Feminist, All Too Feminist

On a recent Best of the Left podcast episode, “What are women complaining about?,” I found out about action being taken to address Hollywood's gender bias, which has received a lot of media attention in the past year. What really caught my ear was the stat that the percentage of speaking roles for women in Hollywood movies has only increased by 5% since the 1940s and 50s. And what interested me about that stat was that, as a fan of classical Hollywood movies, I was under the impression that there were now far fewer major roles for women – not a few more. Fans of classical Hollywood movies just think that there were more and better roles for women then because so many of the movies from that era that film buffs still care about have terrific roles for women: canons are not necessarily representative of the norm.

So far, so awesome for women that the ACLU has taken political action to have the industry investigated for gender inequity. In fact I think that every industry where there's perceived discrimination should be subjected to thorough governmental investigation, especially if that industry is as powerful as Hollywood (or Silicon Valley). How else is the public going to know, and how is discrimination by the powerful going to combated except by transparency, public pressure, and public accountability?

However, the segment lost me when an indie director who was asked why it matters that there are so few women in the industry gave a standard leftist response: that we won't see more “authentic portrayals of women" in movies in television until we have more female directors. In the first place, surely what matters about women not being able to make careers in an industry is... women not being able to make careers in an industry.

Second, as a writer and English major I'm disturbed by the implication that only female creators can produce good female characters. Because there are so many more canonical male authors than female ones, almost all of the female characters who mean the most to me were authored by men. The exceptions are the heroines of Jane Austen and George Eliot, but they don't mean more to me than the heroines of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Flaubert, Thomas Hardy, Henry James, Ibsen, or Tennessee Williams. Nor are they noticeably more “authentic”: they are all distinctly literary characters, and as such resemble (and are, no doubt, influenced by) each other more than actual people.

The question of authorship is more complicated in the case of film directors, but assuming the fiction that the director is the “auteur,” all of my favourite female film characters were authored by men. I don't tend to think of it that way, though, because many classical Hollywood actresses have more-or-less-unofficially attained the status of auteurs in their own right, so that I think of a Bette Davis or Barbara Stanwyck or Jennifer Jones character as being authored by her; or, if she's paired with a remarkable director (or, occasionally, producer) in a remarkable film, co-authored. Sometimes directors and actresses develop ongoing creative relationships in which the collaborative aspect is emphasized: Sternberg and Dietrich, Fellini and Masina, Godard and Karina, Cassavetes and Rowlands, Lynch and Dern. The other part of this is that I've hardly seen any movies by female directors, a fault I hope to remedy some year soon (I have a lot of faults, though, so I can't promise when it will happen), and it so happens that my favourite movie by a female director, Elaine May's Mikey and Nicky, contains a couple of my favourite male characters.

Which leads to my objection as a writer to this use of “authenticity”: of course both male and female authors have to be free to create characters of both genders. I don't want to be told what I can write about, and I don't want any other writer to be told that, either – although if they create a representation that's offensive in some way, they should be criticized. If you want to hear me criticize sexist representations, please enjoy my podcast about time travel movies, co-hosted by David Fiore. (Criticizing sexism isn't the purpose of the podcast, but we do spend a lot of time doing it in each episode, especially me, really loudly, with swearing.)

Moreover, if you tell men that they can't write female protagonists, you reinforce the notion that women are utterly alien, which isn't exactly conducive to the feminist project. At its best, imaginative literature and filmmaking about women by men has been about the fluid movement between desire and cross-gender identification; about the affirmation of heteronormativity through desire and its undermining through identification; about sympathy and sadism. To remove cross-gender identification from literature and film would be to remove at least 50% of what interests me about them.

So, based on my responses to this segment, what do you think: am I a feminist, or not a feminist? Please answer in 3-5 paragraphs, giving the reasoning for your position.

I think the answer is that I'm all too feminist, but it will take more than five paragraphs to flesh it out.

Penultimate Post

Although I first promised this post on feminism a long time ago, I've gone back and forth about whether to write it. As I finally sit down to compose it as the penultimate post of this blog, I wonder if I can finally do it without getting too angry or sarcastic – the reason I've abandoned my many previous attempts.

A couple of things have happened to make me less angry. First, my political perspective has vastly broadened this year, which has had the effect of taking my focus off of feminism. When I'm not focused on it, I'm less upset about it. I also realized, quite a long time ago, that a tone of anger is never going to persuade anyone to listen to your criticisms. It didn't work when Camille Paglia did it in the 90s, and it doesn't work when Cathy Young does it now.

In fact, my first criticism of feminism is its resistance to criticism. And that's the final reason my anger about feminism has subsided a little. When I was listening to the Best of the Left episode yesterday, hoping to get myself riled up to write this post, because now the problem was that I was too calm about feminism to write it, I noticed that one of the clips, a collage of reasons to be a feminist, featured a couple of MRA talking points, I realized that feminism has, in fact, been absorbing criticisms from all corners, and not just from other communities that feminists recognize as oppressed, such as Women of Color and the trans community. Does that make me any more hopeful about feminism? We'll see.

