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Linda Tripp, the White House's ghoulish bad conscience
I'll take religion over gay culture
The affirmative action of Gwyneth Paltrow
America's New Age obsessions: The good, the bad and the inner child-y
Tom Cruise is no cruiser
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A L S O
About Camille Paglia
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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:
As I was watching the conclusion of the World Cup soccer tournament on TV
recently, I was moved by the triumphant French team's unabashed glee, which
they expressed by kissing and embracing each other in a way that would
presumably be considered taboo and unmasculine by male athletes in these
United States. What led to our country's unspoken prohibition of such
displays of affection?
-- Carrie
Dear Carrie:
The cultural insularity of the United States was nowhere clearer than during
the delirious weeks of preliminary rounds in the World Cup tournament,
broadcast from France to billions of viewers, rich and poor, for whom "fútbol"
is a passion and a way of life. Because of the dominance of American-style
football (a heavily armored war game that I have called my pagan religion),
soccer is barely a blip on the national radar screen here. While there is
increasing interest in the sport, reinforced by parental concerns about the
serious injuries and draining practice time of American football, it will be
decades before soccer can hope to challenge our triple-threat hegemony of
football, basketball and baseball, around which an elaborate academic and
media culture has grown.
The global focus on the events in France, along with the teams' panoply of
national traditions and rivalries, was extraordinarily moving, but relatively
few Americans seem to have paid much attention. I watched early matches on
Univision, the Spanish-language network, and though I understood little of the
commentary, I adored the broadcasters, with their mad enthusiasm or
sophisticated weariness -- very different from the flat, pedestrian
cliché-mongering or har-har-har locker-room joshing of American play-by-play
reporters.
The star of the tournament for me was the Paraguay team's goalie, Jose Luis
Chilavert, an extraordinary athlete built like a mesomorphic Roman gladiator.
What speed and power! I haven't seen such raging, testosterone-fueled
dominance on the field since the heyday of linebacker Lawrence Taylor,
defensive genius of the New York Giants. Chilavert's saturnine, burning
maleness practically blew out my TV set.
Your question addresses men's greater physical affection outside the Anglo-American block. Yes, it is remarkable indeed to see the kissing, hugging,
hand-holding, flower-giving and general tenderness that are perfectly
permissible among heterosexual men in many parts of the world, particularly
along the Mediterranean rim, European, Near Eastern and North African. The
Puritan repressions of American history have unfortunately conjoined with
stoical British reserve, the "stiff upper lip" that first appeared among the
middle and upper classes after the Industrial Revolution, when imperialism and
international capitalism fused. Anglo-Americans are generally uncomfortable
with the tactile and in public require a larger buffer of personal space than,
for example, the urban Japanese or Hindu Indians. We're all business, our
identities defined by the individual or primly official rather than the
collective or organic.
I suspect that a good deal of current male homosexuality in America is due to
our prohibition on spontaneous touching, so that men who hunger for physical
intimacy with other men (traditionally achieved in the military or at sea)
have been forced to define their natural yearnings in genital terms. Cultural
norms for male physical expression or emotional display are vastly different,
as we can tell from all the tears and sentimental bawling that go on among
Homer's Greek warriors in the "Odyssey." Both Herman Melville and D.H.
Lawrence have written feelingly about the need for warm male bonding, but of
course today's snickering little queer theorists have reduced it all to a
banal formula of artists-in-the-closet.
After watching the World Cup matches, I was struck by how my perceptions
changed, literally overnight, of American young men at the beach. How stolid
and disproportioned they suddenly seemed, with their broad shoulders, fibrous
upper backs and massive biceps, pumped up from the weight room. How clunkily
they shuffled along the sand. Soccer, a truly populist sport that requires
only a ball and is played from earliest childhood around the world, may be
responsible for the greater grace and sexiness of foreign men. Soccer's fancy
footwork, swiveling hips, loose arms (hands can't be used) and free-form
dashing and feints give a sensuous fluidity to men's bodies that we see in
America only among dancers.
