiccated wasp system I think that is that is quite you know it's quite pass I think that african-americans also have good reason to complain about the by the swampthing of American culture by by gangster motifs from the streets I think that it was very parallel actually I think the kind of crisis of representation that is endured currently by african-americans and with a gangsta style of hip hop and Italian Americans I think I think perhaps so an alliance or a bridge could be made with with groups in in the african-american community who are also concerned about the portrayal of America one of the best expressions of the sort of equity feminism that I believe in was given by Clare Boothe Luce this event as we know is sponsored by the Clare Boothe Luce Institute Miss booth was fair minded clear-headed utterly candid also elegant and gorgeous but of course that's not important but you can see for yourselves now here's how she summed up the mission of feminism and I quote at length because it's really one of my favorite quotes of all time it is time to leave the question of the role of women in society up to mother nature a difficult lady to fool you have only to give women the same opportunities as men and you will soon find out what it is not in their nature what is in their nature and what is not what is in nature to do they will do and you won't be able to stop them but you will also find and so will they that what is not in their nature even if they are given every opportunity they will not do and you won't be able to make them do it now I love that brief eloquent statement and I put it in an article sometime ago and the dissident feminist and brilliant scholar and social critic Camille Paglia saw this passage and she wrote me that she found it quote absolutely awe-inspiring it's it sums up the whole thrust of my adult career and I was so happy about that because it's not easy to impress Camille Palio it's very easy to be impressed been dazzled by her we're back live with Camille Paglia dr. Camille Paglia thank you for joining us for in-depth this month and we're gonna get right back to the to some of the criticism and the questions and people want to know first of all let's go to Molly Ivins her criticism sweeping generalization is your signature in fact her work consists of damn little else well I think molly ivins had only read things have I written an op-ed pages there are 800 pages long I mean she clearly did not read any of my other work like sexual persona 700 pages long which is an enormous detail about about you know about the great artworks and literary works I'm very sorry and I think I don't know Molly Ivins regrets the viciousness with which she greeted my arrive on the scene it's unfortunate because I actually think the Texas feminists have a great style I loved in Richards I mean I think that that kind of talking so I straight from the hip way of talking is like is you know it's excellent I mean so um you know I think that I haven't said that like in the early 90s now she likes it she likes to pretend that all she only text people with people in power she never talked but never attacked civilians I think she said just everything but but there was no call for her to defame me in the way she had when it's a good example of the because she's part of the inner feminist circle and in this in this country and here is a strong talking woman who should have liked should have liked and appreciated another strong talking woman and is completely missed it completely missed the fact that she and I have more in common than we have and different Naomi Wolf you are a nipple pierced person's Phyllis Schlafly well Naomi Wolf and I had a very long war culture war in the early 90s went on for years and you know at this point she's married and as a mother and as it has gone evolved in her thinking about many things but I criticized her severely in the early 90s because of her book the beauty myth I thought was an atrocious mess okay that it's saying that the beauty was something being cooked up by men and the in the sort of capitalism to keep women's self-esteem low and I was one of the first voices in sexual persona in in my in my lectures to talk about the need for aesthetics and that that that in fact that one of the distinguishing marks of human race is a love of beauty and in the end that the creation of beautiful artifacts or the emergence of the beautiful person is a sign of advancing civilization and that phen that feminism had you know in terms of rejecting beauty as a male conspiracy had set itself against culture the other thing was that Nomi wolf was blaming anorexia on the media and I said I said anorexia is coming from mostly from these highly competitive pressure cookers of the white upper middle-class families that send their children to the Ivy League and they if she sees anorexia in in the in her fellow students at Yale or in or when she was a Rhodes Scholar then she says she should be looking at the ethic if the family culture that produced it where's that coming from I said it was not it's not coming from the media I think that that's that that is absurd it's a bit obesity the same thing well I mean the problem is that a problem with the meat the problem the media is part of our cultural environment insofar as it projects images of women that are unrealistic I mean obviously in the fashion magazines and so on obviously this is a cultural you know problem that we need to address but anorexic per se I was denying was it was caused by the media what the worst thing is and Naomi was one the first to a comment on this in public to she the lengthening okay the actual today we say through Photoshop technique the elongations of images okay of actual living women including known celebrities okay magazines so that there is no way that any human person not only could be that thin but actually have legs that long as the ones we customarily see I do feel that the current media environment in advertising and so on is toxic for young people but but I don't want to change the media I'm a libel Eve in free speech the media is protected I'm a free speech the feminist those days they want to wade into the media and censor censor censor okay I don't believe in that I believe in education and uh supplying images from a high arch okay I want young people to see in grade school the great variety of female forms that have been glamorized through history in fact most cultures valorize the opulent woman okay the heavy woman has always been seen as far more desirable than the stick thin women our urban industrial age so the answer is not to censor the media and to carry on against the media the answer is to reform education now the now a wolf has apparently never be thanks to her Ivy League education had never seen apparently okay these the the richness we have the actual art historical tradition I mean I mean and I know that that's Susan Faludi is another example for that with a harvard education i and i thought what these are products of the Ivy League and I thought when I was trying to discourse with these women how limited their actual background was I thought why have they up and given a truly humanistic so when I would when I go to England and talk to two undergraduates at Ochsner Cambridge women undergraduates it's unbelievable the difference compared to our Ivy League students