Definitions 

First, let's get the context out of the way. What is feminism, and am I a feminist? If feminism is the belief in the equality of women and men, then why yes, I am. I think the majority of people in most countries nowadays would define themselves that way, in fact. (If you want stats, don't look to this post, because I'm not going to provide them for every point. Many critics of feminism have written many stats-laden articles that can be easily found on the internet. I decided it's not worth my time to produce one of those articles, because I'm not getting paid for this and because mountains of stats alone won't persuade anyone of anything. If you find yourself concerned or intrigued by anything in this post, I'd suggest that you do your own internet research, like I did, and, like I did, draw your own conclusions.)

The very fact that this is a popular sentiment – few would define themselves as racist, either – means I have to further define what I mean by “feminist.” So let me be clear that not only do I think men and women are equal, but I also reject traditional gender roles. I have never wanted children and my life is centred around my artistic and intellectual pursuits.

On the other hand, if being a feminist means adopting certain political stances (e.g., on reproductive rights) and/or adhering to at least a few of the theories propagated by the feminist movement (e.g. those theories evoked by terms like “patriarchy,” “objectification,” “rape culture,” and “consent”), you're starting to lose me. If it means feeling righteous anger about street harassment or male “spreading” on public transit, among other popular talking points and memes, you've lost me. If it means believing that women as a global group today are oppressed, I'm not going to agree without heavy qualifications. I'm not even sure that “oppression” is the best lens through which to look at the traditional position of women (it's a lens, and an informative one), and increasingly I think that each instance of oppression, or disenfranchisement, needs to be looked at in its own particular cultural, historical, and political context.

Finally, if being a feminist means thinking that there's a place for a women's movement even in supposedly modern, democratic countries today – then again, yes, I do. But I have given up thinking that feminism will ever be “reformed”: that is, that it will ever purge the elements that I find objectionable and become a collection of ideas and set of priorities that I largely agree with and find positive. Nevertheless, there are of course many people, from lawyers working to improve the legal process for rape victims and ensure access to safe abortions for economically deprived women, to members of civil rights watchdog groups committed to social justice, who do good feminist work with real, important consequences every day.

In summary, then, as soon as you move outside of a definition of “feminist” that means “person who believes in the equality of women and men and rejects traditional gender roles,” feminism, for me, is just another set of ideas to be considered independently and objectively. Some of them are interesting and useful, many of them (even the same ones) are misguided and infuriating; all of them have been carefully considered by me, and none of them are accepted by me without many qualifications. Sometimes, as in the case of reproductive rights, I agree with the feminist position, but not for the reasons most often given by feminists: I don't think that being able to control one's reproductive capacity is in itself essential to equality, because I don't think that opposition to abortion is solely a conspiracy by the patriarchy to keep “control of women's bodies” in their hands. That, like so much feminist poststructuralism, is a melodramatic cartoon that obfuscates more than it illuminates. I do, however, think (in keeping with older trends in feminism) that control of one's reproductive capacity is necessary for economic independence, which is necessary for equality.

I'm not here today to talk about the hard (in the sense of both “difficult” and “concrete”) issues, though. I'm here to talk about the stuff that a person of my demographic (highly educated, raised middle class) is going to most often encounter on the internet: the theory, on the one hand, and the memes, on the other. In fact, it's unavoidable. Along with geeks, feminists may be the highest-profile colonizers of the internet – no doubt because they're pouring out of college and university campuses.

Keeping this in mind, here are my Top 5 Criticisms of Feminism:

Imperviousness to Criticism

If you start to criticize a trend in feminism to or in front of a feminist – say, for example, the way that feminism treats the topic of rape – the first thing you will hear is some variant of “feminism is not a monolith.” The response neatly serves to shut down the conversation because it's irrefutable but fails to address the point. It doesn't matter to me, or my criticism, if some feminist in a cave somewhere agrees with me. What matters is the general tenor of the conversation, and that is the source of my frustration.

Many critics of feminism have pondered why such criticism engenders such defensiveness. Believe it or not, I can also be the feminist responding defensively to attacks on it – all it takes to trigger that response is for the attacks to be made to me. The best explanation I can give is that, whether or not the mainstream media is “liberal” (that's an argument for another day), people of leftist sympathies have picked up the liberal message from the media that “feminism=equality for women=good for women=good” and identified with it to such a degree that any criticism of feminism is equated with being anti-woman and, as such, next door to evil. So that when, as a teenager, I heard about Camille Paglia the “anti-feminist,” I genuinely believed that she must be some kind of Antichrist. Until I saw her on a talk show, risked listening to her, and found what she had to say fascinating and challenging, even when I disagreed with her.

To me it seems like a no-brainer that no political movement can be at its strongest unless it's open to having its most fundamental philosophical positions questioned. I don't mean negated: if we take as the basis of feminism the assumption that women and men are equal, feminism doesn't have to entertain the idea that they are not equal. But any positions formed on the basis of the assumption of equality should be open to criticism, with the idea that proponents and critics have the same goal of advancing the idea and reality of equality. So if your ideas suck, or if they may in fact be harmful to the cause of equality, you ought to know about that, think hard about it, and abandon or refine them.

Since, however, the left is no better than the right at having open, objective, rational discussion about its pet ideas, but instead wants to find reasons to cast out traitors, the bullshit of feminism goes unchecked, and reform is impossible. Because if “feminism is not a monolith” or its variants doesn't succeed in shutting down the conversation, the next move is to discredit your critic by branding her an “anti-feminist.”

