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> <Picture>
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> <Picture: The Women's Quarterly Logo>
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> -----------------------------------------------------------------
> ------- By Camille Paglia <Picture>
>
> Interview: I Told You So!
>
>
>
>
> I Told You So!
>
> Camille Paglia sounds off to TWQ editor Charlotte Hays about the
> feminist establishment, the Clinton scandals, and why Gloria
> Steinem is out of touch
>
> TWQ: The first question I want to ask you is about Monica. Is she
> a vixen or a victim? Did she get what she wanted?
>
> PAGLIA: Well, Monica Lewinsky herself bores me silly because she
> is a kind of a prototype of a narcissistic and spoiled American
> girl that I have been seeing develop over the last twenty-five
> years as a teacher--not at my school, the University of the Arts,
> where most people don't have those kinds of economic advantages.
> But I certainly saw this coming from my first job at Bennington
> College and later as a visiting instructor at Wesleyan and Yale.
> And I have been warning about this for years and saying that we
> are raising up a whole generation of young people who are
> completely removed from any sense of the outside world. To me,
> the most damaging thing Monica did to herself was her response to
> Barbara Walters' early question: "When you went to the White
> House as an intern, were you interested in politics?" And Monica
> Lewinsky is so shallow and her family is so shallow that she
> said, "No, not at all,"-and in a very high and superficial voice
> that you would use having a drink off Rodeo Drive or something. I
> was just amazed at that! Our educational system at the primary
> and secondary level is so flawed that we have girls who would go
> to the White House as a tremendous career opportunity for
> themselves and come out of that experience in Washington undented
> by any sense of wider political or historical realities.
>
> TWQ: What would you advise her to do?
>
> PAGLIA: I would advise Monica Lewinsky to get the hell off the
> public stage before she damages the cause of women any further.
>
> TWQ: What has been her impact on the establishment feminist
> movement?
>
> PAGLIA: Ohhh, I have been in hog heaven over that! Never, never
> did I dream that Gloria Steinem would shoot herself in every one
> of her eight feet-but she did over Monica Lewinsky!
>
> Christina Hoff Sommers was an early warrior in this battle, and
> we were together in all of this in the early 1990s. And now, of
> course, a horde of other women have come onto the scene, and we
> no longer have to take all the abuse. Christina and I have for
> years tried to get people to see that the feminist establishment
> did not speak for all women.
>
> In fact, I'm the one who coined the term "feminist
> establishment." When I went out on my first publicity tour after
> Sexual Personae and in my early articles in 1990, 1991, 1992, I
> drilled that phrase in every interview. I kept on saying,
> "feminist establishment, feminist establishment"-to try to drive
> that wedge into media consciousness and to make them understand
> that the leaders of the feminist organizations based in
> Washington and New York not only did not speak for all women but
> they did not speak for all feminists either. They were as
> divorced from the actual historical currents within feminism as
> the leaders of the Communist Party were in the Politburo or the
> more recent Soviet Union, where they were living like the dukes
> of the Romanovs.
>
> At any rate, year by year, my campaign to portray--correctly
> portray--the feminist leaders as out of touch with women has
> really succeeded-and they helped me enormously! I feel that my
> record, in terms of my feminist responses to the various sexual
> scandals from the early 1990s, is now being proved to have been
> the correct one. In 1986, for heaven's sake, in my own
> university, I lobbied for the adoption of moderate sexual
> harassment guidelines, but at the same time I felt there was a
> fascist extremism in feminism coming out of Catharine MacKinnon
> that was pushing these things toward authoritarian extremes that
> I, as a libertarian, could not support. And so in 1991, I was the
> only feminist out there who was attacking Anita Hill! One week
> into those hearings, I wrote a piece for the Philadelphia
> Inquirer that begins, "Anita Hill is no feminist heroine." And I
> felt Clarence Thomas was quite right: He was the victim of a
> high-tech lynching. Then when Paula Jones came along in 1994, I
> was the only feminist immediately out there saying, "I find her
> case credible." I was on the "Larry King Show" in May 1994--that
> transcript is in my book, Vamps & Tramps. I went against Eleanor
> Smeal, who was saying, "This is just a put-up job by the right
> wing,"--the same thing Hillary tried all last year. And I said,
> "Oh, really? Well, Anita Hill's case was a put-up job by the
> feminist establishment."
