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
Is marriage headed
for the trash can of history?
Dear Camille:
What do you think of "In The Company of Men," a very tough, sharply
written film about a couple of women-haters and their solitary victim
that has a lot of women fuming? Fuming, I gather, because they feel --
as one female 20th Century Fox executive told "Men" star Aaron Eckhart --
"This movie never should've been made ... it has nothing good to say."
This movie is so fascinating, so hard-ass. It portrays one of the
cruelest acts I have ever seen perpetrated on a woman, but it's an
honest film that shows in very bald fashion where a
lot of guys live. Do you think it illuminates, diminishes, propagandizes ... what?
Jeffrey Wells
Dear Mr. Wells:
Alas, nothing in the rather murky televised clips of "In the Company of Men" has made me want to rush off to the theater and risk wasting an entire precious evening. In these depressing days of low quality control, I've had too many disappointments and vexations with first-run movies, where I end up twiddling my thumbs and loudly sighing and griping. Unless a film is genuinely "cinematic," with something to pleasure or affront the eye, I now wait for most things to be released on video -- which allows me to jeer in private and to save time by simultaneously grooming the cat or reorganizing the silverware drawer.
"In the Company of Men" seems to be an ambitious but over-talky high-concept film that probably needed a bit more script development. Its importance may be more as a bravura demonstration that an independent, low-budget production (it cost only $25,000) can spark discussion and win national publicity if its makers pay intelligent attention to ideas and the Zeitgeist.
Though writer/director Neil LaBute claims the film is really a critique of corporate culture, it's clear that audiences are taking it as a salvo in the gender wars. The remark you quote from the female studio executive is appalling, of course, and smacks of Puritan moralism and preemptive Stalinist censorship. It's curious that "In the Company of Men" got an early reputation at the Sundance festival for misogyny, when the film seems awfully PC. That is, it's simplistically polarized between a conspiratorial devil male and a saintly, handicapped female -- we're back to the silent-film villain gleefully twirling his waxed mustache over the pitiable, pure-as-snow maiden tied to the railroad tracks.
It used to be a principle of literary criticism that true tragedy cannot be based on the sufferings of animals, children or the disabled -- which lead to pathos (or bathos when things get campy). I have zero interest in watching a deaf woman being stalked and humiliated by a cad. It's like those masochistic melodramas of women in torment -- Audrey Hepburn as a blind woman being terrorized in "Wait Until Dark," or even Julie Christie trapped by a randy computer in "Demon Seed." The recent plane crash on "All My Children," which apparently bumped off the delectable Maria (a longtime soap star), is absorbing my sentimentality quotient for the moment.
The cardinal, excerpted scene from "In the Company of Men" (in which the yuppie played by Eckhart proposes the cruel stunt to his wimpy colleague) struck me as completely unbelievable in both form and content. Rogue heterosexual males don't have those arty, self-conscious speech rhythms, nor do evildoers announce their plans in advance like crop projections from the Department of Agriculture. Only great directors like Alfred Hitchcock can carry that off, as in a masterpiece like "Strangers on a Train," with its visual intricacy and moral and psychological ambiguity.
If the clips I've seen are representative, "In the Company of Men" is accurate about neither companies nor men. Nevertheless, it is clearly a serious effort to deal with the rancid state of contemporary sexual relations. My standard for scenarios of callous seduction and libertinage is probably a bit high, since it was formed by European films like Roger Vadim's brilliant 1960 modernization of "Les Liaisons Dangereuses," starring Jeanne Moreau, as well as Fellini's "La Dolce Vita" and even "Bonjour, Tristesse," where Jean Seberg cavorts as Francoise Sagan's wicked sprite.
Dear Camille:
What do you make of Louisiana's new "covenant marriage" law, which aims to strengthen married life by making couples sign stronger vows and submit to a two-year "cooling off" period before they can get a divorce? Feminists like Katha Pollitt, predictably, are trashing it as an imposition on women's rights, while "new communitarians" like Amitai Etzioni are defending it as a non-compulsory alternative to no-fault divorces. What's your opinion?