Now, there are people who are actually anti-feminists, and not always from a conservative perspective. There are many reasons for a person to be an anti-feminist: you can actually think that women and men are not equal, or you can think that men and women are equal but different and traditional gender roles honour that difference, or you can think that feminism is opposed to “family values,” or you can think that feminism promotes political divisiveness and does not actually serve the cause of gender egalitarianism. In my experience, people who are anti-feminists are quite happy to identify themselves as such. For my part, I think I still identify as a feminist despite a hugely fraught relationship with feminism from my teen years on because I don't want to be confused with traditionalists. As much explaining as I have to do in order to identify as a feminist, I feel like I'd have to do even more explaining in order to not identify as a feminist, and my time is limited.

One day maybe we'll get to the point where we can all call ourselves “humanists” or “egalitarians” and it won't seem like a complacent move, but we're not there yet. In the meantime, what I've learned to do is to continue to identify as a feminist but to broaden my egalitarian focus. What you are actually thinking, saying, and doing is probably more important than how you label yourself.

Failure to Model Enfranchisement

My second criticism of feminism is its failure to provide a model of what an enfranchised woman would look like. There were two roads feminism could have gone down: the road of emphasizing victimization, and the road of emphasizing enfranchisement. Guess which one it took. I was never happier as a feminist than when, as a teenager and in my early 20s, I was reading Molly Haskell on the types of independent womanhood represented by the great stars of classical Hollywood (Garbo and Dietrich, Davis and Crawford, Hepburn and Stanwyck), or Camille Paglia celebrating feminist role models (mostly those same women plus heroines of Spenser and Shakespeare); or marveling at forceful famous women of arts and letters from Colette to Courtney Love – or for that matter, Paglia herself.

Part of the reason for feminism's emphasis on victimization is, presumably, that the idea of “personal responsibility” was so tainted by conservative rhetoric that the left surrendered it to the other side long ago. (Which is exactly why Paglia's use of it was so electric.) The left seems to consider the rhetoric of liberation and independence to be in conflict with the recognition of systemic victimization. The result is that feminism can look awfully fucking depressing, and attracts on the basis of feelings of anger and victimization rather than feelings of possibility and aspiration. 

Not that the idea of agency has been entirely banished from feminism. Here, feminism is definitely not a monolith, but rather a mishmash. Recently, for example, Charlize Theron's action hero character in Mad Max: Fury Road was widely celebrated as a victory for pop culture representations of female agency. This is something that seems to happen periodically in the era of the action blockbuster – I can remember the excitement and controversy over Linda Hamilton in Terminator 2: Judgement Day when I was a kid. Women are, obviously, never going to get equal representation in the action genre, so that every time, at long intervals, a movie of this kind with a good, ass-kicking role for a woman does come out, it will feel like something revolutionary and “feminist” all over again.

Personally, I'm not that inspired by depictions of women kicking ass. (Linda Hamilton in T2 is more interesting to me because she's a complex character who's a bit of a psycho, not an idealized mother, and not at all a sex object – while still being very badass.) But a feminism that envisions its end goal as a woman who is free from male oppression and victimization is going to look very different from a feminism that envisions its end goal as a woman who is intellectually, emotionally, and economically independent – which is not, notice, necessarily the same thing as a woman who is unequivocally triumphing in a late capitalist society. The first has its emphasis on (a negative view of) men, and what they do; the second on (a positive vision of) women, and what they can be.

Linda Hamilton in T2: a bit of a psycho, but check out those buff arms

And lest you think that the personal responsibility “piece” (to use late capitalist businesspeak out of a business context, like a real asshole) is just about celebrating female capability and strength, the other side of it is the recognition, which some iterations of feminism consider essential to considering women as full human beings, that women can be just as deeply shitty as men can. That is, I think, what Lionel Trilling meant when he said that Jane Austen's Emma Woodhouse is one of the few female characters in literature who have “a moral life” just like a man. People who are just victims, who have no agency, can be pitied, but they can't make true decisions and choices, and therefore can't be held responsible for their actions.

Perpetuation of Gender War

It's bizarre how some feminist arguments seem to be stuck in a time warp: they keep appearing, decade after decade, as though no progress, or attempt at progress, has been made. For example: the catcalling issue, which emerged again when that woman posted that video on YouTube. What did the video add to the discussion, other than bringing the argument to a new medium? Have we made any progress toward stopping catcalling? Or have we made any progress toward understanding and addressing the cultural and economic reasons why it happens? Or are we still chanting the mantras “patriarchy” and “misogyny”?

A whole lot of feminism, especially the kind that occurs on the internet, is just the perpetuation of gender war. One of the feminist memes I've heard endlessly repeated is that people who say that feminism is about male-bashing “just don't understand” what feminism is. Obviously, the ideological basis of feminism is not hating men, nor does it logically entail hating men, but not everyone who thinks that feminism has a man problem is simply confusing the idea of being equal with men with the idea of hating men.