they these women are sophisticated they know how to talk they have they have a natural respect okay for for the Arts and now what we have are these these sort of tunnel vision kind of in a feminist so come out who see the entire world in black and white ideology of black and white and then bad women good okay you know men oppressors and women victims and everywhere Naomi is still kind of doing that but we're no longer in any kind of a war about it was a flying match we were having in the 90s do you not teach at an Ivy League school because you can't or because you don't want to I am persona non grata in most of the of America now academia if I'm invited to speak it would it's never by the literature department are very rarely by literature department usually by history department it could be classics anthropology something like that we could because there's so much of my workers and is in is in those those it's abroad now I could leave you know I love first of all in arts college environment is my natural place so I was at Bennington and I'm here this is it is so stimulating to me in my work to have these apprentice artists in my committed apprentice artists in my classroom like this it is a constant and I thank God I don't have to deal with all those prep school grabs that they on the Ivy League campus but if I want to leave America I could be teaching at all kinds of you in lecturing and teaching and all kinds of major universities worldwide outside of America I am seen as a writer I'm really seen as a writer here they say oh she's that personalities on TV and people you know feel they'll have to read my books they sort of know everything about me even though I've written like thousands of pages of you know and doesn't you know all these decades of work and so on so I don't want to leave America I love America my family came to America and I want I want to make a American education better and I think I think the corner has been turned in American a khadeem and the all the big fancy names and fear of theory of the last 20 years are all in decline they're all falling down and people are turning back look at Harold Bloom sudden resurgence right people can dismiss you know what oh no bloom doesn't speak for acting well bloom obviously has a vibe now or the mass audience or the putt reading on it has a vibe with bloom and they now see him as as you know apostle and evangelist for for hi are at a time when when the National Endowment for the Arts certainly all those years I mean it's under good stewardship now okay by the National Endowment of the Arts certainly did everything is power to trash the image of of the arts or just alienated from from you know from the mass audience I mean the arts need help okay the literature humanity they need help in this in this country education has become all about sentiment okay young people are to our tutoring sentiment you have to be tolerant be nice now don't say anything bad to so-and-so you know little Johnny was crying after you called him this or that a wuss okay and it's all turning into that date what is that daycare center stuff no I believe arts should be absolutely presented from the star net arts where people give them finger paints to do know I'm talking about history our history where everything is in chronology and give them a time frame when I do it put a time timeline on the board the kids look like their mouths hanging open they've never seen a time line they have no sense of anything they actually they don't on a diagram a sentence okay all the structure of Education that was given to my parents immigrant generation and to me the quality of public education that I had in upstate New York and in Syracuse New York it's gone now okay it's gone and it's a scandal that's a scandal so like city your first step in this second segment go ahead hi Camille I'm a big fan oh thanks um one of the things that I've noticed in your work as a person who's written and sold a bit of comedy myself is a highly evolved sense of humor how do you balance a sense of humor with the dry academic world oh thank you for that question this is such a great question you think that's one reason why many people didn't take me seriously for a very long time I thought well how can a deep person be funny okay to them comedy you know it doesn't go with this so that's why you're Susan Sontag for all those years she would pose as a very deeply serious person okay you can't see Kitty mention either Simone de Beauvoir or it sounds like having a big belly laugh no I mean it should be obviously did it privately but they would the image of the intellectual they had evolved again the austere hyper critical intellectual I don't believe that I believe like they like the Hindu gurus okay are actually the the aging masters and sages are actually very funny okay they're they're funny they're prankish and Zen masters are known to be prankish so I mean I to me comedy is as a symptom of a balanced perspective on life and people who are going around like gloomy gusses okay you know with like the in that context style of intellectual these people are suffering from something coming from their childhood has nothing to do with the proper intellectual response to life right now now I again I'm coming from a working-class background you know it's like working-class people actually have much more of a involved sense of humor okay they they laugh much more heartily okay then then middle-class people do there's a loss of physical and mental energy I think in that transition from the working class the middle class and I observe this happen you know in my own my own family that is as we as we moved is you know the next generation moved into the professions of of teaching and law and so on there's a kind of sobriety this day of Northern European sobriety that's expected of you but I I'm very prankish in person in fact you know in college I was on probation but for pranks for pranks yeah yes no I something like 39 made a list 39 pranks they put me on probation I mean yes I I love to make like surreal environments there was like so was I'd love to terrorize the anyone in authority like the like the you know the administrators of the dormitories it's like well there's one thing I did like I staged a murder scene or the one that one of the doormen came back to her room after a beer blast and I had staged the thing with like a coffee red cough syrup for blood and I'm like man my envelope opener for the knife and I touched her chair tipped over and feel what I'd screamed another time I took the clocks I found that the clocks could come off of the wall in the dormitory these large clocks like someone I went on a chair and I took them down and I put them two of them into into the twin beds of the counselors in my dormitory so when they came back from the beer blast I'd love it they came back and in the the clock faces where it tucked up with the sheets around there on their face in bed they came in they screams okay I'm song and then the thing that finally I think that were they with the put me on probation I had shaving cream I was coming back from going back from the shower and I just put a big question mark and shaving cream on the resident advisors door which meant like question authority well it removed the varnish from the door okay so they cost to it that was it I was on probation