American athletic training encourages a frozen pelvis in most sports positions
except for football's wide receiver and the slalom racer. Even basketball, where
finesse is at a premium, has gone over to baggy shorts that drape and conceal
the thighs -- an overdone hip-hop street style presently aped by white middle-class boys in shopping malls from coast to coast. More sex is apparently
being had at a younger age these days, but male teenage personae have become
childishly sexually neuter. Soccer, with its tousled heads, sculptured legs and lightning-quick moves,
may be just the ticket to re-zap torpid sexual relations in the United States.
Dear Camille:
What is your opinion of the recent changing of the guard at the New Yorker magazine? With Tina Brown happily running off to the land of Disney and movie/journalism synergy, will David Remnick steer the august publication back toward William Shawn-type sobriety? Will this work in the '90s? If Si Newhouse had phoned YOU up and bestowed the job on you, what would you have done with the New Yorker?
-- Maggie
Dear Maggie:
Holy Hermes, I'm not editor-in-chief material! I'm more the manic, go-for-the-jugular, roving she-wolf, à la Roz Russell as the intrepid reporter in
"His Girl Friday."
As for the New Yorker, I don't give a freaking fig what they do with that rag.
The appointment of such a comfy-cozy, middlebrow insider as Remnick will
hardly produce creative change, but maybe Condé Nast owner Newhouse needs a
caretaker to assure continuity until a much-needed new direction is found. As
a 1960s pop Warholite and rock fan, I utterly despised the still-canonized
William Shawn magazine as the darling dainty doily of the liberal bourgeoisie.
Tina Brown, who brilliantly restored Vanity Fair to its 1930s peak of wit and
glamour, could and should have done the same thing to the New Yorker, whose
sole vestige of its prewar splendor remains its wonderful cartoons.
But Brown made several key mistakes. First, she failed to realize that the New
Yorker has always been a national magazine and not just a bulletin board for
the slick Manhattan scene. Second, she wrongly thought New York is as
culturally and politically central to the United States as London is to England and
that the PC-ridden Ivy League, from which she drew so many contributors, is
equivalent in distinction to Oxford and Cambridge universities (a laughable
gaffe). Third, she confused being an editor with being a celebrity and became
obsessed with social status. Fourth, she thought money (which Newhouse
showered on her) could buy quality.
To this day, Tina Brown knows nothing about America beyond the parochial elite
of the Washington-New York-Cambridge tunnel and the Los Angeles lily pad.
After a strong start in 1992, her New Yorker sank into mediocrity year by
year. She surrounded herself with sycophants and retreads, and little that
she published will have staying power.
The London Observer, recalling my 1996 Salon article on the
Brit editors (Andrew Sullivan, Brown, et al.) who had swept into the U.S. and
were then losing ground, contacted me immediately after Brown's resignation
and asked me to weigh in. To their surprise, I was actually in London (for
the release by the British Film Institute of my book on Alfred Hitchcock's
"The Birds") and had to squeeze in the piece after a frenzied, 11-hour day
of print, radio and TV interviews. I felt very much like Simone de Beauvoir
on a tear as I sat alone in a smoky French bistro off Oxford Street, zestfully
cutting up my thick, medium-rare, marinated lamb steak with a big, sharp knife
and dissecting Tina Brown on page after page of yellow foolscap.
"Camille Paglia vs. Tina Brown," trumpeted the Observer over its July 12
headline, as the now-inevitable picture of me with arms akimbo in the purple-velvet Moschino cavalier's jacket glared out at the bleary breakfasters of
London, who would doubtless have preferred thinking only about France vs.
Brazil in the World Cup final that day. Inside, the screaming headline was
from my piece: "Tina Brown screwed up big: The power and money went to her
head." I say, among other juicy things (remember that steak!), that "the
editorship of Tina Brown corrupted literary New York" and that the 1990s reign
of Brown and her husband, Harold Evans, former head of Random House, "was one
of pretension, snobbery and disgusting display."
As a woman, Tina Brown had every chance for major and enduring achievement.
As a person, however, she was undone by her own false values. She played
pinch and tickle with Mammon and turned her writers into slavish golden oxen.
Disney can have her.
N E X T_P A G E | Demi, Bruce and Liv -- The volatility of celebrity unions
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