Our horrible fate, as envisioned by Camille Paglia.
Welcome to Harpy Seminar, a regular feature we plan to have at regular intervals, unless we get too busy to have it at regular intervals, in which case it shall appear whenever we have time and inclination for it. Each Seminar begins with a question or prompt, which we discuss amongst ourselves, then edit the highlights of our conversation into a post. Please feel free to join in in the comments!
PhDork: This is among the most emailed op-eds from the Times. I hope because people are sending it around going “Do you believe she’s still banging this sad old essentialist drum?” and not “Yup, it’s the feminists fault!”
I remember before I’d read Paglia I thought she was this high-profile academic that did gender stuff, and boy, I better get my hands on it! So I buy Sexual Personae, start reading, and am like “You’re kidding, right?” I tried to give her the benefit of the doubt, but got through maybe 100 pages before completely tossing it.
Everything that’s wrong with that book is wrong here, but this is even worse, in that there are mammoth problems in such a short piece. Help me shred this cranky, janky piece of writing from a soi-disant “public intellectual.”
SarahMC: “But to what extent do these complaints about sexual apathy reflect a medical reality, and how much do they actually emanate from the anxious, overachieving, white upper middle class?”
I was with her up until “anxious.” After that I have no idea what she’s talking about. People don’t have sex because everyone is so androgynous, who are they supposed to fuck?! And of course, overfamiliarity kills (white middle class) Americans’ sex drives: women are repellent creatures. No man would want to spend time with one if he really got to know one.
Like you, Dork, I wish I could see how readers are reacting to the article. There aren’t comments on this piece.
Pilgrim Soul: I really couldn’t read the whole thing – it’s so florid and full of bullshit – but mostly I want to know why the Times published it.
PhDork: Pageviews, I suppose. Isn’t that why Salon keeps her on? She’s a shit-stirrer. Emphasis on “shit.”
BeckySharper: Here’s another one: “In the discreet white-collar realm, men and women are interchangeable, doing the same, mind-based work. Physicality is suppressed; voices are lowered and gestures curtailed in sanitized office space. Men must neuter themselves, while ambitious women postpone procreation.”
By “neuter themselves” I assume she means “not sexually harass their colleagues” or “have female bosses.” This reminds me of Helen Gurley Brown’s retro laments about how it’s such a shame there’s no sexiness in the workplace anymore. None of these women seem to understand the concept of “hostile workplace.”
Pilgrim Soul: I don’t even agree that white-collar men are neutered. I saw that passage and thought, “spoken like someone who has never set foot in the ‘white-collar realm,’” which is not discreet, and in which men in no way neuter themselves. Upper class white men are always too busy proving their dicks are waaaaaayyy bigger than the schoolyard said they were to bother “neutering” themselves.
I could show you a list of ways in which dicks have been waved in my presence during my time in a white-collar environment.
BeckySharper: “Androgyny is bewitching in art, but in real life it can lead to stagnation and boredom, which no pill can cure.”
Since when does workplace or social equality equal “androgyny?” I’m a middle-class white professional woman but somehow I manage to maintain my gender and sexual identity (and get laid on the regular). Give me a fucking break.
PhDork: (For the record, I find androgyny absurdly sexy. Waaaaay more so than cartoonish gender stereotypes.)
BeckySharper: Camille’s also contradicting the shit out of herself. She wants us to believe the problem here is that these days women aren’t womanly (i.e. submissive) enough and men aren’t manly enough (i.e. dominant.) Which is EXACTLY the kind of Victorian prudery she seems to blame for cutting off the sexytimes to begin with. So…the answer to prudery and rigid gender roles is…a return to prudery and rigid gender roles?
PhDork: Exactly. If she’d just cop to the fact that “bourgeois propriety” and “Victorian prudery” are code-words for PATRIARCHAL BULLSHIT, maybe we could just all hold hands and get along.
SarahMC: And she assumes any woman with a low sex drive must be white–that women like Beyonce are all having a lot of great sex. That goes without saying because they’re women of color.