so but yeah it was the 60s was when they hippies you know we're going to the stock exchange and throwing dollar bills off the balcony going sooie sooie I mean so it was a part of that spirit of the 60s what politician has the best sense of humor today mm-hmm oh my god who has a sense of humor at all today I mean in America oh my god I'll give you a chance to think about it a little bit Charleston South Carolina you're next you tomato hi you're hot you're cute I love you Thanks listen I have a question I saw a statistic that was staggering that 4% of the American population that being black males between 15 and 40 years old commits about 60% of the crime in the United States and and this naturally this follows that racial profiling policemen who see these kind of and deal with it on a daily basis are prone to look towards black males who create a lot of crime after 9/11 I saw a lot of people interviewed blacks particularly who and I paid closer attention to this and and they were asked since 9/11 do you have a problem with someone of Arab origins or looks being closely scrutinized racially profiled and they had no no problem with it whatsoever and I thought this was a large hypocrisy I just wondered how you felt about racial profiling and those type things well I think it's inevitable you know that if police are in an inner city environment where there is a high concentration of african-americans it will seem like their racial profiling I happen to witness very unseemly scenes in the 1980s when I would be traveling by car on the New Jersey Turnpike from Philadelphia to New York and I saw that the that the troopers or maybe they were just local police had out of the car constantly it seemed whole african-american families who were standing under very dangerous conditions along the side of the road in a situation that I thought really was not a was an American okay i if indeed the troopers or local police felt there was reason to search the car of these particular African Americans I believe that the cars should have been taken a to a rest stop or two you know often seems to me that there was a deliberate effort to humiliate and to intimidate other drivers and of course the reason that was happening is that there was such a drug run going on from from from Florida all the way to New York City okay so that so the New Jersey Turnpike was a puzzle as a point of intervention because it's almost like a kind of alley so I mean I think that the questions about racial profiling you know our legitimate ones I think many you know many African Americans drive it driving cars okay you feel that there is the subject of excessive scrutiny and I think they probably are rights like yes obviously it you know I think where it's gone too far our situations like you hear about like for example I was hearing recently on the radio the first reports about the shooting that happened in City Hall where a councilman was was murdered point-blank with a gun and in those first moments it seemed as if the shooter was free they thought that he had escaped and was somewhere either in the building or in the area and so the alerts that went out over the radio I was listening to to the New York radio the alerts were never mentioned race now because because of this because of that kind of a censorship there now it turns out that the shooter actually was himself cut down by and by a police under undercover policeman who was on the floor of the council chamber but I think that you know there are ways that clearly where our hypersensitivity to racial matters and goes against logic and there are other places where African Americans have very legitimate grievances I think in the public realm California moranga hi my name is Kareem and I'm calling in response to a comment I was made earlier regarding security in America and how voters are possibly gonna lean towards bush because of these policies and them and basically them supporting the military and actually from what what I'm experiencing when talking to people and so forth people don't feel secure with Bush at all because he was in office nine months you know and we had 9/11 and personally if I have a security system that fails me you know after I put them it put it in place I would actually change that you know if I if it fails me and something happens to me I would change and and another thing is after 9/11 we went in the Taliban we still haven't found Osama bin Laden and and basically Bush's being it is tap dancing and I don't feel secure personally about those the whole security issue Thanks California let's leave it at that we got yours oh thank you I agree with everything that the caller says he the in my view in my view the billion dollars that is being poured into Iraq every week should be going to build up our own security infrastructure in this country we are our local emergency response teams are still inadequately trained and supplied we have all kinds of security problems around chemical plants and nuclear plants in this country I think that just just I could go on for five hours I'm afraid on on the Iraq issue but there is a tremendous waste of national assets seems to me on this adventure and with no one in sight Cranston Rhode Island yeah I happen to disagree with you The Carlyle Group which is friends with George Bush has risen from the number fifth of military supplies to the number one ISO there yes taking into consideration globalized fascism when you when you put the wing when when a few who want to impose total control on the many then then power has been centralized if you take into consideration Homeland Security or the Patriot Act or no support for a free internet based college education or the Bush's role in the 9/11 attacks taking into consideration the CIA reports that that the Bush family were friends with you Osama bin Laden's family and and that the CIA knew about these attacks prior to the attack on 9/11 some of this information is available at infowars.com thanks Cranston well I mean we can't just blame the Bush administration I was vocal in the in the 1990s about the indifference it seems of the Clinton administration to the first attack on the World Trade Center 1993 I mean I thought that people in the media dropped it also I think the media bears an enormous responsibility for a lot of these problems they in there again all absorption din domestication issues there insularity and the media also deserves tremendous blame for for the sliminess in the face of our you build up toward war last year we never had a real national debate on the on the invasion of Iraq and then they and then the ultimate blame the Democratic senators of my own party Democratic senators laid down flat like like Persian rugs and let everyone walk right order we had no national debate on this question of war and I think that the population which seemed to but by polling support the the invasion of Iraq was in fact misinformed about about the potential consequences of this and yeah what I mean that whole region okay anyone who reads anything about the history of that region going all the way back to antiquity has to fear this this naive stepping into this problem from which I don't see in the date of extrication site we have just 40 minutes left our emailers have been wild about asking you about different people so if you could could I'd like just run through