In this extraordinary work of commentary, observation, scholarship and humanity, Paglia nails her theses time after time. The reader finds his head bobbing in agreement like a doggy in the backseat car window. The engaging, humorous style feels more like conversation than a book. Camille Paglia is a master teacher. Time and again I had the experience of wanting to ask a question-and at just that moment the words on the page answered my question.
How central has pornography been in Western art? I never paid much attention, largely because whenever my class went to the museum, the subject of sex was verboten, beyond discussion. Paglia shows porn has been center stage for art throughout the history of the West, but on the sly. Humanity hasn't always been hung up on sex, as Westerners have been since Rousseau and Americans particularly since the advent of Steinem feminism.
Paglia takes porn as a legitimate subject for study, and injects it into the scholarly mainstream. Much of it is hilarious and downright unimaginable in this era of Catherine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin. Picture one hundred nuns in a circle, connected by dildoes. Say what? Women wouldn't do such things -- would they? Surely only hateful, nasty men engage in group sex? Allow Camille Paglia to show you that women can be just as licentious and sexually lunatic (or interesting, depending on your point of view) as men. Her treatment of Emily Dickinson left me gasping. No one else sees Dickinson as the female Sade, not even Paglia's mentor Harold Bloom. Yet her reasoning is compelling.
Paglia does make her case against establishment feminism, but does it here in scholarly fashion, with appropriate reserve. The bisexual Paglia celebrates civilization as a male achievement -- had it been left to women to create culture, she says, we'd still be living in grass huts. If you think about it, you see she's right. Women MAY achieve; men MUST. Until the arrival of the pill, nature kept women so firmly in their place that they had no realistic chance to contribute to the arts. But it's been nearly 40 years since the pill arrived and the female contribution to art since then has been nugatory. It's there in the sciences, but not in the arts. Paglia's case is airtight; she's talking common sense and reality, not ideology.
Don't read this thick book in a public place, for three reasons: first, you'll embarrass yourself by bursting out frequently in startled laughter. Second, stupid establishment feminists will swoop down on you in all their outraged ignorance, interrupting a pleasant read. Third, Paglia uses such an educated vocabulary that you'll have to carry a first-class dictionary around with you, and those things weigh a ton. Seriously. I have something of a reputation for the extent of my vocabulary, but I had to assimilate new terms on virtually every page of this book. HARD work -- but well worth the effort. Paglia essentially gives the reader an education in art appreciation, something most of us don't take seriously anymore.
In a real sense, then, this book taught me to see. It taught me a number of other things, too, chiefly that my instincts were right all along about man-woman relations and that there IS a point to 'great art' that I would've been shown in college but for the crap that has replaced real learning in the academy. Paglia is the needed corrective for all that. She has kept alive the proud tradition of honest, disinterested scholarship while all around her others sold out. Paglia and Allan Bloom stand out as heroes in the war against barbarism launched by the ideological Left. It's a measure of her honesty that she herself is a Lefty; but she looks to reality as her taskmaster, not ideology.
Read this book.