BeckySharper: Yeah, there’s a lot of hating on the body type she perceives as “white” i.e. tensed, lean and muscular. But it doesn’t make sense within the context of her argument; since only an incredibly small percentage of women have this body type. Saying the reason women can’t get it up is because they’re all skinny and boyish is simply NOT REALITY. Plus she’s digging up the tired old racist stereotype of non-white women are more sexually available than white women–again, a stereotype that exemplifies exactly the kind of Victorian prudery she claims to be denouncing.
SarahMC: Paglia turns what could have been a decent exploration of the issues surrounding “women’s Viagra” into a call for a return to stricter gender roles and imitating so-called black sexuality.
PhDork: Its remarkable, given what a dog’s breakfast this essay is, that she fails to consider some things, though.
BeckySharper: We cannot talk about contemporary eroticism or sexual culture without talking about porn. Unless one is Camille Paglia, apparently. Feminists, sociologists, cultural critics, the medical establishment, etc. have talked ENDLESSLY about how porn has eroticized and glorified certain body types and behaviors, and how that has affected sexual behavior, gender relations and modern ideas of sexiness. But not Camille. Maybe she doesn’t have hi-speed internet? Or a DVD player? Or know anyone under 60? Instead, it’s 100% old-school sexist alarmism: when the social playing field is leveled and women aren’t traditionally submissive, the natural order is destroyed! No sexytimes for anyone! Plagues and Rapture! Dogs and cats, living together!
Readers, what’s your favorite part? Her essentialist “vive la difference!” crowing? The pillorying of feminism for killing The Sexxor? The grotesque slavering over those sexy dark-skinned people and their erotic, t/humping music and seductive oriental spirituality? There’s enough here to go around!
Whenever I find myself reading Paglia (and i had the same experience with Sexual Personae as PhDork) I can’t help but think that she has somehow annexed a seriously good supply of crack cocaine and is taking it on a daily basis.
And while part of me envies her dedication to getting insanely high and then writing rubbish (there is no way anyone writes this sober), I can not for the life of me imagine why a sensible newspaper would publish it.
Bonus points btw for the completely insane paragraph about Victoria’s Secret and Country music. Which manages to be both insanely racist (ooh working class sexy multicutural people having a party at VS) and play out bizarre class stereotypes in addition to implying that all Southerners are sex-hogging rednecks. Genius I tell you, genius.
First of all, can I say that that picture is ridiculously adorable? If that’s the future Paglia imagines, I want in it.
I had to steel myself to read it since I didn’t want to devolve into a blithering mass of incoherent rage and usually just get it secondhand, but I figured there was more in the article that wasn’t addressed here, so I bit the bullet. Biggest reading on the WTF-meter was definitely this: “The sexes, which used to occupy intriguingly separate worlds, are suffering from over-familiarity, a curse of the mundane. There’s no mystery left.” What the fucking hell is so mysterious about prescribed, pre-fab Barbie and GI Joe gender roles? Aren’t we supposed to have fully absorbed them as a prerequisite for living on earth? And isn’t the whole point of her much-derided androgyny to INCREASE mysterious allure (hello, Bowie?) than to decrease it? I think she’s got her brain on backwards.
Also, my jaw clenched when she mentioned that rock music today is “all superego and no id.” Never mind her blatant rockism (if you don’t know what I’m talking about, look here—http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rockism—Harpies, how do I do hyperlinks on here? BBCode or HTML, or something entirely different?) and her loathsome invocation of Sigmund Fraud…the id is supposed to be the state of humanity that we’re supposed to evolve away from. She seems to support some kind of reverse evolution—and I like Devo, but this is absurd! I think music has a responsibility to be conscious of the world around it and not operate in a bubble, and I detest the id in general—the id is what’s keeping me from being an anarchist, basically. I can’t in good faith advocate it knowing that there are people out there who still act like animals.
I only got as far as: “The implication is that a new pill, despite its unforeseen side effects, is necessary to cure the sexual malaise that appears to have sunk over the country.”
Um, what sexual malaise? If you are going to base your lovely diatribe on some idea that sexual malaise is an epidemic, make sure there is an epidemic. Same goes for: “But to what extent do these complaints about sexual apathy reflect a medical reality, and how much do they actually emanate from the anxious, overachieving, white upper middle class?”