some of the people they want to get will go on Condoleezza Rice I think she's a great mind I really admired her for a long time I think she's a little as steely and cold okay I'm a little I'm a little unnerved by someone with at such an evident lack of personal relationships sending got you know families you know it represents a family managed to fight and die in Iraq and I I'm afraid in recent weeks with it's apparent where she was kind of not willing take responsibility for problems again from her own office that her star may be besmirched but I used to I because I'm so interested in the idea of a woman president we asked annalisa reckless in recent years when she take I love the way she takes the state the way she she say but she comes out for a press conference she she's able to like it to handle the mic handle the media this is what we need okay our first woman president should be studying Condoleezza Rice's you know manner plus she's a very cultivated woman who was a master of the piano as well as an athletic woman so I think she's a role model and so in so many ways Noam Chomsky well Noam Chomsky you know I said some nasty things about me so I'm gonna try to take the high road okay about him I think that his linguistics theories are overblown okay I think that he is a that his Mystery's have been a kind of fascism in a khadeem I don't think that he is a deeply learned in person in history of world languages I think that he is someone who is has a very distorted way of proceeding a reality and he is one of the great anti-american voices who has been comfortably ensconced with this job that he doesn't even apply for it MIT all those years he's even sunny in his field okay Foreign Relations I think he's a kind of I think he hallucinates a bit about foreign policy on the other hand let me just say this okay the Bush administration by going into Iraq has managed to vindicate okay Noam Chomsky's entire view okay so it is one thing one of the main criticisms I have of what's happened in Washington is that Noam Chomsky's views which seemed absolutely delusional now seem to have the ring of truth to them Matt Drudge Matt Drudge is one of the one of the great independent voices of our time I like him he that the Drudge Report is the first thing I turn to when I go online it's the last thing I turned to before I go offline if I'm not a long time I'm on it for four other times okay he this this is this is the net he is the web okay he has put his in even though he's only putting links up there okay what his his choice of links he is like he's like an improvisational artist to me it's like in the main line of Andy Warhol but it was a great to me or abnormal for me to his the the I was poetic way in freeform way that he treats his site okay is to me one of the unique experiences of our time I really respect him I we don't agree on politics I mean he's like what you're conservative and is thinking than me but but I I think he is that at a time when the arts the fine arts are actually not producing anything particularly interesting and I've become you know it's sometimes rather bizarre with particular exhibitions that come from England where you have you know bisected cows you know of bodies on display and so on I mean I think Drudge is actually one of our best examples of a performance artist he's fabulous on radio he's a master of radios completely different than than his website Phoenix Arizona Phoenix for you there go ahead Phoenix yes go ahead sir you're on there okay sorry I wanted to ask miss peg Lee a big and a tiny flower question my main question is in studying popular culture in relation to the Western canon how do you expect students of your work or who's ever is how does that benefit their understanding of the Canon and also because I actually think your work actually kind of sort of mythologize is the present my second major minor question is just do you have any recommendations on writers I really admired your no on the rina rina I'm gay myself and I really deeply admired your so many things had to be said there that you said and anyone that has you recommend that that you find insightful and regard the homosexual contemporary another way okay all right oh wait now yes all the overall theory holding together in my work is this hey that's that judeo-christianity never did defeat paganism as the history books say but rather that Greco Roman paganism went underground during the medieval period and erupted at three key moments one was the Renaissance most people would accept that that that was a revival of greco-roman humanism and artistic motifs and so on the second eruption of paganism was romanticism where you had all this primeval stuff which I call the colognian coming up from him from the earth the demonic the occult and all those things and the third grade eruption of paganism is the age of Hollywood which is what I call the 20th century so that what we're getting in the pagan the pantheon of the talked about the great studio era where you had that deification of the stars like that and that that's incredible kind of a manufacturer of the stars of the level of a Dietrich Harlow and so on every day worth etc so yes I feel that modern popular culture is the final term okay in this in this long story therefore the wastelands of view of things TS Eliot's the wasteland 1922 saying that Western culture is in fragments and pieces collapsed I said that that is complete delusion okay yes maybe the Fine Arts tradition was collapsing into cubism and I'm a great admirer of Picasso someone I don't mean to diminish cubism but their whole kind of view a pessimistic view of a culture of being at an end of the West being over okay which we see even in Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot following World War two which in so influenced Foucault and which is a play this wasn't sonntag idolized and so on with a play that I absolutely abhor from the moment I saw it in college I said this this bleak view of culture of life as nothing but but a an empty landscape with one poor tree trying to come back to life in a bunch of hobos they're chewing on chicken bones and no woman in sight by the way one the great misogynist plays of all time and I think that it's not a view of culture instead what was going on in Hollywood at that moment okay fantastic entertainment Hollywood supplied what modern avant-garde culture how is it denied was possible any longer emotion and beauty and and in the body okay so that's why the mass audience gravitated toward popular culture that's why when you get people like Naomi wolf or now and others and other other feminists okay we're always bad-mouthing or Faludi Celine bad-mouthing the mass media I say you know wait get off these four new theories you know which all right they are all coming from the frankfurt school of commodification all that stuff okay get off that and realize the degree to which the working class and in the mass audience not only here but now worldwide okay has fed off these magnificent mexican immigrants and images so I do see a continuity I see continuity in the West going all the way down from that from the founding great works of literature nor into the great classic movies and so on okay there's a lot of trash to popular culture right now which I you know I didn't certainly don't mean that young people should be