A S K C A M I L L E
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Dear Camille:
With all the brouhaha about Andrew Cunanan (why didn't he whack Hilfiger instead?),
the FBI's Ten Most Wanted List got media play again. My question is: Can
women ever be truly equal in society, without at least five of them on the FBI's
Most Wanted List?
Elizabeth
Dear Elizabeth:
I laughed uproariously at your offering up of Tommy Hilfiger on the
sacrificial altar! I was reminded of Euripides' play "Iphigenia at Aulis,"
where Artemis magically substitutes a deer for the princess-victim under the
priest's knife. It's appealing to imagine the gifted Gianni Versace as a
grizzled Ganymede snatched skyward, while gangsta-favorite Hilfiger, the
candy-stripe Aryan uniformist, takes the messy hit instead.
Thank you for your astute observation about the all-male Ten Most Wanted
List. Funny how the feminazis don't want sexual equality everywhere ...
Actually,
violent crimes, particularly serial murder, are overwhelmingly committed by
men. Women tend to kill people they know -- in exactly the way lesbians form
huge kinship groups to exchange and mentally abuse partners in. Men, on the
other hand, gay and straight, like to hit and run.
In "Sexual Personae," I treated flamboyant criminality as a deranged
"abstraction" related to artistic genius. One of my most notorious sentences
is this: "There is no female Mozart because there is no female Jack the
Ripper." Women occupy the great middle range, even of the intelligence
scale, whereas men register at the extremes, both high and low.
As someone who devoured Krafft-Ebing's classic "Psychopathia Sexualis" as a
teenager, I have always been impatient with feminist naiveté about and
ignorance of criminology -- a defect especially evident in the simplistic
feminist discourse on rape, which is reduced to political formulas that are
of no help to any ditzy girl on a date.
Dear Camille:
The July 20 edition of the Los Angeles Times contains an AP article about the
emergence of male studies courses on American campuses. Apparently men now
want a piece of the victim pie. The bright spot of the article is that men
generally don't take these classes -- most of the students are women. Do you
think men as a group will start whining for special treatment due to their
victimization as men? What do you make of this?
Bemused
Dear Bemused:
I welcome programs in male studies as a useful counterweight to the obsession
with women's problems that afflicts American campuses. One would hope that
such courses would not take the victimization route but document all of the
glorious accomplishments of male history that are currently censored out of
the PC curriculum.
Systematic action simply must be taken against the male-bashing women's
studies autocrats who've got university administrators by the balls. For
other suggestions for reform, see my article assessing current gender studies
in the July 25 Chronicle of Higher Education.
Dear Camille:
Kudos to modern-day radicals like Dinesh D'Souza, Allan Bloom, David
Horowitz and yourself for your alarming reports on the destruction of
the Western canon by the Hezbollahs of the campus PC establishment.
However, I think you and other defenders of the canon ignore the worst
perpetrator. If ever there was an example of "Rousseauist" revisionism
in contemporary culture, it would have to be at the hands of the Disney
animators. Let's face it, these guys haven't had honest
characterizations in an animated feature since "Pinocchio" and "Bambi." Disney has never been honest with kids about nature
nor mythology. In the safe-suburban world of the Disney studio, Ariel
doesn't die (I can't wait for Disney's "Fairie Queene"!), Quasimodo is
spared the ultimate price for his rebellion, and Zeus and Hera are
rewritten as the Cosby parents to Hercules, an Orange County teenager-cum-WWF pro wrestler.
Disney reaches far more young minds than college professors ever can.
There is little likelihood in today's pitiful schools that kids will
ever learn the real lessons of these beautiful myths as the author
intended them to be told.
Shouldn't Disney be held accountable as intellectual and aesthetic
philistines? The only aspect of integrity in a Disney production is the
quality of animation. Therefore, it is not surprising that the
unimaginative writers at Disney fail repeatedly at non-animated
production (IMHO, their best ever non-animated film was "The Love
Bug"!).
