A S K C A M I L L E
| Camille Paglia's online advice for the culturally disgruntled |
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Illustration by Zach Trenholm
The Heaven's Gate castrati community
| a feminist paradise?
Dear Camille: Is the Heaven's Gate episode one more example of America's spiritual emptiness? Or has our country always been fond of mystics and madmen? As someone with a historical perspective on (and appreciation of?) pagan religions, you might be able to enlighten us on this subject. --Wondering Dear Wondering: The mass suicides in California are simply a delayed development of the 1960s schism in American religion, when many members of my generation turned away from the traditional, overly moralistic organized religions and went off in search of enlightenment. Hinduism, Buddhism, astrology, Satanism, Wicca -- you name it, we tried it. The Heaven's Gate cult was bound by hypnotic subordination to a quirky, seductive, but sexually undefined father-brother figure, not unlike Charles Manson, whose extraordinary thought-control over his daffy brood of hippie chicks led to the barbaric slaughter of the Sharon Tate and LaBianca murders. Judging from their bland, namby-pamby manner, the Heaven's Gate group was inspired less by "Star Trek" than by "Mister Rogers' Neighborhood." Leader Marshall Applewhite (a perfect name!) managed to grind all his multiracial followers down into the same pure, WASPy, fluffy, tender vittles -- Wonderbread with baloney on the side. But surely Gloria Steinem, who's been mad as a hornet at Milos Forman, must have been so gratified to see her utopian society come to pass: at last, a gender-blended co-op paradise where nasty maleness was castrated out of existence. I found the video testaments left by the group morbidly fascinating for their uncanny re-creation of what early Christians must have been like, marching off to martyrdom in an ecstatic trance, giddily eager to meet their Maker. The historical Jesus himself appears to have been a charismatic teacher with apocalyptic visions of the imminent end of the world. This period in America resembles the Hellenistic era, when Rome rose to rule the ancient Mediterranean. It was a sprawling, cosmopolitan, polyglot world of sexual permissiveness and spiritual anxieties. Mystical, New Age-like cults sprang up everywhere, and major deities like Isis, Cybele and Juno were syncretistically merged. The Heaven's Gate doctrine of a helpful spaceship whirring along in the tail of Hale-Bopp is neither more nor less substantiated than central Christian teachings about the resurrection of Jesus, which was celebrated worldwide this past weekend. In "The Second Coming" (1920), William Butler Yeats prophesied the anarchy and monstrous apparitions that appear at the end of an astrological 2,000-year cycle. The Heaven's Gate bunk-bed spectacle of Night of the Living Dead may be just a tantalizing Mexicali appetizer for what lies ahead.
Dear Camille: I had a son last February, and he has been a true joy to me. I really do enjoy watching him rumble around like a tank, getting into everything, tearing up every object within reach, courting danger and feeding his infinite curiosity. However, since I am also a mother, I want to protect him from all harm and adversity, which I logically realize is impossible. What is your advice for a mother who wants to raise a masculine, loving, happy son, not a vicious brute or a sniveling milquetoast? --Mama Kim Dear Mama Kim: Your description of your boisterous son is wonderful. Your letter doesn't state whether this is your first child or whether you have a daughter to compare him with. In defiance of the current campus orthodoxy of social constructionism (which sees infants as blank slates prior to social indoctrination), many mothers report that their children's personalities are immediately obvious in the first days and weeks after birth. Are boy toddlers, in general, more aggressive than most girls? My aunt and uncle reported that, after they had had two girls without incident, their first boy was a reckless dynamo, climbing every surface, investigating every object (e.g. the stereo) and wreaking destruction in his path. "If he had been the first child," my aunt wearily declared, "he would have been the last." You raise a crucial issue of child rearing, which feminism has never honestly faced. To what extent is the aggressive drive of masculinity a civilization-advancing, even if sometimes self-maiming, force? Your letter also doesn't indicate whether there is a father in your household. In today's divorce culture, it's assumed that men are dispensable, that a mother can provide everything that a child psychologically needs. But perhaps a male is necessary for a sexual dialectic: The mother nurtures and protects, while the father prods and challenges, sometimes brutally extending the borders of the son's world. In Virginia Woolf's semi-autobiographical novel "To the Lighthouse," the stern father figure, who is a rival to the children for the charismatic mother's attention, goads and irritates his hostile 6-year-old son. Is this jealous intrusion for or against the child's best interests? I suspect that sons need to be pulled out of the safe, warm bath of a mother's love, which they would otherwise never leave. After the industrial revolution, it has become more and more difficult for boys to find appropriate masculine models. Office work neuters males, and the old options of going to war or shipping out on a freighter are no longer as feasible. Most of the rest of the world still retains a traditional sense of masculine identity, so that some day northern Europe and the United States may find themselves very vulnerable indeed, should an international crisis arise caused by yet another of the fascist dictators that history produces on a regular basis. In "The Sandpiper" (1965), Elizabeth Taylor, as a bohemian artist and unwed mother living in a secluded beach house at Big Sur, coddles and pampers her precocious son, who recites Chaucer in authentic Middle English. Behold the genesis of male homosexuality! -- not inborn but induced by the blissful intimacy of an overattentive mother. The boy's effete sensitivity and girlish mannerisms disappear when he's forced to go to a strict, male-administered school with other boys. Now, he both boasts of and cruelly spurns his voluptuous mother, who realizes that she must surrender control for him to thrive. My opinion is that, as early as possible, boys should have social contact with robust adult men of every kind -- practical men of action, not just white-collar bookworms, whose sense of the physical world is dim.