absorbing a diet of trash now what you lost is text second part we're gonna get to that list here list but we're gonna get a list of people you're gonna recommend people read but we'll put that all together a few minutes should government limits port of the arts no government government support of the arts should be a given it should be a given in any of the the miniscule amount that is given by the government now but who is the blame okay for this declining amount okay the arts community itself okay by identifying its its cutting edge you know works with it with artworks that profane established religious values why should any taxpayer feel okay that he is he or she is underwriting something like Andrei Serrano's pissed Christ where you had a crucifix submerged in a beaker of the artists urine now I there's a lot lot to be said for avantgarde transgressive are I could I could give a hole in the maple floor in an aisle of Mapplethorpe I love maple farm but the idea that the government needed to support Mapplethorpe at that time okay when he was already rich okay from his own works he was not a struggling artist at the time of that so I wrote an essay actually in for to could magazine that's a collected insects are in American culture where I said I adore maple for fact I wrote an homage to his great portrait of Patti Smith from the cover of horses for civilization magazine I love maple farm again I love everything transgressive about him nevertheless that's not the whole history of art not all art has been transgressive the whole oppositional view of our has simply a heritage of romanticism since the late 18th century and early 19th century most of art for human history has been celebratory of power has always been that the church you know gave money for it for celebration of its values the government or Prince's the Medici princes gave them and give money for celebration themselves the pyramids you know most most of the history of art has been under isn't propaganda underwriting bike by the powerful in the rich it's true nevertheless the workmen the artisans produce fantastic objects that are power of the cultural heritage of everyone in the world I come from an Italian culture okay where it's assumed tried the peasant in the field my people okay that I came that that the operas are their heritage that Michelangelo Sistine Chapel ceiling is their heritage there's no sense it belongs to any elite all that stuff so what's happened in this country okay is this the way the the arts community itself managed to shoot itself in the foot okay like that that wouldn't when they brought the Saatchi collection over to the brook museum of art and in this there's nothing of any religious consequence or or reference in the whole exhibition so for one thing and that is this Madonna a figure but by a Nigerian British artist named Chris ofili where you had the elephant dung being used for her breasts and and little cutouts of women and women's genitalia from pornographic magazines they paste it all around her that's the part that the you know the Liberals are in defending this often leave out now I could give a lecture on that explaining what he meant by that in terms of African traditional African fertility religion and so on there are many potential meanings there the Brooklyn Museum what a bunch of coconuts I mean they didn't they didn't they knew what was gonna happen they wanted a sensation they wanted to offend Catholic Catholic Catholic sensibilities okay hey listen look the Catholic Church is like you can you can say anything in the Catholic Church okay you know everybody but you know but anything about Judaism or or Islam for many years which was completely all you know impossible okay so so the Brooklyn Museum should have realized that was going to be this it's supported in some way by possibly having a whole maybe a breather brochure or something before you enter the exhibition about the history of transgressive are the history of objects that offends okay established taste or something to give the whole thing context right and then we would have had the explosion that you did there were two Giuliani win it into it okay with you know bite by bite by trying to cut off support to the Brooklyn Museum so what I'm saying is the reason that that we have this pathetically small budget for the net for the that for the Arts in this country okay is because of the arrogance with which the arts community has conducted itself by saying saying to the mainstream audience in America we're about spitting on you taking your money and spitting on you now what kind of art what kind of art teaching what kind of art education can go forward with it with that kind of attitude Ocala Flordia a higher doctor I was listening to your words and you mentioned intellectual a few times now I am just I come from a blue-collar background just a high school graduate now I'm a very successful businessman I looked up intellectual in the dictionary and it says the rationale as opposed to emotional and my question is a hypothetical now might does not make right but throughout history it seems that men have run the world due to their physical aggressiveness as opposed to the submissiveness of women now when it comes to feminism does it hold true that that feminism would not exist except for the benevolence and the tolerance of men and feminism is actually one collective one collective aggressive stroke away from extinction well I think feminism is permanent it goes through phases I mean there are times when it seems to surge and then in and then subside again but actually feminism is a part of the West's legacy when so many people on campus and PC campuses you know badmouth Western culture for having sex feminism and indeed the entire concept of civil liberties is a product of Western individualism because all the way back to the ancient Greeks now feminism itself we can you know trace where there are there are feminist expressions of the various point by isolated women from the medieval period on probably but what but it really has its roots just following the period of revolutions in the late 18th century that after the French Revolution and in the in the American Revolution and you began to get women like you know Mary Shelley who was the daughter of a prominent feminists who are who want to achieve the same level of men but yes it in so far is that the modern capitalist Industrial Revolution you know produced a system that allows women to escape from the drudgery of housework and to be freed from dependence on either husband or a father okay for doing justice in themselves in some way yes feminism is a product of male achievements and is there have been there have always been two strands and feminism there is a kind of puritanical strand I mean it what's often covered up is that many of the founders of feminism and the women's suffrage movement of the 19th century were ardent prohibitionists okay wanted to stop the public sale of liquor because they felt that liquor was something that caused problems at home that men drank up you know drink drink up the family income and gin and then abused beat their wives and the band and their children so on and so forth and so there and then there's a kind of pro sex or libertarian or sort of extreme and extravagant theatrical strand in feminism guy I kind of belong to and it