Men and women have been accusing each other of terrible things throughout history. That is, apparently, what human beings who are necessarily (for the propagation of the race and transmission of property) intimate with each other, and who are on more-or-less of an equal social footing (compared to, say, property-owning men and slaves) with each other, do. Since men, for most of this time, by and large wrote the books, this argument has survived as anti-feminist literature and its refutation, the latter of which could be put in the mouths of female characters (Chaucer's Wife of Bath, for example, or Cervantes's Marcela), and which could involve criticisms of men as well as defenses of women. Now that women not only write more books but also have access to Twitter, they can write their own attacks on men, which can go viral, because there's nothing that either men or women like better than a bitter stereotype characterizing the “opposite sex.” Since feminism is predicated on the idea that “men oppress women through patriarchy,” a notion that's broad enough to include every complaint any woman might think to make about men, feminism legitimates this demonization of men, which in fact often proudly announces itself as feminism.

If you try to point this out, you will be told that “reverse sexism” isn't a thing because “reverse racism” isn't a thing. Feminists don't, can't, hate men; they can only react against misogyny. The fact that the racism analogy is always brought out to avoid addressing criticisms only goes to show that, unconsciously, feminists know that people consider race a more serious problem than gender, and in fact share that bias. It's true that men don't suffer from systemic sexism, which is not to say that the traditional male gender role doesn't involve plenty of hardships and disadvantages. (Feminism has got this covered under “patriarchy is bad for everyone,” although that phrase, too, is often used to deflect rather than to engage with criticism.) However, the fact that demonizing men doesn't contribute to systemic sexism doesn't make it more pleasant. All it does is add fuel to the neverending gender war.

Sexual Parochialism

I could write a book about the sexual parochialism of (most) feminism. Camille Paglia did write one, and it's called Sexual Personae. Credit where it's due, a lot of feminists did come around after the 90s debates: BDSM feminists emerged; it seems to be largely acceptable among feminists for women to direct pornographic films as an expression of their sexuality; and feminists seem to be recognizing sex worker's rights as a legitimate women's issue.

But alongside sex-positive feminism there arose rape culture feminism, which as far as I can tell is an excuse for the left to police any language or behavior that it doesn't like by associating it with rape; and campus rape hysteria, which appears to be a volatile mixture of sheltered middle-class women at their hormonal peak who are being fed a steady diet of victimization feminism, men at their hormonal peak who are being fed a steady diet of misogynous sports culture, controlling parents paying exorbitant tuition fees and expecting that their children will be protected from dangerous reality in return, and a culture of binge-drinking. Sounds like the makings of an American tragedy to me.

Meanwhile, feminist hostility toward the concept of personal responsibility has become a self-caricature wherein, by tortuous logic, no one – women included – is allowed to discuss strategies for rape prevention other than “telling men to stop raping,” or they risk being accused of “victim blaming” or even being a “rape apologist.”

Rape is to the left as terrorism is the right. Rape is, no doubt, a bigger actual threat to American women than terrorism is to Americans, though the numbers that float around and have even reached the White House are bizarrely inflated: more soberly, in a 2014 Bureau of Justice Statistics survey about 6 per 1000 female college students age 18-24 reported being raped or sexually assaulted. Both left and right trade in fear-mongering, as the dwindling middle class invents bogeymen in its entitled pursuit of a vacuum-sealed reality of perfect safety.

Back in the 90s, when I first became aware of problems with feminism, I was willing to entertain the possibility that feminist studies were inflating rape statistics. But I could not buy Paglia's claim that date rape “hysteria” consisted of sheltered young women, unprepared for the fact that adult life and sexual freedom can sometimes be physically and emotionally unpleasant, having “bad sex” and then retroactively – perhaps due to the intervention of feminists – interpreting it as rape. Until, two decades later, I read Lena Dunham's account in her memoir, Not That Kind of Girl, of what she labelled on the book tour, though not in the book, as her “sexual assault,” which is an absolute textbook case of the process I've just described. There are sometimes good reasons to expand the legal definition of rape, as feminism has been doing and attempting to do for some time now, and there are also good reasons to be concerned about its expansion. All we've got to go on are our intuitions, which are themselves culturally determined, but all I know is that there's not an intuition in my body that can account for why Dunham (who I think is a fine comedic writer and performer) thinks that she was sexually assaulted, unless she thinks that a traumatic sexual experience is, ipso facto, a sexual assault. There's one occurrence early on that one could make a case for as a sexual assault, but Dunham specifically doesn't describe it in a way that would make it unambiguous.

If Dunham had refrained from labeling the incident in life as on the page, the account could have stood as an example of some of the shit young women experience in their sex lives, although even as such it casts a sort of Gothic shadow over female sexuality, as if, here as elsewhere in the book Dunham is conveying the message that the sexual freedom for women that one version of feminism fought for is a cul-de-sac that ends in male violence and callousness. If I say that my own experience, although sometimes weird and awkward, hasn't been that bad at all, I know I'll get the response that offering a different example is insensitive to people who aren't as fortunate. But the very fact that these dark experiences are apparently widespread makes me think that Paglia called it when she said that middle-class feminism was producing generations of depressive young women who were not equipped to philosophically or emotionally handle the turbulent reality of their sexual imaginations and experiences.

Hence – the ongoing problem of the sexual parochialism of feminism.

