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 invasion of
the White Girl Robots
Dear Camille:
I'm intrigued by this phrase that you use to describe middle- and upper-middle-class white girls: "White Girl Robots." I totally know where you're coming
from, and unfortunately, agree that all too many young educated white women
are shallow, bland, humorless and limp. Because of the White Girl Robot
Syndrome, ever since high school I've had very few female friends -- I'm
simply bored by most women. My question is: Why do you think so many young
women turn out like this?
Woman-Hating Feminist (As a side note, I myself am a woman -- in case that wasn't obvious. I attended the quite PC Wesleyan University, and I consider myself a feminist, though not in any kind of Gloria Steinem way.)
Dear Feminist:
The affluent, white middle-class girls of America's elite schools seem to be
sleepwalkers. They've regressed to a 1950s style of timid conformism that is
shocking, in view of their enormous career opportunities. They're
clones -- whether they favor preppie polo shirts or postmodernist nose rings.
Truly independent thought seems beyond them; they crave dogma,
group approval. They've been overprotected by their parents and
overflattered by their teachers. Far from suffering from "low self-esteem"
(a rank contemporary cliché), they've been touted as "future leaders" and
pushed beyond their talents or aspirations. You're quite right to call them
"humorless" and "limp": How few are the feisty among them!
I am repeatedly struck, in contrast, by the bold vitality of American
working-class women (exemplars of my pugnacious, mouthy, street-smart
feminism), as well as of black, Hispanic, Brazilian, Italian, Greek, Dutch, Russian,
Chinese, Korean, Indian or Egyptian middle-class women, with their strong,
ebullient personalities. Even American Southern sorority girls, who rule the
Gulf Coast beaches, have more pizzazz and joie de vivre than the generic,
prepackaged yuppies of the elite schools, who know how to use the gym but
not, in its deepest sense, the library.
The plight of American white girls is well-captured by "Daria," the MTV
cartoon series where the stoical, affectless, slightly blobby heroine and her
neurotic, paralyzed, prematurely ironic gal pal dodge and manipulate their
overbearing, well-meaning caretakers -- unctuous, PC-spouting teachers and
oafishly upbeat boomer parents.
It remains to be seen whether nature or nurture is more responsible for this
deplorable situation. Given every option but their natural right to early
motherhood, middle-class girls may be adrift. Most of them lack the vision,
focus, will and aggressive drive necessary for long-term major achievement;
yet they are also disaffected from men, whose virility, in these office-bound
days, is at the vanishing point. Too many white girls are just plodding
along, expecting happiness to be handed to them on a platter. Passive yet
querulous, they are hardly the future that feminism hoped for.
Dear Camille:
I've read Dr. Laura Schlessinger's books and listened to her show (she,
like you, bashes NOW). I've also read Ellen Fein and Sherrie
Schneider's definitive dating guide, "The Rules," (as well as attending a
seminar of theirs -- they, like you, insist that the differences
between men and women are real). I find other eerie similarities
between the works of all those women and your own, as if you embrace
common themes. And it seems that the popularity of all of you is
symbolic of America's growing dissatisfaction with "modern" values and
ideas. Am I just crazy, or do you think you have something in common
with them as well?
Chain Link
Dear Chain Link:
Yes, there are definite parallels among the life philosophies of Dr. Laura,
the "Rules" divas and me. Those three women have the old-style punch of
Jewish-American matriarchs, who had no trouble expressing themselves to
anyone about anything. Watching Fein and Schneider tear through the talk
shows, I felt nostalgic for my college years, during the first ferment in sex
roles. (A huge proportion of my lively fellow students at the State
University of New York at Binghamton were smart Jews of modest means from New
York City and its suburbs.)
One of the big lies of the current feminist establishment is that all of the
advances of contemporary women are due to the organized women's movement. In
fact, a heady new spirit was already strikingly evident in my generation of
1960s women well before NOW was founded in 1966: popular culture (Elvis,
Motown, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones) had a far bigger impact on us. The
women's movement was a positive product and subset of my generation, not its
determining factor.
