Campus Crusader

While Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins label religion the root of all evil and urge all reasonable minds to cast out belief altogether, fellow atheist Camille Paglia has defended religion’s essential role in our culture for years. An ex-Catholic, Paglia has decried the abuse of Catholicism in contemporary art. She has quipped that “multiculturalism is an academic shibboleth,” but Paglia would like to see the study of comparative religions included in college core curriculums. A bisexual and a registered Democrat, she has argued for Trent Lott’s right to oppose gay marriage. But such seeming contradictions are the blocks with which Paglia has built her career. As a feminist who despises much of modern feminism and a classicist who has written extensively on Madonna the superstar, not the virgin, Paglia’s controversial and often inflammatory opinions have made her an outsider figure. In fact, it took nearly two decades for the rising intellectual star to get her first book published: _Sexual Personae_ (1990), a survey of Western culture and the arts through the lens of gender politics, which earned her loyal allies and seething enemies with its provocative assertions on hot topics like date rape, pornography and gay rights.

Paglia’s aggressive undoing of gender roles and merry intertwining of pop culture and high-minded theory made her a lightening rod in the ’90s. Now battle-scarred but no less fearless, Paglia is still a fast-talking iconoclast. She is a contributing editor for _Interview_ Magazine and writes a regular column for Salon (recently resumed after a six-year hiatus), where she dubbed YouTube “a triumph of the improvisational Warhol aesthetic” and called the potential Clinton presidency redux “a long, sulfurous night of the walking dead, with chattering skeletons tumbling out of every closet.” Her 2005 analysis of poetry, _Break, Blow, Burn_, was a critically well-received bestseller and she has plans for a companion piece on the visual arts. _Heeb_ met Paglia at Philadelphia’s University of the Arts, where she has been professor of the Humanities since 1984.

*You’ve said that religion is essential to the arts, and that our culture is stagnating because of our lack of religious knowledge.*
Middle-class students have less exposure to religion and not even an elementary knowledge of the Bible. The working-class students that I get, they recognize the Biblical references. But the privileged students have been deprived of the key to understanding some of the greatest artwork of the West. Japanese tourists line up to see the Sistine Chapel, but American students cannot recognize the meaning of the tree in the Garden of Eden. The early ’90s was the first time I started to feel that; in my freshman course I would show my students images and many of them didn’t know the story of Adam and Eve. The Bible is absolutely foundational. Whether you are religious, agnostic or atheist, you must agree that if we do not know the Bible, we’re not going to have any culture left.

*What do you see as the symptoms of this problem?*
There’s an enormous cultural vacuum in the West that is now being filled by endless talk about Britney Spears and Brangelina and so on. This is why we have these mini-gods. There are not even major stars on the level of Elizabeth Taylor or Marlene Dietrich. These small-scale celebrities are consuming an incredible amount of the psychic energy of young people, as you can see with the success of the Perez Hilton website… which I look at once a day and do enjoy.

*Stephen Colbert called celebrity ‘America’s fourth great religion.’*
A wonderful phrase! I don’t have any automatic faith that the West will survive its clash with radical Islam. I’ve been thinking for years how it’s like the way of the Roman Empire: It was soo sophisticated and soo powerful and soo superior and guess what? The whole thing disintegrated; it was very vulnerable to the attacks of committed barbarians. And that’s basically where we are now. Where are the young intellectuals? Where is the young Andrew Sullivan? There is tremendous room for the next generation. When Katie Roiphe came up in the mid-’90s, I thought she was going to be the intellectual of her generation, but she just withdrew after the huge flap about her first book, _The Morning After_. She drifted off into writing memoirs and talking about her personal life, and now has come back with some book on marriage. She didn’t step up and that position is still vacant, so we now have absent two generations of young intellectuals in America.

*But academe is more competitive now. There are more Ph.D. candidates than ever before, and it could be said there are fewer opportunities to get noticed.*
My first book, _Sexual Personae_, was published when I was 43, for heaven sakes! It sat in a box for years, I couldn’t get it published. Seven publishers and five agents rejected that book before Yale Press finally took it. For a year, it was just selling by word of mouth. It was only afterwards that all the university presses started publicity departments, trying to speak to a general audience. People who just stumbled on my book began asking me to comment on Madonna, political correctness, date rape. Access to media came from having written a book, and publishers are still looking for bright young people. But with the Web, anyone can become established by him- or herself—you have instant access. And yet, there’s still a huge vacuum. Something is seriously wrong.

In _Sexual Personae_, you make some broad generalizations about genders, cultures and ethnic groups. There’s the ‘Pagan,’ the ‘Appolonian,’ the ‘Dionysusian’…
I was talking about those forms one can detect in literature and art. I rarely talk about these types in real life except for the blonde sorority queen, an archetype of American high school culture that hasn’t gone away. If you see the film _Mean Girls_ you can see it: the tyranny of the blonde.