I have heard little criticism of Disney except from the Southern
Baptists, whose objections are moral and not aesthetic. What do you
think? Frankly, I am concerned that suburban children are becoming, in
the words of George Will, "immune to art," and more importantly,
oblivious to human nature.
James O'Brien, M.D.
Dear Dr. O'Brien:
Your analysis of the failing imagination of Disney productions is excellent.
In this period when the art of animation is undergoing a splendid
renaissance, it's sad indeed to witness Disney's increasing mediocrity.
Walt Disney was a mogul and auteur whose profound cultural impact on the
20th century is still insufficiently appreciated. "Snow White" and
"Fantasia" practically formed my mind when I was a toddler. The often
terrifying, pagan energy of fairy tales, with their universal archetypes and
dark hints of sadism and incest, flowed into Disney's best work.
We now live, of course, in the namby-pamby nursery of managed care.
Everything has to be trimmed, regulated, sanitized and dumbed down. You
correctly note the ominous stultification of suburban children, who have no
sense of ambivalence, resonance, ambiguity or nuance and who must binge on
hip-hop to get some sense of cold reality. Americans since the
Puritans have usually been "immune to art," which is one reason popular
culture has so flourished here. But even pop is in the doldrums these days,
in music, TV and film, as well as in Disney features. Dilution,
homogenization, recycling and tedium are everywhere.
Dear Camille:
What's wrong with these kids today? SCOOBs (Shrew Children of
Overindulgent Boomers), as I call them, seem hellbent on destroying the
peace of my confirmed bachelorhood. I go into a restaurant the other
day when a boomer, with 4-year-old SCOOB in tow, sits down at an adjacent
table. The SCOOB begins screaming for apple juice, licking the cap of
the catsup bottle, throwing silverware. When I ask for another table,
the mother has the nerve to call me out for not finding her little
monster to be the cutest thing on the planet!
The thing that I remember as a kid was that I would never even think of
acting out in public. The Rousseauist philosophy of misbehavior as
expression has to stop. I'm sick of kids ruining my meal, my flight,
even my trip to Vegas (an upcoming new casino, Bellagio, obviously
understands this and is enforcing a no-children policy). I am not
looking forward to the future. Being spoiled is a horrible personality
trait because it means that one cannot be happy. SCOOBs may turn out to
be the vassals that sack this Roman empire. I think allowing one's
kid to act like an animal in public is far more serious than spanking
him for good reason. What do you think?
Latter-Day Paul Lynde
Dear Latter-Day Lynde:
Oh, brother, do I agree with you! Uncharmingly rambunctious children are a
natively American plague. I was raised in the Italian way, which produces
much more robust and resilient adults. Italians, particularly in family
groups, pay enormous attention to children but also enforce a strict sense of
public limits. Like Japan, Italy is not a guilt but a shame culture, where
one must never disgrace the family before strangers. The "figura" or "good
face" has to be maintained.
My libertarian distinction between (and political separation of) the public
and private realms no doubt owes much to my upbringing. Even a 1-year-old
can be taught (by the fierce, abrupt, Italian "SHH!") that public places like
churches, shops and restaurants are communal spaces where self-expression
must be moderated. Italians are raised with a firm "No Whining" policy:
"No" really does mean "no" for Italian parents. In America, "no" can
eventually be changed to "yes" by obnoxious, strident, juvenile wheedling,
which turns spineless liberal parents to helpless jelly. Teachers then
inherit all these behavior problems, which is why tens of thousands of
American kids are doped on Ritalin. Pills are papering over the discipline
disaster of the middle-class home.
In America, we treat college students like children, children like infants,
and fetuses like trash. A related subject is Americans' inability to control
their dogs -- another immature pathology that foreigners, like the brusque
Barbara Woodhouse (a renowned British dog trainer), find absurd.
Need some tough love? Ask Camille.
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