goes back to Victoria what would hell and so there's been an argument even within feminism and now and then one one part of the movement has kind of dominance and then the other one comes back so I I was part of the probe sex part of it in the 1960s and all of a sudden the doors were shot in my face okay be first for many reasons I I love the Rolling Stones I was told the Rolling Stones are sexist like I I thought that hormones play a part in sexual identity oh I was told that this was all nonsense and Senator so that was the entire pro sex wing a feminism lost ground throughout the 70s and 80s and but we'd made this enormous resurgence again in the 90s oh and I think that where it's a probe man or respectful of men man men and heterosexual relationships I think I think it's that kind of strident feminism that you're thinking about of the 80s of the early 90s I think it's you know that's that's pretty much gone Redmond Washington hello I am a mother whose homeschooling my son and I'm very interested in a curriculum that would help him understand the Arts in the world I'm so do you have any suggestions thank you you know can I just pick on to that email or who wants to know what do you how do you deal with how do you treat a kidney gardener in order to make them a free thinker oh well instance you'll have to face this in terms of of the of the arts I mean I think it's so important to expose the child to images from from there there are some huge women look one-volume history of art books that are often used in freshman college years that are like there's a famous one by Janssen called history of art my parents had a book by Gombrich that was that was the story of art that began with the earliest you know cave art things and when it moved all through the periods and I think it's it's never too early to introduce the child to images now one of the problems is that many images from history of the Western tradition are nude so I so then so I think that each family has to make a decision to the degree to which you think that children should be looking at news or not I believe that as the children in Europe your European kids are you seeing nudity everywhere and that it hasn't caused you know personal corruption I think that it were possible you child should be taken to a museum my parents I took me from upstate New York to visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City and these were it was this mind-boggling experience on me I must have seen the museum when I was three or four years old mind-boggling you see to see the magnitude of the of the great the great stone Sphinx is of queen hatshepsut that are there and see these magnificent paintings and unfortunately smaller galleries and smaller smaller towns tend to be more contemporary art but I think it encourage the child to study the image because today with movies and TV everything is moving moving moving too rapidly okay but the art of examining a complex work and really looking at it there and so many of the great classic works of the medieval period and the Renaissance are in the Baroque are on religious topics so I think that even very conservative families who feel who feel that they don't want nudity in the images they show the child can certainly help discuss with the child okay some of the great masterpieces of with the biblical stories from the Sistine Chapel ceiling and so on I think that you need to go to the library already did buy books I mean that's all these things are available in the library and I think that was that child has to have your encouragement and I certainly was encouraged the tree art seriously by my family a couple quickly and had a couple more people from the emails Jackie Kennedy well I wrote actually a piece on Jackie Kennedy I thought what a classy woman she was I thought she had such elegance and refinement I really you know it admired her I'd love the way she held herself which is which is a part of the heritage of being trained to when you're riding horse respect parents on who share this wonderful quality and I think part of the great tragedy is the more we learn about what was really going on the way she was personally undermined by the the extent of the you know the philandering by her husband it's a I think that even even the legacy of his administration is starting to suffer from that I feel bad about it because I think that the Kennedys both of them lit a fire and an appetite for political participation in my generation I will never forget the ecstasy I felt when the John Kennedy in 1960 we after after the some nolan's of the Eisenhower years the image the image of woman that made me I mean Mamie Eisenhower was a very nice lady but she was no Jackie Kennedy you know to have this like a style and vitality in this sort of forward-thinking and articulated a so John Kennedy oh he's articulate innocent in the press conference so they were a wonderful combination Michael Moore well okay I agree with him about politics probably about many things okay but I I must deplore and condemn the methods he's using to fictionalize productions that he is claiming our documentaries okay so insofar as he was guilty of restaging a scene involving a rifle at a bank as part of his Lobby I mean I think that there's no room for that there's no room for dishonesty at the New York Times or in in Hollywood and so I I wish that Michael Moore would stop using tactics of defamation and deceit as part of his political agenda dr. Laura Schlessinger well dr. laura is um you know is uh I mean if I she's only if I happen to be the car and I get on the radio I always enjoy listening to her she's tough she's a tough cookie but I think there's something over the years maybe a little bit too brittle about her presentation I mean she she basically thinks that you all can just pull yourself up by your bootstraps out of life and this is the way to do it and I think that there's not enough room there's not enough relaxation there's not enough room for comedy she always say in her in her presentation next is Toledo hello Toledo hello admire doctor pack Illya and I've seen her many times by the way I a was I graduated from Berkeley in the late sixties oh and became very liberal of course and I had a great education there and then I got my first job and got a paycheck and found out how much taxes I was paying and that changed my mind a bit but on education I must tell you I just met a young lady accidentally in a restaurant the other day and she graduated high school with an A average and we just talked by waiting for our tables and she said have you travelled a lot and I said yes and she said where you been and I said well most recently England and she said what language do they speak there now this is really a commentary on what the doctor has said several times during the day what do you feel about school vouchers and secondly I think by the way on another matter you personify sexiness oh thank you even in my declining years okay yes vouchers why support the vouchers I support anything which can can throw a bomb into the calcified public education system can release it from it's just a terrible enslavement it has by the teachers unions at the present moment I think there's been a charge of just a tragic decline I mean there's every kind of idiocy me I think if there was remember there were legal attempts to stop