*Do you think there are any enduring Jewish types? Daniel Boyarin has championed the idea that the Jewish man was and should be bookish and feminized.*
There is a warrior tradition at certain points in Jewish history. But on the whole, the Jewish man is a man of the book. I think Charles Murray’s theories about the intelligence of the races went astray in not focusing on the word-centered ethos that can raise the IQ of any child. If you are brought up in a highly verbal environment, you will become precocious, and this can be observed in Jewish culture. It could well be that so much intramarriage over the centuries also led to higher IQs of Jews relative to other groups. But in my own observations over time, there is non-stop talking going on, non-stop educating. This is how I was raised. My parents talked all the time, commenting on American culture and everything. It’s no coincidence that people who understand me are often Jewish. In fact, when I was in high school I wanted to join the Jewish Community Center but my parents overruled it.

*Let’s return to the ‘tyranny of the blonde.’*
Oh my God! There’s no way to escape your memories of high school. Blondes ruled my school in Syracuse, New York. They had this charisma. As they aged they lost it, but they lived their glory years as blondes at the apex of the social pyramid. They ruled by virtue of their beauty and glamour—that is something many feminists don’t understand, but most gay men know what I’m talking about. In the gay male world, a beautiful young man has authority by virtue of his gorgeousness. The moment he starts to lose it, he’s lost. That may have been a factor when Andrew Cunanan became very embittered, went over the edge and shot Gianni Versace. He had been a beautiful young man, and then crossed that borderline at age 22, 23 and lost it.

*Was it Elizabeth Taylor who changed that paradigm of beauty?*
Yes! And she converted to Judaism to marry Eddie Fisher. Her parents are from the Midwest, but I wouldn’t be surprised if she was partly Jewish or Indian. Her look is so global. You show an Elizabeth Taylor movie in India and people think she’s gorgeous.

*What if you showed _The Way We Were_ in India?*
Oh, Streisand! I’m such a fan of her early work. Today you cannot imagine what it was like when Streisand burst on the scene in the 1960s. There was nothing like her. She was a mercurial and androgynous creature who was this displaced person—she had been living in Flatbush and never set foot in Manhattan until she was 14. And those early appearances of hers on TV shows, variety shows and her early records—they were welled up with emotions and style and camp and wit. She was funny, funny! And then something went wrong and she became this strange diva thing, taking herself too seriously. A Star is Born: It’s a movie about rock ‘n’ roll and she’s singing standard Borscht Belt ballads. That’s when her tastes started going weirdly middlebrow, almost like she drifted towards her mother’s generation. Now we have an endless series of ‘farewell’ tours and she’s making serious pronouncements with Al Gore about the environment, so people find her annoying. But Barbara Streisand broke the mold, she revolutionized gender roles. How has this been forgotten?

Well, who can forget Yentl?
There was something going on in New York then. These New York Jewish girls, they were fabulous! And they were _not_ feminists! This is what gets me so mad. People say, ‘Because of feminism all these women are now so powerful on the professional stage.’ Wrong! Wrong! Wrong! These Jewish girls who I knew in college were outspoken and tough, scandalizing their parents. Not _one_ of them was reading Betty Friedan. Sex became this _agenda_ in feminism. People still say, ‘Oh, the radical men kept women under their thumb, had them go make the coffee in SDS,’ but I didn’t see any of that. I saw women being treated equally by men… in fact, they were so feisty that men didn’t want to cross them! Those post-war baby-boomer Jewish girls of the early to late 1960s—that was an ideal persona.

*As an Italian-American girl you looked up to Jewish heroines?*
There weren’t many Italian-American role models when I was growing up, so for me Jewish girls were ethnicity unleashed in the assault on the WASP establishment. My father was convinced that there were unstated restrictions against Italian-Americans buying property in certain areas. He had an experience where he went into a suburb of Syracuse to inquire about a property there, was told it was sold and heard later that it wasn’t sold. Though he was a professor at the college, with his last name it didn’t matter. In my life the issue of ethnicity has been huge. That’s why I’m aggravated that Italian-Americans have never been given favored minority status. If you can prove a relative three generations back of Hispanic lineage, you’re eligible for scholarships.

I imagine you like The Sopranos—it explores Italian-American particularity and portrays the ongoing tensions among Italians about how to express Americanness.
I despise _The Sopranos_. I can only watch 10 minutes at most, it makes me so angry. To me it was not only the Italian stereotyping, but the class stereotyping that really bothered me. The North Jersey working-class types in that show are really similar to those we have in Philadelphia. Their portrayals are inaccurate, condescending and foolish. David Chase changed his name from the Italian-sounding ‘DeCesare.’ What Italian changes his name? It’s ethnic pornography for middle-class media people in Manhattan who feel uneasy about their privileges. I came from an immigrant family. Three of my grandparents were born in Italy and my mother was, too. One of my grandfathers worked in a shoe factory, the other was a barber. Thanks to the G.I. Bill, my father was the only one of 10 siblings to go to college, mopping floors to earn his way. He became a high school teacher and then a professor later on. I’m sure this rooted working-class experience helped shape me, helped keep me rooted. That’s something that’s increasingly difficult for academics coming from entirely middle-class suburban culture, losing contact with those forceful grandmothers and ending up with no religion.

What do you think?