>
> It's comical the mess that Steinem made over Monica Lewinsky, but
> the real hypocrisy was in the Paula Jones case in 1994. If in
> fact the feminist establishment had responded with principle
> rather than with expediency-in trying to protect their own
> conspiratorial associations and affiliations with the liberal
> wing of the Democratic Party (to which I belong) --if they at
> that time had spoken out and put pressure on the President, on
> the President's lawyers, and said that this is a very disturbing
> charge that Paula Jones is making, then Clinton's legal team
> might have been in a mood to settle and have persuaded the
> Clintons to settle at that time and spared the nation all of this
> endless controversy which has diminished everyone. It has
> diminished America in the eyes of the world, it has diminished
> the stature of the U.S. government, it has diminished the office
> of the presidency, and it has poisoned the atmosphere so that
> young people no longer feel like going into politics-which is
> going to damage us for decades. It's going to make this country
> politically vulnerable in the world if we cannot get strong,
> idealistic people to go into politics. The Monica case is like
> the cow that has long left the barn! It was the Paula Jones mess
> that I think historians are going to focus on.
>
> TWQ: What about Juanita? Do you believe Juanita Broaddrick's
> accusation that Bill Clinton raped her in Little Rock when he was
> attorney general of Arkansas?
>
> PAGLIA: Okay, my feeling about the Juanita Broaddrick case is not
> unlike what I felt about the Anita Hill charges. That is, Anita
> Hill came forward ten years after the fact, making very trivial
> charges about conversations that made her uncomfortable--when the
> poor man didn't lay a hand on her, apparently. And I felt that it
> was like the surveillance of a police state, with Hill coming out
> ten years later at a crucial moment for Clarence Thomas and
> making charges about conversations at lunch! I thought that was a
> fascist trend in American politics, and this seems to me the same
> thing: twenty-one years later, even if Clinton is guilty, this is
> un-American, okay? It's undemocratic to say, "This is the final
> straw; if this had been known, he should have been driven from
> office." Her charges might well be true. However, as a feminist,
> I have to say that I have serious questions about the kind of
> judgment that was shown by her at that age. The story that she
> told Lisa Myers of NBC--that she and Clinton met briefly at a
> political gathering two hours from Little Rock, and that Clinton
> encouraged her to call him. She did that when she was going to
> Little Rock and he said, "Well, I'll meet you in your hotel
> room."
>
> Now, excuse me: As far as I'm concerned, by any rational measure,
> her consent to meet him in a hotel room conveyed to
> him-especially since he hadn't ever heard from her or met with
> her before-that she wanted to have sex with him. All right now,
> he was wrong and brutal in his behavior, and if it were within
> the statute of limitations, then I think he deserved prosecution
> for what became an assault. I'm not excusing his behavior in that
> room, but for heaven's sake, give me a break! That a mature
> married woman had no idea, was totally stunned when he began
> kissing her at the window! Now, women cannot behave like this. It
> was too muddled.
>
> TWQ: You have been very critical of the feminist view of rape.
> They seem to think it's rape if somebody looks at you crossways.
> Is this going to change because of the Clinton scandals?
>
> PAGLIA: Well, the recent controversy at Harvard, where the
> faculty was assembled to vote on a charge of sexual misconduct by
> a student, shows that the PC attitudes are very deeply entrenched
> in a lot of places in this country. In terms of sexual harassment
> and date rape issues, we're in a terrible muddle right now. It's
> completely confused. The only thing that can be seen clearly is
> that the authority of the feminist establishment to speak about
> sexual matters is now over.
>
> Unfortunately, this has led many other people to say, as Michael
> Crichton did in his recent Playboy interview, "Feminism is dead."