even experiments and having high schools in the inner city for there were all males okay because it was thought that if you could just say and I agree with that when you have kids trouble kids all kinds of experiments that could be done if we could just free up the the you know the education system from the the social engineers among us but yeah there are problem you're very parochial interlocutor there at the restaurant yes it's a terrible problem America is an enormous country that is the size of you know it's like of several Europe's I mean we have we have States okay that are larger than Europe itself and and Europe is like such a patchwork of languages and cultures and there's a and also can international connections around the world that connection between India and you know in Britain is this is intense so in America we're very insular despite the enormity of the country and efforts have to be made by educators to open up the minds of the students to the great world that's out there but not in this kind of a multi-culti way that says all the peoples of the world are this great peaceful nation and the only evil people in the world are the Americans there would be a wonderful paradise on earth it wasn't for evil America that's the way they're taught that taught all this ok cetera right III think that that most of public education and including college these days is a waste of time a tremendous waste of time kids are madly bored I think there should be meant much more development a return to trade schools where kids are learning something I think that every single course is being taught has to be evaluated in terms of what the kids are getting I think the kids need help with learning how to how to house keep you know the old home economics thing was thought hopelessly you know uh you know moded and that kind of thing people need how to you know how to balance a checkbook kids aren't learning things at home I think minorities need help with business and how to how to manage small business businesses to give them you know a leg up whereas people from the upper-middle class you don't have you know K looking to learn things about investments in the stock market from their family you know people from the working class don't the utter emptiness of so much public education these days right the different volatile okay and the the the mediocrity of it in in America is shocking to the mind I'm I'm in favor of of kids not going directly into college but actually if their families could afford uh sending them abroad take that money you know I send them abroad have them return to college later have more adults returning to college we need much more interplay of Ages okay I think that the social pressures in high school are terrible right now they're just they're just take to keep on graduating kids and this like big group of eight the age group up like that and of course you can't keep them back Oh heaven forbid they can't read or write don't keep them back we have to have social promotion or they'll suffer psychologically even though they can't read and write you just graduate them without reading you know writing skills etcetera etcetera I think we need much more a mixing of ages in in schools and I think that we have to free people from the tyranny of school I think young the reasons one reason I thought that for the Columbine massacre okay was that you have boys penned in school pens okay they're physical energies need to do something gay find something for them to do and say and then Oh then we infantilized the kids okay they can't buy liquor Oh No okay so because they can't buy alcohol till they're 21 they're all taken every kind of weird drug okay that is like I mean they're from Special K an old drink I say to ecstasy you're pickling their brains I mean we have a whole pickled brain generation moving forward alcohol at least you know you're violently sick if you overdo it but it evacuates these is it all got from the system by the next day we're producing unsophisticated okay you know kids with with minds of jello who are uneducated no no you can't find England obviously on the map people couldn't find Iraq on the map also okay that's what really got me about last year okay but we were being we're being forced into a war okay well where most Americans wouldn't have the remotest idea where it where Iraq was or any sense of mid-eastern the history Mid Eastern politics or the idea that the British Empire had had made this mistake before getting into Iraq you know following the the cutting up of the Ottoman Empire after World War one st. Louis Oregon all right hi doctor and speaking of pickled brains I'm in your opinion on this of thinking of Pat Schroeder and her what she's accomplished with others in the Congress and military I certainly opposed women in military when it comes to combat positions and things certainly women in the military have a very big place and it should get bigger but I have a huge problem with that if I could say one other thing about if I remember Gulf War One there were a lot of women I guess and reserve units that went and afterwards the military didn't want this out but there was a huge number that became pregnant while they were there were others that after six months were had to go home for one reason for because of maternal reasons I have a hard problem with women even the service academies because it does come down to a combat type situation I've been stood in her opinions and on the subject but I gave it a lecture at West Point I got an earful about that from a member of the cadets I think maybe the jury is allow about women in command women have not actually ever served in combat even even I understand it in the Israeli army they're not really on the front lines the thing is in our modern military of course when you have such advanced technological machinery if you have women jet pilots can certainly seems to me serve extremely is as well as men probably if they if they're if they are able to pass the test without any lowering of the standards so for women as was done in you know in cases of admission of women to fire in some fair companies local fire companies but yeah III think honestly it's still not known to what extent do what would women's presence in a combat unit so compromised cohesion I I'm willing to have an open mind about it I'm perfectly willing as a feminist to say alright this is one area where where perhaps it's not working to have women but unfortunately this argument also crosses over to gays in the military and their the idea that the gays should be drummed out of the military because they their presence too would break down cohesion and situations where you have the soldiers literally sleeping on top of each other and under conditions where you might have a temperature 20 below or something like that you know all these questions are they're very thorny ones we haven't been in a war to test it for very long I certainly agree that the military should not be a laboratory for social engineering and I think that is what happened in the 1990s where people were trying to enforce social positive force you know culture changes ahead when in fact the military is our fighting armor we're going to depend depend on I I I post any kind of misuse of the military for any reasons as now in Iraq where where are our brilliantly trained military