Bridegroom
Dear Bridegroom:
As long as "covenant marriage" remains optional, it should be welcomed as an effort to strengthen marriage vows, which 30 years of epidemic divorce have rendered nearly meaningless. The beneficiaries would be children, whom broken homes tear in two, no matter what parents tell themselves. If both marriage and divorce were made more difficult, couples would be forced to think more deeply about their commitments.
However, no law will be able to reverse what is ultimately a profound social shift, as women have gained economic independence. Marriage, historically designed to protect and provide for women and children, is no longer a necessity and is dwindling into a mere convenience -- or inconvenience, as ardor cools. Rather than trying to circumscribe the legal force of the marriage contract, an authentic radical feminism would follow Simone de Beauvoir's example by rejecting marriage in the first place.
As for that whiny troll, Katha Pollitt, an unscrupulous and unreliable critic and a cultural philistine, she's a good example of the phony prep-school/trust-fund leftism suffusing the incestuously interwined Ivy League cliques who run the corrupt East Coast literary and magazine establishment. Dear Camille:
My girlfriend works at a large publishing company and was recently
required to attend a series of lectures on new sexual harassment laws. The
legislation is so outrageous that my reaction, instead of the usual disgust, was amusement. If what I heard was correct, the person with the greatest
sensitivity in any given situation becomes the person with the
greatest power. An example was: "One person (sex unspecified) is looking
at another as they work." Apparently, the conclusion to be taken from the lecture was that if the person being looked at "felt uncomfortable," they could
sue. Taking offense is now the quickest route to riches through
a successful lawsuit! Certainly, no corporation, city or country can
effectively operate in the restrictive environment generated by these
laws. They will surely be repealed? Right?
Enraged in Elmhurst
Dear Enraged:
Political correctness, which was largely defeated in the fiery TV talk show and news panel wars of the early 1990s, is still deeply embedded in literature departments and in addled hierarchies from the Pentagon to university administrations and corporate middle management. Your girlfriend's experience -- being "required" to attend pious, instructional sermons -- is horrendous but very typical of how private companies are trying to cover their asses against future litigation by imposing genteel, 1890s-era rules of decorum on their employees. The next step will be tasseled draperies to shroud the furniture, as in the Victorian period, so that no one gazing at a table leg might be lewdly reminded of a real lady's leg.
An entire sexual harassment industry has sprung up that specializes in providing "experts" for on-site sensitivity training sessions or (what a nightmare!) compulsory weekend retreats. There is a direct pipeline of extreme feminist ideology from the dictatorial campus "student life" offices to these lucrative, business-oriented services. The situation seems to be getting worse and needs much more public scrutiny.
I support moderate sexual harassment guidelines (relating to "quid pro quo" coercion of subordinates) and lobbied for their adoption at my university in 1986, before the present national furor began. However, I vigorously oppose the secondary "hostile workplace" clause (which has swelled larger and larger in sexual harassment policies) and have argued since my arrival on the scene seven years ago that it is excessively bourgeois and subjective and that it infringes on basic constitutional rights.
Looks and words, however uncomfortable, must be left free in a democracy.
Liberalism's relatively recent addiction to authoritarian surveillance is one reason for the rise in this decade of the libertarian movement, to which I belong. Oh mighty oracle,
Breastfeeding is becoming a bogey of the '90s. Here in Australia we
have mother A suing mother B for breastfeeding mother A's children and
governments legislating to prevent women selling their breast milk
(while allowing the sale of blood and sperm). On the other hand, there
are women using public (and aggressive) displays of breastfeeding as some
form of political statement. How can such a natural and essentially
mammalian activity become a political football?
Chthonic Youth
Dear Youth:
I'm sure Salon readers will be as fascinated as I am by your bulletin from Australia. Breastfeeding has gotten some attention in the United States through a few controversies over whether public nursing violates local ordinances forbidding indecent exposure.