> That's a disaster! That's the ultimate damage inflicted by the
> hypocrisy of the feminist establishment. Feminism is not dead,
> but the word "feminism" has become very tarred because of these
> selfish women who seem to think that all women are somehow
> pro-choice members of the liberal wing of the Democratic Party.
> Just recently, Gloria Steinem opened her mouth again and stated
> that "Mrs. Dole does not speak for women." And I thought, "After
> all this time, Gloria Steinem! Your views do not speak for all
> women either! Not all women are of your particular social elite
> Manhattan clique!" So I think we're beginning all over again.
>
> TWQ: You said that the first female president will be somebody
> who has her sexual persona straight. Could that be Elizabeth
> Dole?
>
> PAGLIA: No, I don't think so. Unfortunately. I had great hopes
> for her, watching her over the years, but her recent announcement
> of an exploratory committee was such a disaster.
>
> TWQ: Why?
>
> PAGLIA: It was one of the worst things I have ever seen on
> television, by any politician, I have to say. And the media gave
> her a free pass on it. There's no doubt about it. Because she is
> a woman, people are very leery about applying to women a standard
> of critique that you apply to a man. It was just a canned version
> of her normal speech. The sprightly tone and the giddiness and
> the coming out into the audience were completely inappropriate
> for that particular context where she was walking among media
> people-very cynical media people who were watching with an air of
> disgust with their cameras and their notepads. It was just a
> replay of the after-dinner speeches she has been giving for
> years. She failed to understand that, if she is going to be a
> statesman, then she has to behave in a statesman-like manner now
> and that her presentation has to be issues-oriented. I found it
> condescending--that going up to people and touching them on the
> shoulder. I think she's a credible vice presidential candidate,
> but one expects them to be able to step into the shoes of the
> president. We need a far more commanding figure.
>
> Christine Whitman has it. Here's a woman who is a real
> sportswoman, who comes out of a mandarin background, but she has
> that manner--the manner of command. I've seen her come out to the
> cameras with other governors from the White House and stand there
> in the portico and give forceful statements to the press and so
> on. That woman's got it! Now the problem is her rather moderate
> position on abortion which may make her unpalatable to a lot of
> Republicans. But there's a woman who is ready to step into the
> presidency. Similarly, Dianne Feinstein has the manner. She was
> mayor of a very fractious city and has a lot of experience--which
> Hillary Clinton does not!--no experience whatsoever with any
> political matter outside of sitting inside the White House with
> her sunglasses on making phone calls to her Yale law school
> friends.
>
> TWQ: Should Hillary run for the Senate?
>
> PAGLIA: No, absolutely not! She has no talent whatever for that!
> The med-ia, you'd think, would have learned their lesson because
> of the Clinton debacle, but they went right ahead in a big
> stampede and promoted Hillary Clinton, way beyond her abilities.
> She has no ability to be a senator. She has no ability to work on
> a team. Basically, she is a coterie-type personality. What she
> would be ideal for is what she is doing now-which is to go out
> into the world and to be a spokeswoman for highly educated
> Western career women and to fight for women's and children's
> rights or as an ambassador-at-large for the UN. That's her
> appropriate role. I want to fall on the floor laughing--imagining
> Hillary Clinton working well in the Senate with everybody else!
> Oh, give me a break! I've already joked in print that they would
> need to build her a private cloakroom on the Mall. This is not a
> woman who has any ability to deal with the mass of humanity. She
> is the most arrogant, the most moralistic, the most sermonizing
> and annoying person on the earth--and it is just a joke that the
> media have allowed this to go on as long as it has.
>
> TWQ: Why did it take us so long to see what Bill Clinton is
> really like?
>
> PAGLIA: The media are to blame. They dropped the ball, okay? They
> dropped the ball over the Gennifer Flowers thing. That's the one
> they should have pursued. If I hear one more time, "Well, she
> went to the Star and many people dismissed her." Why did she go
> to the Star? She went to the Star, for heaven's sake, because
> that tabloid was the only one that would give her an airing of
> her views! I mean all other media were in such a hurry to sweep
> the Republicans out of office that they overlooked all kinds of
> stuff that they knew about, including the Broaddrick case, at
> that time in 1992.