Failure of Cultural Perspective

Feminism's difficulty with philosophically dealing with sex is part of its broader failure to look at the issues it raises in a wider cultural perspective. To use the example of rape culture: the tortuous logic of rape culture theory is that our culture, rather than condemning sexual violence against women, actually condones it. Of course, there's a certain striking, paradoxical truth to this. You can make the same argument about violence in general: on the one hand, we strongly condemn it; on the other hand, we glamourize it; make it the constant focus of movies, TV, the news, even popular music; celebrate it in sports; institutionalize it in the police, military, prisons; make it the cornerstone of masculinity.

Given this similarity, I don't see why we're not making the leap that the problem we should be doing something about is not violence against women, but violence. MRAs, whatever their problems, have made the points that although women are at far greater risk of being murdered by an intimate partner than men are, men are at far greater risk of being murdered in general, and also at far greater risk of death by suicide. Why should we so focused on rape? Because we're invested in female virtue? Not as feminists we're not. Because feminists are only interested in problems that affect women? Because that would be a problem. It was one thing when we thought that violence disproportionately affected women; as we apply the arguments of feminism to men, we become increasingly aware that that is not the case.

Likewise, one of the more interesting feminist articles I've stumbled upon on the internet have to do with looking at the problem of the wage gap from the perspective of worker's rights and women's unpaid labour as mothers. In other words, for me, as soon as you look at the problems that affect women alongside problems affecting other groups, they become a lot more interesting, but maybe that's because we're no longer simply repeating the words “patriarchy” and “misogyny,” or, more recently, “privilege” and “entitlement,” and thinking we're done.

Trust me, I've been an angry young woman in my lifetime, and at the age of 40 (as of the end of next month), I still get pissed off at sexism as often as I get pissed off at feminism. Female anger, as a symbolic, lightning-in-a-bottle substitute for female agency in a world that stifles the latter, is a glorious thing (as long as you're not dealing with it in person), and it's still a delight to see it disrupt expectations of soothing, submissive feminine niceness. But I've never been especially interested in being angry at men. Insofar as men do terrible things to women and other men, is it because they're inherently evil, or because that's how masculinity is constructed? If it's the latter, why are we wasting our energy ranting about “toxic male entitlement,” as happened in the wake of the Isla Vista Killings? Couldn't we, instead, be talking about toxic gender roles and their relation to violence?

It seems to me that the majority of feminism happening on university campuses and the internet is a lot more invested in staying angry at men than in doing something about the issues it has raised. That's a shame for many reasons, and not least because once upon a time some people thought that one of the great boons of feminism would be the transformation of heterosexual love into a relationship based on equality; that changing the meaning and improving the nature of love would be feminism's contribution to a new and better world. 

Failing that, nevertheless, at this point in history, I don't think there's any point to trying to adjust the current social and economic system to make it better accommodate women, with their same old biological disadvantages (slightly curtailed by birth control) – not that the white men at the top of the global power structure are interested in sharing their power anyway. We should all be focused, women and men, on creating a better, more egalitarian, social and economic system. All of the ideas of feminism are valuable to think about; the best ones, by their own logic, ought to be extended beyond feminism and take feminism beyond identity politics; the worst ones should be unequivocally rejected.

Critics, Artists, Idols, Fans: Camille Paglia's Intestinal Flora and Joseph Cornell's Cultural Detritus

In her brief heydey of the early 90s, my teenage idol Camille Paglia called out her teenage idol, Susan Sontag (“Notes on Camp” was published when Ms. P was 17, my age when my life was changed by Sexual Personae), for her failure to maintain her visibility and public centrality of the 60s. One can now say exactly the same thing about Paglia, although her seemingly wilful withdrawal from relevance has been less mandarin (the accusation she levelled against Sontag) than schoolmarmish. In fact, Paglia's failure has been far more conspicuous and embarrassing than Sontag's, since she herself gave us the terms by which to measure it, boasting prematurely in the first volume of Sexual Personae that its two volumes made it the longest book ever written by a woman... only for the second volume, on sports and pop culture, to never materialize.

Instead of that volume, we got two collections of provocative articles, plus a BFI monograph on Hitchcock's The Birds, in the 90s; in the new millennium, we've been gifted with one slender volume in each decade to date, the first on poetry, the most recent on the visual arts. Meanwhile Paglia has stuck industriously to her teaching gig at the Philadelphia College of the Performing Arts (now University of the Arts) to which she once attributed the maintenance of her intellectual acumen (she's a real teacher, not like those celebrity academics and conference schmoozers) and, until recently, produced a rambling column for Salon.com that illustrates Paglia's decline from the late 90s to the late 00s, as steep as her previous decline from the early to late 90s. To use a Paglian analogy, Paglia's falling-off as a critic after Sexual Personae – composed in the 70s and 80s – is as striking as the difference between Lauren Bacall's glowing, fresh-faced appearance in To Have or Have Not, her breathtaking debut, and every movie afterwards, when the 19-year-old's baby fat melted away, leaving only the hard, prematurely matronly mask.  