However, the selling of breast milk has never been an issue here at all. Is this a new wrinkle in Australian entrepreneurship? Will mother's milk be your next export? We're very happy with Nicole Kidman and Foster's beer.
Please show us more!
Possibly there is some currently untestable health hazard in unpasteurized breast milk. Otherwise, I fail to see how government has the right to ban its sale. By my libertarian code, each person has the right to dispose of his or her body as he or she wishes -- including selling organs, fluids or hair. (Until the invention of dynel, impoverished Italian women's shorn locks made the wigs of the world. Three millennia of olive oil gave us an edge.)
The politicizing of public breastfeeding began in the 1960s, when hippie women went braless and shoeless at love-ins and rock festivals and began to push the envelope governing public displays of affection. It's a debatable point: To what extent in modern Western culture is exposure of the breast, a secondary sex organ, inherently erotic? (There was a recent flap in Toronto over women winning the male right to go bare-chested.) And to what extent does breastfeeding, a utilitarian function, resemble other "natural" activities? -- some of which are publicly permitted (eating and drinking) and some not (urination, defecation, sexual intercourse).
As with most sexual conventions, the laws will change if enough people defy them. But the majority of women at this time don't appear to be particularly eager to make militant spectacles of themselves and their infants.
Dear Camille:
I am amazed that I can talk to you all the way from the tip of
Africa. After being isolated for so many years due to sanctions, it
still takes time getting used to. In South Africa we have at the moment
what they call "Truth and Reconciliation" hearings to determine who is
guilty of crimes toward humanity during the apartheid years. My problem
is that I feel people from privileged white backgrounds who committed
crimes against other people did so to prevent black South Africans
having any rights and opportunities. People who committed crimes in
their struggle to end apartheid surely did it because there was no other
alternative to use against a powerful government and just wanted to be citizens
in their own country. I do not think they can all be treated the same
way. What do you think? I'm confused and value your opinion.
Helena, Cape Town
Dear Helena:
It's wonderful to hear from Salon's South African readers. Your letter certainly puts into perspective the sometimes trivial preoccupations of the gender-obsessed and gender-confused United States. What is happening in South Africa -- with stunning speed -- is a microcosm of the political evolution of world history. Representative democracy (currently gridlocked in Washington, D.C.) is both difficult and necessary.
The American media, focused on celebrity crime cases, provide woefully inadequate coverage of international affairs and only rouse themselves when there is a natural disaster, terrorist attack or prepackaged event like the transfer of power in Hong Kong. Hence it's hard to follow what is actually going on in the hearings you describe in South Africa.
There is always a turbulent period of recrimination, inquest and payback after a political cataclysm of the kind South Africa has experienced -- remarkably without the slaughter and destruction of full-scale civil war. You who are there would know best how this process of investigation and prosecution (rather than general amnesty) was chosen and whether it now seems to be gathering ominous momentum, as in the Reign of Terror after the French Revolution.
Any nation that has suffered and survived what South Africa has may need to look back and systematically reassess -- in the way, for example, that Germany after the Nuremberg trials never did until recently. Victors usually dictate the terms: Had the rebel American colonies been crushed by England, for example, George Washington would be remembered as a traitor rather than as a freedom fighter. Your tribunals are partly a struggle over whose historical view will dominate.
Again, you can best determine whether the borderline between justice and revenge is getting blurred, and whether the attempt to quantify penalties for past misdeeds is threatening to destabilize South Africa's great gains.
Sub-Saharan Africa, where tribal traditions of monarchy still linger in ostensibly democratic nations, is carefully watching your social experiment, as is much of the world.
In view of the extreme economic and political inequities of the apartheid era, it is a testament to South Africans that your progress has been so steady and controlled. But dangers may still loom, if the nation does not cohere. The hearings that concern you may reveal whether deep resentments remain that cannot be rationally resolved. We all wish you the very best.
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