>
> The media are the guilty party in all this! Then the feminist
> establishment, after that. They were so biased. In the early
> 1990s, the majority of journalists were and still are Democrats,
> liberal Democrats, and they wanted Bush out of office. They
> wanted the Republicans out so they played this game, and then the
> snake turned around and bit them in the ass! That's why the media
> have been obsessed with this story for so long. They realized
> they had been rooked, that they had been suckered! They had been
> taken! They had been seduced and abandoned by Clinton himself. So
> I thought, well, one good thing has come out of this--the media
> have really learned to be much more neutral in their political
> positions.
>
> But no, oh no, no, no! The Hillary senatorial story took off in
> this giant balloon, and once again there was manipulation of the
> news to turn at-tention away from the impeachment disgrace of
> Bill Clinton. So the media have learned nothing! And neither has
> the Hollywood establishment.
>
> TWQ: Will the Clinton marriage last after they are out of the
> White House?
>
> PAGLIA: I have no idea. You know, they know each other best. She
> has no friends. All this talk about her great female friendships!
> She has no friends aside from him. I think they are a
> dysfunctional pair. I just don't see what they would do apart
> from each other. I happened to be in the convention hall in 1996
> for Clinton's second nomination (I was in Chicago for the "Oprah"
> show) and I saw Hillary making her speech. I looked up and saw
> Chelsea: The spotlight was on her, smiling and applauding her
> mother on the podium. And I saw sitting next to her what I
> thought was a prison matron or an FBI agent--a mean-looking
> woman, fierce and unsmiling. Later I learned it was Hillary's
> mother! Here's Hillary giving the speech, one of the high points
> of her life, and her daughter is applauding and smiling and these
> people are giving her standing ovations, and the mother was
> there, brutally ungiving. And that is the whole story of that
> family, okay?
>
> Hillary is a mess. And her family was a mess, and the media won't
> touch it. The media will not go near the mess of Hillary's
> family! Those brothers, the walking wounded brothers, who look
> like whipped dogs! And the point is that Hillary's relationship
> with her family has always been bad, really bad! You can't
> understand what's going on with her relationship with Bill until
> you understand that. But, no, the media are all "Saint
> Hillary"--wonderful wife--wonderful mother.
>
> In fact, she's a far more interesting character. She's not a
> lesbian. Okay? No, it's more complex than that. She is, I have
> said, a Protestant nun, and she's closer to Evita than to
> anything else. I was the first to compare her to Evita: Now
> everyone notices that. She thinks she speaks for the common
> people. That woman should not be anywhere near our government,
> okay? --because look at the guys she surrounds herself
> with--those geeks, those eunuch geeks! She loves eunuch geek men.
>
>
> TWQ: Like who?
>
> PAGLIA: Oh my God, look at them all! Sidney Blumenthal, Ira
> Magaziner, Harold Ickes--they all look alike. They are all weird
> Ichabod Crane men, all high IQ men who have no natural virility,
> okay? It's really weird. She loves to have her little cabals with
> them. And the other one--the lawyer David Kendall--they're all
> alike, and they all bond with her. They're all joined at the hip
> with her! She's the one who has been calling the shots in all of
> this. She's the one with the hard-line strategy: "Don't settle
> with Paula Jones." She's the one down the line who's been the
> mastermind of a lot of this stuff. That woman is an authoritarian
> who should be kept out of dem-ocratic government. She's a tyrant
> who thinks she knows what's best for the people. She's Orwellian
> in her attitude toward the rest of humanity. I think she's a
> great spokesman for women's and children's rights, I really do. I
> think she should be shepherded off to the proper position--which
> is making speeches and then retiring to her hotel room to sulk
> and then getting into the limousine to go on to the next speech.
> That's all that woman can do!
>
> Professor of Humanities at the University of the Arts in
> Philadelphia, Camille Paglia is a culture critic, libertarian
> feminist, and columnist for the Internet magazine Salon. She is
> also the author of four books including Sexual Personae: Art and
> Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson; Sex, Art and
> American Culture; and Vamps & Tramps.
>
>
>
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