R E C E N T L Y The decline of pop culture (09/29/98) Ken Starr: The illicit child of Clarence Thomas and Anita Hill (09/15/98) Male troubles: Bill Clinton, Matt Drudge and Mark McGwire (09/01/98) I serviced the president and all I got was this lousy Martha's Vineyard souvenir (08/18/98) Swinging with the sodomites (08/04/98) - - - - - - - - - - A L S O About Camille Paglia Ask Camille archives - - - - - - - - - - C O L U M N I S T S Sexpert Opinion By Susie Bright I'll write the book of love (10/09/98) The Reluctant Capitalist By Heather Chaplin Hedging their butts (10/09/98) Left Hook By Joe Conason Hypocrite of the House (10/05/98) Right On! By David Horowitz Clinton's amen chorus (10/12/98) Mr. Blue By Garrison Keillor If I write a salacious story in the first person, will readers assume it's about me? (10/06/98) On Television By Joyce Millman Teen spirit: TV's wise kids and puerile adults (10/12/98) Under the Covers By James Poniewozik Remember when it was fun to read the Web? A look back (10/13/98) Let's Get This Straight By Scott Rosenberg Free speech or blatant ripoff? (10/09/98) Home Movies By Charles Taylor Prince's unfairly maligned second film mixes swank screwball comedy with uptown sass (09/29/98) Second Thoughts By Sallie Tisdale Recipes make the woman (09/24/98) Salon Columnists - - - - - - - - - - S A L O N E M P O R I U M FREE! 12-ounce bag of Salon Blend with a purchase of $30 or more. While supplies last.

A S K_C A M I L L E +|+ C A M I L L E+P A G L I A | PAGE 2 OF 2 --- Online advice for the culturally disgruntled --- Dear Camille: Over the past 15 years, I have noticed a large increase in the number of people of my acquaintance making public pronouncements about their restricted diets. Their comments range from the supercilious ("I can't believe you eat red meat!") to the annoying ("Don't you have any decaf?") to the bizarre ("I can't digest instant coffee"). Their actions often contradict their alleged incompatibilities, e.g., the allegedly lactose-intolerant milk haters who scarf up any imported cheese. What's up with this annoying trend? Michael in New York Dear Michael: Like the renaissance in tattooing and piercing (which has blessedly passed its peak), self-restricted diets are a ritual practice that gives people swamped by impersonal, metropolitan, modern life a sense of control over the body, as well as membership in an elite, esoteric group. In other words, it's a combination of monastic mortification with imperial glorification. Established religion's metaphysical vastness has sadly been lost in this splinter-cell tribalism, where the body is scolded or pampered like a colicky baby. Renunciations, in their own perverse way, indulge and license a part of the self that was never fully parented. A Draconian diet plan is simultaneously stern father and consoling mother to the quivering lump of flesh that otherwise feels shapeless and lacking in coherent identity. It's really America's mental cupboards that are bare. In Mediterranean cultures, food, family and nature remain in exuberant harmony. Dear Camille: I am a 31-year-old gay man whose dislike of American homosexuality has led me to live in Latin America, where the gay men are more truly troubled yet have more oomph. However, I have never found love (if you don't mind my saying that), and I am seriously considering making an effort to become straight. I feel as if I could almost do it, were it not for my fascination with the penis. I don't think I could ever transfer that fascination to any part of the female body. Do you think I should try to be sexually attracted to women, or is it too late? Michael Bonine Dear Mr. Bonine: Turning straight may be too radical a reversal. Those banana-laden phallic fruit trees will go on waving at you in the breeze, like a Busby Berkeley chorus line. I doubt that sexual "fascination" of any kind can ever be totally eradicated. On the other hand, self-knowledge should be our ultimate goal. Gay men's need to hunt, serve and worship the penis -- in contrast to straight men's drive to risk or lose it through immersion in oceanic female mystery -- probably comes from some early insecurity or crisis of identity in relation to other men, specifically their fathers. Because masculinity has always been an unstable and potentially explosive force, male homosexuality has many risks, particularly in its interface with strangers (of which the most recent example is the horrifying beating death of a young gay man in Laramie, Wyo.). Gay men seem to collide and split, scattering like billiard balls. If it's nesting you now want, the Las Vegas oddsmakers would favor heterosexuality, thanks to Mother Nature's procreative biases. Surely somewhere in Latin America there must be a spunky, liberal-minded woman who wants children but who wouldn't regard your occasional, playful penis-pursuit as the end of civilization as we know it. Postscript: Denis Dutton of Christchurch, New Zealand, writes to this column to announce a very interesting new Web site, Arts & Letters Daily, which reports on and provides links to sites relating to "philosophy, aesthetics, literature, language, ideas, criticism, culture, history, music, art, trends, breakthroughs, disputes, gossip." Congratulations are in order for an ambitious enterprise. On Friday, Oct. 16, I will be giving the keynote lecture, "Shakespeare, Passion, and the Body Politic," at a Los Angeles conference sponsored by the Shakespeare Globe Centre (the organization founded by the late actor Sam Wanamaker that rebuilt the Globe Theatre in London). The lecture begins at 8 p.m. at the Mark Taper Auditorium of the Los Angeles Central Library. The November issue of Vanity Fair features a portrait portfolio of America's 200 "most influential women." A Lesko caricature, entitled "Revolutionary," shows Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem and me as a "triumvirate" -- "just don't put them in the same room," cracks the magazine. When Vanity Fair called earlier this year to propose a group photo with Friedan and Steinem, I immediately agreed, but said, "If you can bring that off, you deserve the Nobel Prize!" The caricature, with its comic forced propinquity, is presumably the magazine's discreet admission of defeat. The snobbish feminist old guard clearly thinks it can continue to ignore the enormous success over the past decade of the pro-sex wing of feminism to which I belong. Even in caricature, however, we warring feminist divas still have more energy than those tired triplets of the cloistered New York lit set (Susan Sontag, Joan Didion, Elizabeth Hardwick), whose Vanity Fair photo makes them look like they're vacationing at a morgue. Finally, a regular home event these days is my partner Alison dramatically playing and replaying the title sequence of Quentin Tarantino's "Jackie Brown," where Pam Grier, her regal Nubian profile outlined against abstract blocks of color, majestically traverses an airport to Bobby Womack's classic song "Across 110th Street." Grier, in our view, is 200 percent real woman. "Faugh!" we say to limp-noodle Gwyneth Paltrow and smarmy, smirky Ally McBeal. Pam Grier rules! SALON | Oct. 13, 1998 Her wisdom is unimpeachable. Ask Camille. Bookmark http://www.salonmagazine.com/col/pagl/