R E C E N T L Y
Behind the baffling bevy of beautiful boys
Giving homosexuality a bad name. Plus: Madonna's star rises again
The glory of female curvature
The uses and abuses of Chelsea Clinton
Why feminists are co-dependent with philandering Bill
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A L S O
About Camille Paglia
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C O L U M N I S T S
Sexpert Opinion
Bestseller Hell
Lying about genocide
The iron wall
Right On!
Word by Word
Under the Covers
Hollywoodland
Second Thoughts
Sound Salvation
Unzipped
The Awful Truth
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A S K_C A M I L L E +|+ C A M I L L E+P A G L I A
Dear Camille:
What was your hit on Bill's victory dance, complete with drum and cigar, caught on camera in his hotel room after the Paula Jones announcement? Also, have you noticed a change in the way Hillary looks at him? She seems softer, more adoring and compassionate. Almost like she's melting.
Dear Fan:
American politics has certainly degenerated into "I Spy," with temperature readings of the presidential brain pan taken by voyeuristic snapshots of probably staged tableaux. "Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar," tartly replied Freud to a suggestive query about his omnipresent phallic stogie.
Stuffing a cigar in one's mouth does seem an odd way to celebrate being freed from litigation over a charge of Invitation to Fellatio. "Don't ask," say conservatives to Bill, and "Don't tell," say liberals to Paula Jones.
There are plenty of red-blooded, lavender-livered guys standing in line to give Bill his orality fix. But his liberality is just for public consumption: no gays need apply, and neither should blacks. The big racial healing and tolerance czar craves only white meat.
When the ever-astute Joan Rivers raised the issue of Bill's all-vanilla tastes with me last month on her radio talk show (nationally broadcast from New York's WOR), I was so startled I could only sputter, "Yeah, the Clinton White House is too white!" Clinton's memoirs should be called "Apartheid of Eros."
Clinton's crew loves to shut women up -- by bullying, threats, ridicule or defamation. They take their cues from the boss man, whose obsessive scenario is plugging up the menacing mouths of white gals -- all of them shadow images of nagging, razzle-dazzle Mom and strident, all-biz Hillary. On Bill's menu, for all his vaunted feminism, the best woman is a silent woman: a cod in the head trumps a bird in the bed.
Hillary's all aglow because she's pulled her mischievous brat out of the tar pit one more time. She's got him on the leash. And oh, he'll pay and pay and pay for Hill standing by her man. She's got more chits than -- well, than a $100,000 passel of pork-belly futures.
My patience with the Clintons snapped when I saw them ostentatiously taking Holy Communion at a Catholic Mass in Africa three weeks ago. Give me a break! As a lapsed Catholic and professed atheist, I cannot stand politicians cloaking themselves in religious robes. The Clintons are sanctimonious hypocrites -- Protestant Pharisees who stroll out of Palm Sunday services with Bible and palms in hand and who jettison half the Ten Commandments at the limousine door.
Tobacco is their Satan -- forbidden to the young and the poor but permissible in choice luxury form to Bill and his cigar-chomping buddies in private or on the golf course. The gap between shadow and substance (in Shakespearean terms) has opened enormously in Washington. Let Bill be Casanova, but he makes a bad pope.
Dear Camille:
As a fan of your books, I was pleased to find your Internet column. My
14-year-old daughter and I recently had a conversation about pregnant
girls going to school. She has two freshman classmates who are pregnant.
Although I strongly believe that these girls need to continue their
education, I can't help feeling that by allowing them to stay in regular
school, see their friends every day, etc., the wrong message is being sent.
In other words, it's OK to get pregnant, everything is fine. Of course, any parent knows how these girls' lives will change
once their baby arrives, but what about the classmates who see all the
attention pregnant girls get, and with very little negative impact (at
school anyway)?
We probably don't need to go back to the situation 20 or 30 years ago, when
unmarried, pregnant girls/women were considered pariahs. How should we
treat this situation and send the right message to our teens?
Kathi Monday
Dear Ms. Monday:
You raise a very troubling question. Certainly, as you suggest, many things are treated with more candor today. Forty years ago, my heroine, Patrick Dennis' Auntie Mame, was fighting "the stigma of the unwed mother" by taking in and flaunting the glaringly gravid Agnes Gooch, to the horror of her nephew's Aryan-from-Darien future in-laws. Many other unmentionables -- from cancer to homosexuality -- have now been hauled into the rational light of day. While there is less shame, there is certainly greater knowledge.
It seems possible to me that the presence of pregnant girls in school might be sending exactly the right message to their classmates. That is, the very physicality of this process -- with its cumbersome late-term limitations and tyrannies -- might strip the glamour from it. I find it difficult to believe that, after an initial surge of gossipy attention, the pregnant girl is much idealized, envied or pursued by her more mobile, fashion-conscious and romance-centered peers.
Actually, most American middle-class girls are harmed, in my view, by their enforced, sanitized distance from procreation. It's dismaying that, in my 27 years of college teaching, no student has ever been visibly pregnant in the classroom -- though occasionally I later heard (once via a confessional term paper) that a girl was expecting. Modern female students are dangerously removed from nature, as it unfolds within them. Their epidemic eating disorders are a grotesque resistance to (and perhaps even a masochistic substitution for) the possibility of pregnancy.
Before Frances McDormand's feisty, Oscar-winning performance as a pregnant, frostbound policewoman in "Fargo" (1996), there was only one other accurate picture I am aware of in major films of the debilitating weariness of late pregnancy, with its eclipse of one generation by the dawn of the next. I refer to Vivien Merchant's amazingly subtle and moody portrayal of the patient wife of a philandering Oxford don in Joseph Losey's "Accident" (1967), a work of brilliant insight into social class as well as sexuality.
Dear Camille:
When I read about all the fuss over singer Paula Cole's armpit hair, my first thought was "What would Camille Paglia think about this?"
Ziad
Dear Ziad:
More attention needs to be paid to the phobia about female body hair in the United States, compared to the more relaxed standards of continental Europe. When the women's movement reawoke in the late 1960s, many militant feminists vowed never to shave their underarms or legs again, as a rebellion against sexist male aesthetic standards, which allegedly reduced women to children. But within a decade, the fad had passed, and today it's only grungy, passive-aggressive college students, Rip van Winkle faculty Marxists or socially retarded granola lesbians who go hairy.
I myself find excess female body hair completely unappealing, probably because my eye has been so trained by the sexual personae of canonical Western art, from beautiful Greek athletes (whose oiled skin in real life was stripped of hair and dust by the strigil) to voluptuous harem odalisques.
Paula Cole has composed a wonderful, award-winning song ("Where Have All the Cowboys Gone?"), but her taste in clothing sucks. Flashing armpit hair at the Grammy Awards ceremony in February could and should have been a radical act, but Cole chose the pathetically wrong costume to go with it. She's too lanky and, yes, cowboyish for that silky, skimpy, cocktail dress, which does not -- repeat not -- go with body hair.
What a nauseating spectacle Cole made of herself! -- at what should have been a peak moment for a woman singer-songwriter. Dr. Paglia, general buttinski and consultant to the stars (the fabulous, supersmart Ellen Barkin visited me in Philadelphia the day after the Oscars; eat your heart out!), would have recommended that Cole go more punk or at least French apache-dancer avant-garde, to give that ebony swatch of sprouting armpit hair a piquantly coherent fashion context.
N E X T_P A G E | Elton John -- From cloying Liza clone to mature artist
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