As with To Have or Have Not, Sexual Personae has taken Paglia a long way, and she's as deserving a star as Bacall. And yet it gets worse, though not quite as bad, just yet, as Crawford and Davis in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? By the way, how do you like this for a coincidence of the kind which Google can magically call up: Who's Afraid of Bette Davis? was released on October 26, 1962, 13 days after Whatever Happened to Martha's Baby?, Edward Albee's similarly-named play, also a bit of camp Grand Guignol about a couple of old hags tearing each other apart, opened on Broadway. Stuff like that makes me think that maybe there really is meaning and order in the universe. And that God is a drag queen.

My Little Monet

Miss P's latest, Glittering Images: A Journey Through Art From Egypt to Star Wars, hopefully bears a subtitle reminiscent of Sexual Personae's Art and Decadence From Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson, but its poverty of ideas, imagination, and language is accurately represented by its thuddingly stupid title. Glittering images? Really? That's the best description of Western art that Paglia could come up with? (And although it doesn't say so in the subtitle, it's all Western art inside.) Because for me it conjures up not Bernini and Monet so much as Barbie and My Little Pony.

The title may be representative of the book's problems, but it's also the least of them. Pagsy trumpets in the polemical-as-usual Introduction, “This book is an attempt to reach a general audience for whom art is not a daily presence.” Well, goody gum-drops, but in fact Glittering Images (really?!??) can't decide whether it wants to be Art History for Dummies or revisionist in the manner of SP. So we get a really dull tour of the obligatory (Laocoon, The Death of Marat, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon), but major artists are often represented by lesser-known works, and some choices, like Donatello's Mary Magdalene, are downright strange – though the Christian denial of the flesh here is interesting if you've already read Paglia's scintillating commentary on the pagan beauty-worship of the same artist's David in SP. Never was there a starker representation of Christian spirituality=ugliness (denial of the flesh and world) and classical spirituality=beauty (physical beauty as divine) than in the juxtaposition of these two sculptures.

In making her selections for GI, no doubt Paglia went through a dilemma comparable to that of the critics who have to come up with 10 Greatest Movies lists for the Sight & Sound poll and can only produce a mish-mash of consensus masterpieces, personal favourites, and perverse selections that they hope to bring to wider attention. The book's lack of a unifying purpose or thesis could be forgiven if the individual essays were brilliant; unfortunately, they're barely diverting. The prose and thought of GI (the title's sugary-pop-song-like adjective-noun combination is picked up in the chapter titles: “Living Letters,” “Solitary Watcher,” “Satin Knights” – that pointless “Knights in White Satin” reference is worthy of an academic conference paper title – “Swirling Line,” “Melting Color,” and on and on) bring together the weaknesses of Paglia's later works, Break, Blow, Burn and The Birds, without their relative strengths. GI has the same gift-booky format as B, B, B: Paglia writes short appreciations/close readings of great poems/artworks with said poems or paintings reproduced for handy reader reference. But whereas in Break, Blow, Burn, she really did produce close readings, if nothing else, the chattier essays in GI often seem to talk about everything but the images. Is it possible that the image-worshiping Paglia is actually much better at reading literature than she is at reading visual artworks?

For some reason the essays in GI go after a shapeless, junk-pile accumulation of facts – bits of historical context, gossip, and tangential “fun facts” like the history of the yacht that the daughter of the guy in the painting is “cavorting aboard” in a photo taken by the same guy who took a photo of the guy dancing the tango, which it sort of looks like he's doing in the painting (I shit you not). This accretive style worked in The Birds, since Hollywood movie fandom can support a gossipy approach in which every detail is precious. Moreover, in that book, Paglia was still paying close attention to the details of the movie itself; in GI, in contrast, she seems bored to death by the artworks, which are accorded about half the essays' pages, or less. I agree with the blogger, a fellow Paglia fan, whose review I found on some scary right-wing website, who said that at times the essays remind him of Wikipedia, only I'd say they're like a Wikipedia entry crossed with the book review of a diligent high school student who's spent more time on the research than the writing.

Like her former mentor at Yale, Harold Bloom, and at exactly the same age (mid-60s, which for Bloom was in the mid-90s, the time of the publication of The Western Canon), Paglia seems to have completely forgotten that paragraphs are supposed to have topics. Sentence follows sentence without progress of either sense or cadence, and at times the prose is so lazy it reads like a bad translation. There's no excuse whatsoever for a construction like “tension is felt from the unnaturally compressed space.” What's wrong with “the unnaturally compressed space creates a feeling of tension”? Not good enough for her? (Incidentally, Sexual Personae is such an influence on my prose that I can't put two words in a row without thinking about Paglia. Thanks to her and that other thorn in my side, my other teenage idol, Morrissey, I bleed alliteration and assonance. My style of criticism also owes everything to SP, in case you hadn't noticed.)

Also like Bloom since the mid-90s, Paglia's decided she's too good for not only footnotes but even a bibliography, which is a shame because it makes Paglia's various historical and biographical tidbits seem about as trustworthy as Wikipedia (we may be in the age of too much information, but at least all of it's uncertain), and also because the bibliography of Sexual Personae was a treasure trove of the classics of 20^th century criticism, such as Kenneth Clark's stylish The Nude, Arnold Hauser's two-volume The Social History of Art (to date I've only flipped through it, though I've owned it for nearly 20 years), the tomes of Kenneth Burke (way too dense for me), and Leslie Fiedler's marvellous Love and Death in the American Novel, which has influenced my thinking about the novel and film almost as much as Sexual Personae influenced my thinking about life. It goes without saying that Glittering Images is not in the league of any of these works, and the reason is that Paglia has no story to tell – about the representation of the nude body in Western art or the secret triumph of romance over the realism in the novel. No thesis; no argument; no story. She told her story in SP; here she points and says, “Lookit – art is neat! And did you know that in the 1920s people liked to tango?”