Um, easy answer: medical reality. A medical reality that has existed and been ignored for years–nay, centuries. A friend of mine is a researcher who has been doing the phase 1 trials for one of these treatments, and she has talked about the desperation of some of the women. They want to fucking like sex (just like the menz), but their bodies doesn’t cooperate (again, just like the menz with their viagra). I mean this isn’t a treatment for not wanting sex… its a treatment for not getting aroused. Perhaps some of it is psycho-somatic, but to bring in all of this other bullshit is ridonculous. Just, blergh.
Wow, this is 67 ways of messed up. Her drooling reference to Beyonce is cringe-worthy, and she has no credibility at all on the subject of her idol, Madonna.
It’s outrageous the way she makes sweeping assertions that are racist, classist and insulting to both men and women, and all without a single shred of evidence. How does she know who shops at Victoria’s Secret? What on earth does she mean about the white middle class being
“overachieving”? So people of color who do the same work are immune from this capitalist oppression and thus able to pursue their sex-crazed ways? “Nature-keyed Asian practices” are the inspiration for “the modern sexual revolution”? Oh, well, we wouldn’t want to miss insulting Asians, since we’re getting to Latinos and African-Americans later. Men’s leisure clothing is evidence of “perpetual boy” status? Yeah, I sure miss codpieces, don’t you?
Paglia is a loon. But then, the game was up with her when she started squeeing about Palin.
This article contains the kernels of a bunch of ideas that could be explored, and most likely debunked, or maybe not.
But I don’t get the feeling from this that she wants to pursue any of them, with like, you know, actual research.
It’s so much better just to pronounce stuff and leave it at that.
She is turrrrrible. As usual. I agree with PS in that her writing style is difficult to even slog through, forget the crap she actually says.
I mean this is her same old bullshit she’s been harping (heh) about for decades now. She clearly has no familiarity with “white collar men.” I’m with PhDork on that one. This is all part and parcel of her elaborate fantasy idea of what the “world” is actually like. It has no connection to reality at any point.
This article just made me laugh. Her topic-hopping is ridiculous, she has absolutely NOTHING to back up any one of her dozens of insane assertions, and there is way, way, WAY too much crap stuffed into one short piece.
But overall, mostly, what amuses me is that this just reads like some cranky old broad hatin’ on everything the younger generations enjoy. It’s well-worn territory that most of our grandparents (and their grandparents, etc.) have covered. I have no need to read this stereotypical old folks’ blather and it’s ludicrous that the New York Times published it.
Oh. Em. Gee. You guys, this is even more unbelievable than I could have imagined:
“Only the diffuse New Age movement, inspired by nature-keyed Asian practices, has preserved the radical vision of the modern sexual revolution. But concrete power resides in America’s careerist technocracy, for which the elite schools, with their ideological view of gender as a social construct, are feeder cells.”
Who knew that vague and dramatic Orientalist pronouncements could couple so well with unfounded reactionary claims about the power of eeevil feminists? I mean, for real, *even if* we bought the whole “bourgeois careerism neuters men and destroys sex” thing, who the fuck actually buys that the gender social constructivists are secretly pulling the strings, or even working as “feeder cells”? Frankly, if there ARE those kinds of career opportunities in feminism, I wish someone would clue me in, cuz the whole teaching-and-blogging thing doesn’t exactly have me rolling in dough.
Also, PhDork, I had a similar experience with Paglia, when I started noticing that nearly every used bookstore I ever entered had a copy of Sexual Personae. At the time, I was like “oh crap, this person must be important and I know nothing about her!!!1!” And then I finally realized that it was because people like you and emilyanne have thrown it away after reading 100 pages.
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Mary Bullstonecraft, Pursuit of Harpyness. Pursuit of Harpyness said: Harpy Seminar: Camille Takes a Dump @ http://bit.ly/cO0FcJ [...]
In college there was this one dude in my dorm who no one really liked because he loved nothing more than spouting forth incredibly pompous Mansplanations, none of which really made any sense at all.
We used to roll our eyes behind his back and refer to these Mansplanations—oh how I wish I had known that word back then!—as “the A.U.P.” for “Andrew’s Unique Perspective.”