is being used for police duties for which it is ill-equipped and our soldiers are not just being killed hey you know the figures are Media as usual is suppressing they're just having killed our souls are being wounded okay there with lightly with there with like a loss of limbs okay people aren't going to walk for the rest of the lives and so on all of that is being kept from us right now so I you know yeah hello go ahead hi this the first time I ever heard about you I'm sorry but I hope to get some of your books and if you just you're very interesting cool nurse and presently I like to know two things what do you think of the Democratic Party again not you know taking the black food for granted and just going on about their business and you know they don't have the white house and they don't have any get Congress if it's gonna happen to them again if they ignore the black vote and also what do you think about liberal arts in America you know the black african-american has been protesting I've been saying with loud voices to include African American Studies into the liberal arts programs and so forth and so on and of course that effect would not allow it at least not at the level of what African Americans went thanks Pennsylvania well number one it is interesting I think that the only enjoyable person to watch right now is al Sharpton okay who who is that because the only person who's who dares to be speaking out all the other Democratic candidates are very constrained by their focus groups and they're in their advisors they're they almost seem like they're walking mummies they can't they can't actually be totally honest about their real views on any issue so I will see what's going to happen I think it would be a very big wake-up call for the Democratic Party if there's a split in you know if al Sharpton takes his votes and and moves with them it's voted for Jesse Jackson actually in the 1988 presidential primary just because like I wanted to it's a you know I want more more candidates in color and more women at the top level and so we're just not getting them I think it's a it's a something really wrong in terms of the I mean there were many seems to me african-american candidates at the at the level at the local level at the level of a state government and so on even even in the Congress and they they really we need to bring them forward more now in terms of this is one of the things that happen actually in the Academy in the last 25 years the first the African American Studies departments and then and then the nobody that Latin American Studies departments and so on that there's a was a process of kind of splintering that occurred in the humanities that I don't think was in the best interest of the humanities overall certainly it got African American issues months more into the curriculum in college and and also at the high school level I was happy to hear that the Harvard Department of African American Studies is now going to move more to the African direction start to stress the African side the question of African history African languages I that's what I felt what is to you know as much is much much more necessary but I unfortunately I don't like any kind of fragmentation in the humanities I don't want a situation where you say well black teenagers it should only be taught African American culture I think that that's terrible I think that that black teenagers should not just read African American literature and they should be exposed to the whole of the history of the Arts Seattle yes hi dr. regalia hi let me say it the starts that I'd like you and you've got to be the most interesting woman I've ever seen on TV thanks a lot and I've seen you at other cases us Oh are you there caller lost the caller caller are you there oh I'm sorry we lost it here that's too bad I apologize let me go through your books sure what will people find in sexual persona sexual persona is a view of the whole history of Western culture that begins with cave art moves into ancient Egypt and Greece and down to Italian art and so on and then it goes into into literature it tries to show what are the fundamental themes in in Western literature none I wrote it in a way that should be accessible to the general reader so people a sense of history vamps and trends Samson tramps is a collection of my essays on a huge variety of topic that's my second essay collection actually it contains the biggest thing no law in the arena is my social and political philosophy and then it has a wide variety of essays on the Clintons and on all kinds of other things as my my the program I did in England about the about the penis penis is an art as well as a transcripts of videos I did like with drag queen Glenda orgasm okay uh who was a real name is Glenn Bell very Oh in New York it's a documentary I did all kinds of things are there sex art in American culture I can use my urban initial articles I'm Madonna on date rape it has the big sa junk bonds and corporate raiders which is which is my long attack on contemporary campuses and the birds the birds okay is the book the British Film Institute asked me to contribute to the series and it's this is this book of parents when their most popular it is a scene-by-scene analysis of this great masterpiece by Alfred Hitchcock it is for it's written for the general reader it's meant it when you start that it's every possible interesting little detail about the movie about the the sets the costumes and so on but as you read it it the movie should unfurl in front of your eyes it starts from the beginning and so it's a great book for the train okay you'll feel you have seen the entire book from beginning to end go moving in front of you marry a meter Cove Nick do you know her she was someone who once had a reputation at Duke University and his natural on the margins of well Emily this is what she wrote about you yes I suspect that Paola is going to be true to her past in ways she does not even suspect that she's going to end up disappointing and alienating everyone including her current backers that she's going to self-destruct Polya may surprise me she's done it before but I'm afraid she'll keep talking when she has nothing more to say well here it is ten years later there are so many people in the early nineties there's the oh she's gonna have a she's having her 15 minutes of fame what's like 13 years later I'm still here yeah a lot of those ladies who are like her big wheels in academia out who they were mad I came on the scene like like an explosion I thought well who is she who is she who is she okay she was someone who was like totally unpublished okay was who it was struggling for most of my career and I wrote a 700 page book which by the way that woman has never read okay and Molly Ivins never read it and I only wolfies never read okay so all these people who think they know so much about me they've never read the master work which is sexual persona they know nothing well we know more about you than we did three hours ago thank you for your time thank you for the invitation Camille Polly our guest on in-depth to this month thanks for joining us

Channel: Bjorn Ottosson

Views: 26,561

Keywords: Camille Paglia, feminism, porn, art, booktalk, Culture, politics

Id: uBVVNCt5hW8

Length: 174min 27sec (10467 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 16 2018