Tangoing Art Deco Doctors and Soap Opera Brain Tumours

That section on the tango that I keep mocking is from what may be my favourite chapter, on Tamara de Lempicka's Portrait of Doctor Boucard, where Paglia makes a persuasive case for her personal candidate for The Only Female Artist Allowed to Exist, in place of feminist favourite Frida Kahlo, preferring Lempicka's “Garbo cheekbones” and “naked ambition” to Kahlo's “ailments, accidents, and surgeries.” It's clear that for Pagsy, Lempicka is the Madonna to Kahlo's Courtney Love, whom Pagsy's bashed in the past, even though unlike Mads, who thought Pags was a creepy stalker, Love read Sexual Personae and was influenced by it – and is much more of a companion to Paglia as a provocative 90s female celebrity.

The Lempicka chapter woke me up a little because for the first time in the book Paglia was making an original argument instead of throwing facts at the page to see what sticks. Or seemingly original, though it's clear that she was turned on to Lempicka by “Laura Claridge's riveting 1999 biography,” as she calls it. Portrait of Doctor Boucard, with its Art Deco melodrama and gaudiness, initially looks out of place among the consensus masterpieces, but as soon as Paglia mentions Mannerism and especially Bronzino it all makes sense.

The portrait is in the tradition of representations of scientists like Vermeer's Astronomer, but unlike that rapt, contemplative being, Lempicka's Boucard is an Adolphe Menjou society type who looks out of place in the lab and as though he barely has time to glance at his microscope. Paglia sees Boucard's twisty torso as a “forceful positioning” and compares it to the cavalryman in Gericault's Officer of the Chasseurs Commanding a Charge, but I see Beardsley's flighty creature of fashion, who shares not only the doctor's angular, distracted stance but also his enormous shoulder pads, which androgynizes Beardsley's woman as the fanciful flowing “lab coat” androgynizes the Boucard of Lempicka's portrait, even as it anticipates the iconic trenchcoat of Bogie's hardboiled detective.

Boucard is also a soap opera doctor, like George Brent in Dark Victory, who falls in love with his patient, Bette Davis, a wild, spoiled rich girl who discovers she's dying of a brain tumour. What does the image say about science – if anything? The doctor as hero as dashing figure of idealized masculinity (blending assertion and suave passivity) out of a Hollywood movie or magazine ad? And speaking of the accomplishments of Boucard's profession that brought new prestige to the medical profession in the 20^th century, the Lempicka chapter also contains the single most hilariously self-parodic, po-faced sentence in the book: “Boucard was a biochemist who had become a millionaire through his development and marketing of Lacteol, one of the first probiotics, which restored intestinal floral to patients with severe diarrhea.”

RESTORED IT, YOU GUYS.

George Lucas's Vulgar Aestheticism

Paglia starts off the book, in the intro, by talking about the disastrous state of the fine arts, and that theme is what gives it any shape it has, although it only comes into play towards the end. The way Paglia has told things, Jackson Pollock was the last artist to be widely perceived as a genius, an attitude of the public towards art that died with his premature death. The Pop artists who followed, by necessarily embracing popular culture, put an end to traditional fine art. In the postmodern art world, there are no central figures or styles; there is only pluralism. Although Paglia does her earnest best to make the general reader (me) understand Conceptual, Minimalist, and performance art, flooding the essays with the names of artists and descriptions of works, I came away thinking that postmodern art is a lot like postmodern science, i.e. quantum physics: the artists are all working out their highly cerebral and insular art problems in their art, whether they set it in the landscape or street or interact with the audience or not, and no non-artist cares about or can understand what they're doing.

All of which leads up to Paglia's “controversial” final-chapter nomination of George Lucas as the greatest artist of our time. Not just our greatest visual artist, mind you, but our greatest artist, period. And while this appears to be based on his entire Star Wars franchise, Paglia courts ridicule (to borrow her phrase about Lennon and Ono's Bed-In interviews) by illustrating the chapter with an admittedly extremely Paglian image of the volcano planet from Revenge of the Sith, a movie that nobody went to see except hardcore Star Wars geeks.

The basis of her nomination is, it appears, Lucas's “pioneering boldness and world impact,” this boldness a matter of embracing technology... like Ingrid Bergman and Bob Dylan. Yes, because using CGI in films is exactly like using an electric guitar in popular music, and Ingrid Bergman (whose Persona was one of the main inspirations for Paglia's concept of “sexual personae”) is a great filmmaker because... he made films, not because of his subject matter or style. Paglia spits out information about Lucas's technological accomplishments like nails, and what she has discovered about his detailed attention to what we now, in the Fandom Era, call “world-building” is indeed impressive: Lucas comes off as a genuine craftsman as well as computerized special-effects visionary. I say “visionary” because as of this moment, and for better of worse, CGI has taken over film, in the sense that the mass audience is only interested in CGI spectacles; but this too shall pass, like all pop crazes.

