R E C E N T L Y
Celebrities' fatal attraction to public sex
Bill's victory stogie: Just a cigar?
Behind the baffling bevy of beautiful boys
Giving homosexuality a bad name. Plus: Madonna's star rises again
The glory of female curvature
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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 The coward From Niagara to Viagra Right On! Under the Covers Hollywoodland Second Thoughts Sound Salvation Unzipped The Awful Truth |
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Dear Camille:
I am a baby boomer who is watching the debut of the
male potency pill, Viagra, with interest. I have a hunch that this new
miracle drug will have a profound effect, but not one that has been
anticipated. My guess is that it will come to be known as the Trophy Wife
Pill. High-income men in their 40s, 50s and even 60s will
come to believe that they can recapture what they had in their 20s and
30s, except now they have money and position. Men who have confidence and
power in the business world can now believe that they can once again enter
the arena of sexual competition with younger men with the same aura of
confidence and power.
As a result, many of these affluent men will be shucking their older wives, something that has been
going on since time immemorial, but now on a much, much larger scale. This
type of individual has a huge ego to begin with, and Viagra will do
nothing but enlarge it, even if the actual physical effect of the drug is
nothing more than a placebo.
Tony
Dear Tony:
I applaud the return of priapism, as heralded by Viagra. Normally, I oppose pill-taking of the Ritalin/Prozac variety as a mind-dulling bourgeois crutch. But aphrodisiacs have a long, noble and global history. Therefore Viagra -- if it is eventually proved medically safe -- belongs in Everyman's war chest of pagan potions.
As an Amazon feminist, inspired by masculine achievements, I have always taken a pro-penis position, whether in arguing that "the erect penis is the ultimate symbol of human desire" or in presenting the 1994 program "The Penis Unsheathed" for London's Channel 4, which surveyed the cultural imagery of the phallus. My favorite advice to the sexes: To men I say, "Get it up!" and to women, "Deal with it!"
Unlike the bitterly anti-male feminist ideologues, on campus and off, I have diagnosed America's sexual problems as coming from too little male lust, rather than too much. Desperate for female approval, white middle-class men have become more and more timid and have ended up castrating themselves. Women get along better with other women -- which is why lesbian experimentation is so much in vogue. Who needs men? -- if they can't offer some secret sizzle that women can't.
"The erection is the last gasp of modern manhood," I told Time magazine for its May 4 cover story on Viagra. It's in women's procreative interests to encourage male confidence, assertiveness and swagger, which are inherently eroticizing. Isn't it obvious that renascent feminism has made women personally and professionally freer but has not at all increased general sexual happiness? Brainwashed by social constructionism, the most ambitious women have become alienated from their own natural instincts and longings -- which is one reason the elite schools have suffered such an epidemic of anorexia and bulimia.
While I vigorously support moderate sexual harassment guidelines (a subject on which I have written and spoken extensively), I also believe that the human race as a whole gains by feeding, fanning and focusing the flames of male lust. Viagra might even be vital to our national defense, since it is highly unlikely that the last two generations of mewling, puling milksop males have the strength or will to resist a serious military threat to the United States. Indeed, women will probably have to take up broomsticks and join Madame DeFarge brigades to defend the borders.
Your concern about "affluent men shucking their older wives" may be quite justified. I myself would argue that Viagra will tend to reconcile rather than alienate long-married couples, who may have drifted into boredom through over-familiarity. It is well known, for example, that motherhood, with its conversion of home into baby-care center, can stifle libido, as the husband is shunted to the periphery and becomes just another cog in the woman-ruled social machinery. Viagra or its pharmaceutical progeny may keep novelty on-site and prevent men from looking elsewhere for excitement.
For an emblem of the new age of potency pills, I nominate Bronzino's magnificent 16th century portrait, "Andrea Doria as Neptune," in which the old, gray-bearded but still muscular Italian admiral (after whom the ill-fated luxury liner was named) is shown half-nude while holding a spiked iron trident and standing next to a mighty, phallic mast. A sea-green drapery barely conceals the fat root of Doria's fleshy penis, which seems to be engorged from his ample, protruding belly. Let 21st century feminism hail and celebrate male sexual vitality!
Dear Camille:
Please give me your take on the recent unearthing of Victoria Woodhull in two
new biographies. Are there lessons to be learned from her brazen, hot
feminism and the way she was ridiculed by the feminist powers that ruled in
her day? How did it take 100 years before her influence arrived on our
doorstep with your very Woodhullish brand of brash thinking? Are you our
generation's "Notorious Victoria"?
Anonymous
Dear Anonymous:
I am delighted with the renewed attention to Victoria Woodhull, which certainly helps with the reeducation of those knee-jerk, doctrinaire feminist insiders whose us-vs.-them attitude silenced dissent and debate for so many decades. In the 19th century, the women's movement was in fact polarized from the start about sex as well as alcohol, which puritans like Susan B. Anthony (a Temperance activist) wanted to control through government intrusion and regulation.
Like me, the scandalous provocateur and polemical journalist Woodhull was on the libertarian side of the equation. As a scholar, however, I am a bit more in the line of abrasively independent thinkers extending from Mary Wollstonecraft to Simone de Beauvoir. I detest group dogma, prissy propriety and cliquish herd behavior -- which are what took over feminism in the 1970s in the urban-centered women's organizations and in the women's studies programs on campus. By the 1990s, the feminist establishment needed a good kick in the pants from a Woodhull-like maverick, and I am glad to have supplied it.
Expand your universe -- ask Camille.
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