I’m thinking this is clearly a manifestation of the C.U.P., because, as y’all are rightly pointing out, IT DON’T MAKE NO SENSE, NO HOW.
What is hilarious to me about Camille is that she is so into reifying these 1950s gender stereotypes when she is obviously working the sexy androgynous, powerful woman thing. How does she get away with this shit? Sometimes I think it is performance art, like Ann Coulter.
Oh my God now I am actually reading it properly instead of just skimming. What is she on about with lower class non white women buying Victoria’s Secret and Country music stars the only ones who write raunchy music? I’m sure she knows from all the Vicky’s shopping trips she takes with her non white girlfriends, right before she goes and sexxxes it up at a Carrie Underwood concert! Finger on the zeitgeist, right there.
She’s probably right though. The possible availability of a female Viagra, Lady Gaga — WHERE IS ALL THE SEX TODAY ANYWAY?
I’d like to know in which parallel universe she resides to come up with this spurious shit. Mostly so I can make sure I never visit it.
Not to mention that her constant wailing about a “female Viagra” somehow representing a LACK of desire in women is incredibly cruel since those remarks come at the expense of women who have sexual dysfunctions and want nothing more to get beyond them. I don’t think I’d want such a pill, but I have had sexual dysfunctions before, so really, fuck you Camille.
“Meanwhile, family life has put middle-class men in a bind; they are simply cogs in a domestic machine commanded by women.”
What?
She seems to have skipped step one of the writing process: Figure out what the hell you are trying to say. Step two: Say it; is then rendered impossible.
I’m pretty sure I would be appalled by what she’s saying if I could tell what exactly that is, but she seems to have taken a lesson in logic from her friend Sarah Palin, and I just can’t tell what in the world her point is, unless it is to see how many ridiculous insults she can cram in a Times Op-Ed piece.
Duh, tall, women. run. everything! Hence the rise of the mancation!
I honestly feel like this is high-school level writing. This is one of those “a bunch of stuff happened in the past! I have opinions!” essays that you get with incredibly general essay prompts (like, apparently, “some upper-middle class straight white people don’t like their sex lives: discuss”).
I cannot believe that a human being wrote this. Clearly this was created by some sort of op-ed writing computer program. Paglia’s going to make an announcement soon a la Sokal and the joke is gonna be on us.
Oh, good. I was hoping someone would mercilessly eviscerate this op-ed, but I never dreamed we’d get a whole seminar!
Previous commentors have picked apart most of the juicy bits, though I was amused at her notion that country (and therefore working class?) music has a monopoly on “raunchy music.” Does the woman own a working radio?
My favorite part, though, would have to be the title for a completely different reason. When I read it the first time, my brain did that thing where it adds words, so I read it as “No Sex Please, We’re (in the) Middle (of) Class.” Hey, as a stand-alone title, the self-edited version actually made more sense! Even after I did a double-take and figured it out, I kept half-expecting her to start upbraiding the nation’s youth for not having more academia-themed sexxy tiems.
(It’s possible that I’ve been at school for waaay too long.)
Oh, yes. Forgive me my slowness, PhDork. I just returned from infiltrating DudeFest 2010, and ruining whole event with my feminist caterwauling. (I spared the Combos, however.) This commandeer and control everything gig is demanding. I suppose that’s the real reason why women don’t want sex. We’re just so damn tired from running everything!
You are forgiven, Tall, due to your efforts to sabotage DudeFest in the name of the Sisterhood. I hope that you left a trail of dead boners in your wake.
I have purposely not gone to the op-ed piece at the Times, not wanting to increase the page views etc. And watched from afar the comments of the harpies nest.
Now Paglia has made it to the back page of my newspaper – The Sydney Morning Herald, titled “Olde Sex Advice”.
Without going through the little tid bits the SMH quoted from her piece, I thought it bizarre that the last line goes to a Christian journal called “First Things”, in which the journal is reportedly to have said:
“we should over it [female Viagra, and whatever else Paglia was going on about], as lower libido is a part of life”.
[...] see the Harpy Seminar on and Sungold’s takedown of Paglia’s [...]