In Fein and Schneider you can see the kind of powerful, humorous
personalities who did not need feminism to set them free. They and
Schlessinger espouse a take-charge attitude toward life. They're shrewd,
realistic and tough. Like me, all three have tried to look at life without
preconception, learning from steady observation and bruising experience and
following the conclusions wherever they may lead. It's fairly obvious as the
century winds down that jargon-ridden feminist theory, poststructuralism,
and postmodernism have very little enlightening or sustaining to say to men
and women trying to adapt to a rapidly changing world culture. Hence those
of us who are sifting through history for enduring human principles of
behavior seem to be talking plain old common sense.
Dear Camille:
Why do women marry imprisoned murderers and rapists?
What's the appeal? Do you think O.J. will remarry?
Puzzled
Dear Puzzled:
It's the Pyramus and Thisbe archetype (borrowed from Ovid by Shakespeare in
"Midsummer Night's Dream"): That chink in the wall sure does bring the
hormones to high heat!
However bizarre they may seem, women who fall in love with death-row inmates
(or kidnappers, à la Patty Hearst) reveal a fundamental element of female
erotic psychology. Exhibitionism, martyrdom and fantasies of delirious
surrender are all mixed up in it. The mysterious, brooding, maimed hero of
Charlotte Brontë's Gothic classic, "Jane Eyre," resembles what these women
see in their criminal beloveds, who seem temptingly singed with hellfire.
The incarcerated outlaw is strong, in defying the system, and yet
weak -- isolated, dependent and in desperate need of HER, a nun in service to
a distant god. Her noble willingness to accept a sexless love suggests the
incest taboo of father-romance: She has displaced all female rivals
(notably, the mother) in ministering to an entombed patriarch, whose legs and
eyes she has become. It's like "The Libation Bearers," the central play of
Aeschylus' "Oresteia," where Electra is so devoted to honoring her murdered
father's grave that she gave her name to a whole complex -- the female
equivalent of Freud's Oedipal syndrome. The doomed prisoner is dangerous yet
castrated, a tainted boy toy who proves the loyal woman's own perverse
superiority by horrifying her family and community -- her real intended
audience.
As for O.J., I see him playing the field until, like Marlon Brando, he finds
a Pacific Islander who missed the international news blitz and doesn't see
he's damaged goods. Actually, I'm more puzzled about his pathetic inability
to hide that Heisman Trophy. Klutz City!
Dear Camille:
What are your thoughts on the case of "Runaway Housewife" Tracy Whalin, the
33-year-old mother of three languishing in a Florida prison after an
unauthorized vacation with her son's 14-year-old best friend?
Press reports in the U.K. when the story broke expressed mild concern and
amusement. Now, however, La Whalin faces 20 years in jail on sex abuse
charges; her "victim" is in "protective custody" and the papers seem intent on
portraying the "shamed" housewife as a dirty old woman.
How should we deal with cases such as these? And would our response be any
different if it was a 33-year-old man having an affair with a 14-year-old
girl?
Michael in London
P.S. I would sign myself Mummy's Boy, or something like that, but the thrill of
being addressed in person by my favorite "intellectual Rottweiler" (who
coined that?) prevents me from doing so.
Dear Michael:
The case you cite has gotten no publicity that I am aware of in the major
American media, probably because it is a replay of scandals of the early
1990s. A woman in the Philadelphia area, for example, was one of the first
to be prosecuted under sexual abuse laws originally designed to protect
underage girls from male seduction: She had a protracted affair with a
neighborhood adolescent boy who eventually ratted on her.
I don't know the facts of the Florida case, but I am on record (in the main
essay of "Vamps & Tramps") as favoring a reduction of the legal age of
consent to 14. I fail to see what demonstrable social or psychological harm
is done to adolescent boys or girls by genuinely consensual liaisons,
heterosexual or homosexual, with older persons. Others (both conservative
and liberal) would insist that teens at that age cannot give informed
consent -- which I think hogwash, more of our endless infantilizing of the
young.
As for the term "intellectual Rottweiler," it originated in a newspaper
profile and has stuck. It's another of the terms (like "equal-opportunity
offender") that was coined about me and that seems to have entered the
language. As an Amazon feminist, I embrace the attack-dog metaphor, which is
far preferable to the kind of images that are bountifully deserved by my
academic opponents -- barracuda, snake, rat, spider and slavering, sycophantic
lap dog!
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