Camille Paglia Speaks Her Mind

Necrophilia is out. Lesbians are in, especially in vampire movies. Men are underappreciated. Prostitutes are true heroines who are unfairly defined by the few victim-losers among them. Americans should be free to self-medicate but not to drive a train while doing it.

This is the world as Camille Paglia sees it. The controversial and confrontational author came Monday night to Guild Hall to chat with Joy Behar, a comedian and television personality, in front of a packed house. As Ms. Behar promised, Ms. Paglia could be counted on for thought-provoking talk, "even if you want to smack her."

A faculty member at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia and facilitator of "Ask Camille," an Internet column sponsored by Salon magazine, Ms. Paglia is the author of several books, among them "Vamps and Tramps" and "Sexual Personae." She is also a defender of soft porn and all manner of uninhibited sexuality, and a declared enemy of feminists who, as Ms. Paglia has argued, endanger women by portraying them as perpetual victims.

Classic Paglia

Ms. Behar, a former radio talk show host, is one of four female hosts of "The View," an offbeat news and chat show that premiered on ABC that morning. She has been described, by her own publicity people, as a Bronx Renaissance woman. She appeared in Woody Allen's "Manhattan Murder Mystery" and Nora Ephron's "This Is My Life" and covered the Democratic National Convention for Comedy Central.

An occasional interviewer of famous personalities for the 92nd Street Y, which sponsored the program at Guild Hall, Ms. Behar is renting a house here for the season. She opened the discussion Monday by asking the urbane, perpetually dressed in black and gray, and irascible Ms. Paglia whether she liked the beach. The response was classic Paglia:

"Ah, the ocean, the ocean, the ocean. Primal, archetypal, elemental," she said, her hands making larger and larger waves in the air and her voice reaching seductively toward a crescendo.

Like A Machete

Then the hammer dropped, with stern conviction: "You know, nature is not mentioned in the humanities. All you people sending your children to Harvard, they're not learning about nature. . . . Everything is socially constructed."

It took just seconds for the two women to attain a sort of rhythm, with Ms. Behar tossing out some current affair with the kooky, anti-intellectual humor for which she is popular, Ms. Paglia hacking into it with the famous intellect she wields like a machete, and Ms. Behar closing the discussion with another of her Bronxish one-liners.

"Did you hear that men have 40 billion extra brain cells? And who cares?" she asked.

Ms. Paglia named those extra cells "the annex," where "extreme criminality and extreme genius" are born.

"Men are mutilated beings," she declared, using by way of an example the fascination they (and a few "gonzo women") have for tinkering with cars, which she labeled an urge to be "lost in the machine."

Drew Laughter

What about the story last week of a wife who was awarded $1 million after suing her husband's secretary for breaking up her marriage? "If that keeps up, Hillary will be a multimillionaire," quipped Ms. Behar.

Ms. Paglia launched into a discourse on the "infantile" and "litigious" nature of modern society. "In the old days, that woman would have just gone and smacked that secretary around," she declared.

She drew laughter from the audience a dozen times, once by recalling the Boston Globe reporter who was fined $1,000 and ordered to sensitivity training after a female co-worker overheard him using the word "pussy-whipped," and again by telling of a college English teacher who "felt sexually harassed" by a print of Goya's "The Naked Maja" hanging in her classroom.

Ellen's Coming Out

Ms. Paglia favors narrower guidelines for what constitutes sexual harassment, the presence of some verifiable quid pro quo being primary. She contended the current rush to file sexual harassment complaints does not result from an increase in bad behavior: "There are snitches running around. . . . I see sycophancy as more of a danger to the social fabric than abuse of power."

Returning to the betrayed wife's lawsuit, Ms. Behar suggested the amorous secretary who was fined $1 million "could sue the husband for sexual harassment and make up the money."

They agreed Ellen Degeneres's coming-out episode on the television show "Ellen" was anti-climactic, given all the hype, and her new real-life girlfriend, Anne Heche, was an opportunistic and undignified pseudo-lesbian. Ms. Paglia predicted she would do to Ms. Degeneres what Yoko Ono did to John Lennon - "she sucked all the jokes out of him."

Masculine Ideal

Drawing on her experience as an educator, she commented that young women are more apt these days to experiment with same-sex sex.

"Men love to watch women making love. Do you think it's because they're trying to figure out how to do it right?" Ms. Behar prompted.

The audience roared, but Ms. Paglia, uncharacteristically demure, simply called it an attempt to return to the womb, where life is without responsibility or work. She then went on an extended lecture that linked, as is typical of her writing, modern sexual behavior with references to classical art and literature.

For example, she said that all things masculine were labeled "destructive" during the 1970s, when domestic violence first became a cause celebre, but said she was thankful homosexual men - they form a greater part of her personal community than homosexual women, she said - retained an appreciation of "the idealism in masculinity" as it is depicted in Greek sculpture.

Men Get No Credit

"Feminist rhetoric" was dishonest, she asserted, by ignoring all that men had done for women over the centuries - "roofing, for example." Also, contending with natural disasters, fighting wars, finding food, and so on. "Men have done that for centuries and never got anything for it," she said.

"They're getting laid that night," Ms. Behar observed wryly.

Ms. Paglia was undaunted, though. She claimed men have given women safe places.

"But the men create the unsafe space they have to protect the women from. There's a conundrum," the interviewer observed.

Still, Ms. Paglia said, appliances invented by men give her time to teach and write. Nonetheless, women were happier in pre-Westinghouse times, she said. "Those women had a fantastic community with each other."

Conflicting Labels

In earlier times, extended families lived together. "The nuclear family," she declared, "is poisonous."

During the two-hour discussion, she offered a variety of labels for herself, a few seeming at conflict with each other - libertarian, Clinton Democrat, Amazon feminist, pagan - and also described herself as "an Aries, I'm so simplistic. . . . I don't believe in currying favor with the powerful. That's why I'm never in the Hamptons."

"So you see the people in the Hamptons as a bunch of ass-kissing types?" asked Ms. Behar. The audience laughed good-naturedly.

"I see the Hamptons as an appendix to the media establishment in New York," Ms. Paglia shot back. It was, perhaps, too well-aimed; there were a few embarrassed chuckles from the audience.

Power Over Men

One male spectator observed there had been much talk that evening about the power of men over women, and none about the power of women over men. Ms. Paglia agreed.

"Woman rules the emotional world," she said, adding that men as a result suffered from the "push-pull of wanting independence and to return to the womb."

"No wonder they don't talk," said Ms. Behar.

Had she been born in an earlier time, with the old societal limitations on what women could do, Ms. Paglia said, she "would have been a nun. And a very bitchy nun I would have been too."

"Yeah, and forget that vow of silence," rejoined Ms. Behar.