brass-balls feminism (2)

I have always relished intelligent provocations and iconoclasms, and seldom miss a chance for one. In this respect, Camille Paglia remains at the top of my list, no matter what others might say about her being well past her prime. Some books are immortal indeed, and I know of no other woman who has managed to piss off so many know-nothings and their politically correct pieties and complacencies and empty rhetoric at the same time - mainstream feminist scholars, queer theorists, gays, lesbians, conservatives, liberals, and so on.
Here's an all-time favourite passage, which breaks all anti-PC records at a stroke. Needless to say, I endorse each and every line:


Is gay identity so fragile that it cannot bear the thought that some people may not wish to be gay? The difficulties in changing sexual orientation do not spring from its genetic innateness. Sexuality is highly fluid, and reversals are possible. However, habit is refractory, once the sensory paths have been blazed and deepened by repetition - a phenomenon obvious in the struggle with obesity, smoking, alcoholism, or drug addiction.

The injustice and impracticality are in trying to 'convert' totally from homosexuality to heterosexuality, an opposition I think false. However, helping gays learn how to function heterosexually, if they so wish, is a perfectly worthy aim. We should be honest enough to consider whether homosexuality may not indeed be a pausing at the prepubescent stage when children anxiously band together by gender. Indeed, the instantly recognizable house voice of many gay men - thin, reedy, and pinched - dates from that pre-adult period. . . .

Gay men should confront the elements of haphazard choice in their erotic history, which began in the confusion, shame, and inarticulateness of childhood. Judeo-Christian morality, following the Bible, would call for a renunciation of all homosexual behaviour. I don't agree. Why shouldn't all avenues of pleasure remain open? But is is worthwhile for gays to retrace their developmental steps and, if possible, to investigate and resolve the burden of love-hate they still carry for the opposite-sex parent. Behaviour may not change, but self-knowledge - Socrates' motto - is a philosophic value in its own right.

If a gay man wants to marry and sire children [with the opposite sex], why should he be harassed by gay activists accusing him of 'self-hatred'? He is more mature than they are, for he knows woman's power cannot be ignored. And if a married man wants to pursue beautiful young men from time to time, why shouldn't he have the same freedom of sexual self-determination as husbands who patronize whores? Why must he be charged with vacillation or evasion, when his eroticism is the most fully developed? If counselling can allow a gay man to respond sexually to women, it should be encouraged and applauded, not strafed by gay artillery fire of reverse moralism. Heterosexual love, as Hindu symbolism dramatizes, is in sync with cosmic forces. Not everyone as the stomach for daily war with nature.

It is much easier for women to live bisexually, since their erotic performance is not measured by the unforgiving yardstick of erection and ejaculation. Men who shrink from penetration of the female body are paralyzed by justifiable apprehension, since they are returning to our uncanny site of origin. Lingering on the unconscious level in every act of heterosexual intercourse are two male terrors: that when the penis goes in, it won't come out again; and second that as he approaches the womb, a man will, as in a nightmare, be sucked back to boyhood and infancy and be reabsorbed into the maternal body.

These fantasies, detectable in the vampire legends of world mythology, have led me to argue that 'mysogyny' is one of feminism's more useless ideas. It is not male hatred of women but male fear of women that is the great universal. Gay activists who spout feminist rhetoric are usually the most mysogynous, for they love the idea of woman as victim, small, passive, and in need of their help. Such men, of course, are usually helplessly dominated by imposing mothers.

Camille Paglia, 'No Law in the Arena: A Pagan Theory of Sexuality', in Vamps & Tramps: New Essays (London: Viking, 1995), pp. 78-79.

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*It is worth adding that she finishes off the essay by proposing bisexual responsiveness as 'our best hope of escape from the animosities and false polarities of the current sex wars', and a 'pagan education' as the philosophy that 'would sharpen the mind, steel the will, and seduce the senses'. A philosophy that should be 'both contemplative and pugilistic, admitting aggression (as Christianity does not) as central to our mythology':

The beasts of passion must be confronted, and the laws of nature understood. Conflict cannot be avoided, but perhaps it can be confined to a mental theater. In the imperial arena, there is no law but imagination. (p. 94)

Again, I'm with her all the way...