Dear Camille: I am a big fan of yours, and generally agree with many of your views. But I have some doubts about your warm embrace of pornography. I must say that I am a very open-minded person sexually. I have been known to order from adult catalogs and partake of adult movies, and hold the general belief that anything that makes consenting adults happy is great, as long as nobody is harmed. Basically, I have no objection to pornography, with one exception. I believe that pornography can be abused, like most things which give pleasure. I am recently married, and have found that my husband uses pornography as an escape from dealing with relationship issues. For instance, during my last trimester of pregnancy he totally withdrew all contact and affection toward me and retreated into his little pornographic fantasy world. Needless to say, his behavior left me feeling very hurt and rejected. He still retreats to pornography when I am sick. It leaves me feeling that unless I am at 100 percent every single day, then he doesn't want to deal with me. I am not allowed to have a "bad day" because if I do then it makes it OK in his mind to emotionally shut me out and retreat to his pornographic world. I have tried to talk to him several times without saying he is wrong. I understand his need for physical release, but what hurts me is not the pornography itself, but that when he uses it, he shuts me out completely. I love my husband with all my heart and he is a great guy. Our marriage is worth more to me than this issue is, so after several attempts to explain my feelings to him and no comprehension on his part, I have quit bringing up the issue and am learning to adjust my attitude and not to let it bother me. But please let your readers know that pornography can be great fun and bring about great pleasure; but like anything, when it is used to escape the real world and to cut yourself off, it can cause harm. --Open-minded, but newly awakened Dear Open-minded: My defense of pornography is based on my belief that it shows the pagan truth about sexuality, the free operation of our nature-implanted animal urges, divorced from romance or sentiment. Certainly, pornography can be abused -- like food or alcohol, which can either enrich or stunt one's life. From this distance, I of course cannot determine whether your husband is a prince or a schmuck. Fidelity is my master principle: If your husband is loyal to you and simply needs imaginative escape, then perhaps the situation isn't so grave. Some evidence suggests that the male brain processes sexual stimuli in a visual and conceptual way, which is why the audience for pornography, heterosexual and homosexual, remains overwhelmingly male. Your letter suggests that your husband may slightly suffer from the so-called Madonna-whore syndrome. That is, your advanced pregnancy could have triggered his complex, unresolved feelings about his mother. To be sexually attracted to one's pregnant wife is in effect to commit incest. That your husband also retreats to pornography when you are sick is more disturbing but implies that he is very much attached -- even addicted -- to female attention. I think you should explore the psychic legacy of his relation to his mother, who was either overclose or overdistant. Heterosexual men carry a lifelong burden from their forced separation from the female body that bore them. "Sexual Healing" (to borrow the title of a great Marvin Gaye song) is their hunger and their quest, in ways that women may never fully understand. April 2, 1997 Seeking higher wisdom? E-mail Camille at AskCamille@salonmagazine.com. More cleavage and glitz! Less Crystal! (03/25/97) The tyranny of racial categories (03/18/97) How do you handle a hungry man? (03/04/97) Why does female homosexuality turn me on? (02/18/97) Politically incorrect desires (02/04/97) Bookmark: http://www.salonmagazine.com/columnists/paglia.html |