Paglia reports in the chapter that Lucas isn't interested in either dialogue or plot, and that may be exactly the problem with the Star Wars prequels. It's fine to be essentially an abstract filmmaker whose overwhelming focus is the visuals, but the mass audience, including myself as a child, originally fell in love with the characters of the franchise – charmingly acted, imaginatively updated archetypes. Film acting itself is more about what can be communicated without words, but that requires a director who is interested in working on, and capturing, performances. And there's no way to care about what happens to the characters in a film without plot. Although I haven't seen them due to the little bit I've read about them, based on that little bit it seems likely that Lucas's Star Wars prequels will go down in history as kitsch spectacles of frequent great beauty due to the enormous craftsmanship of the ILM team, that were however sunk as works of even popular filmmaking by the billionaire-genius's self-indulgence.

Moreover, what Paglia calls Lucas's “mission statement,” “Movies are a mass of objects moving across a large surface,” sounds like something Leni Riefenstahl might say. Our current epic CGI filmmakers are Riefenstahl's heirs, and there's as much to deplore philosophically as there is to admire technically. A certain kind of epic wants to get away from the human, and CGI helps in that process – a point made by J. Hoberman in a recent NYRB piece about Jackson's The Hobbit. And although I take Paglia's point about the cross-sections tie-in books' “contribution... to the visual education of children around the world,” when I was going to pick up one of the beautifully-illustrated children's guides for my eight-year-old nephew one Christmas, I put it back on the shelf after reflecting that after all, it's a glorification of war, with exceptionally detailed, realistic weaponry. I accept that children are interested in violence, but I can't put my own authority behind the idea that war is cool; on the contrary.

In the end Paglia convinces that fine art is in a bad state without convincing that pop culture is in a better one. If there are any artists with global impact at the moment, they probably are the CGI epic filmmakers; so if you want to equate global impact with aesthetic significance and vice versa, that's what you're left with. The “death of the artist” staged by Warhol, who tried to keep his own hand (literally and metaphorically) out of his work as much as possible, and continued by postmodern artists through other theories, together with the insular games and shock-value provocations of postmodern artists, have caused the public to lose faith in art and artists. That doesn't, however, mean that anyone other than Star Wars geeks has faith in George Lucas. And the idea of a “greatest artist of our time” was always a myth anyway, albeit one that has currency when art and the public have a healthy relationship with each other. I have no idea who the greatest artist of our era might be; if there is a single one, I have not heard of him or her. I would probably choose David Lynch as the greatest living filmmaker. INLAND EMPIRE is as abstract and plotless as anyone could wish, but it's also all about Laura Dern's performance (conveyed mainly through silent sequences or absurd, fragmented dialogue, though Lynch also does give her a pivotal, theatrical marathon speech), profoundly anchored in the human through the director-actress collaboration, exactly like Bergman's Persona, an exploration of identity that Lynch has been drawing on extensively in his most recent work.

I'll give Pags the benefit of the doubt, though, and assume she made her pronouncement about Lucas because it's more apt to generate interesting debate (about art, pop culture, and technology) than yet another critic saying what amounts to, “Oh, uh, great living filmmakers? Um, David Lynch, he's pretty good. Yeah, him.” Unfortunately, saying that George Lucas is the greatest artist of our time in 2012 is sort of like saying that Walt Disney is the greatest artist of our time in 1942. The only new thing Paglia has brought to the argument, which in itself isn't stupid (although for my own part I do not care), is this “great artists of the technological age embrace technology” crap, or, the “art cannot be good any longer unless it uses the latest technology” position, which is indicative of the actual thought that Paglia has put into the essays in Glittering Images: exactly none.

These Fragments I Have Shored 

Joseph Cornell is not among Paglia's artists, a perhaps surprising omission given his fan-worship of the female stars of Hollywood's Golden Age, which Paglia shares, and his frankly devotional, religious attitude towards them and to other female performers, of which Paglia would approve. Wouldn't it have done more good to acquaint newcomers to art history with a work like Cornell's Penny Arcade Portrait of Lauren Bacall (1946) than to include Warhol's Marilyn Diptych (1962), which is as familiar to even those with no interest in art whatsoever as the Mona Lisa? But Paglia seems ignorant of Cornell, not even mentioning him in the context of Eleanor Antin or Walter De Maria's boxes, although Cornell was making box art decades earlier.

As detailed in Deborah Solomon's Utopia Parkway – the evocative title comes from the distinctly unromantic street in Queens where Cornell lived for decades with his widowed mother and disabled younger brother – the reclusive, celibate Cornell spent his spare time scavenging flea markets, dime stores, Woolsworths, and second-hand bookstalls for cheap mass-produced objects and images and texts for his extensive dossiers on 19^th century ballerinas and opera divas and glamourous Hollywood actresses, which he then brought into odd, graceful, mysterious juxtaposition in his collages and boxes. Besides female performers, other motifs of the boxes over the years included birds, sky charts, hotels, and Cornell, who did not draw or paint, also appropriated images from the paintings of the great masters.

Cornell shared Warhol's interest in machines, but whereas Warhol saw machines as impersonal, passive recording devices (hence his aspiration to be one), Cornell's machines are interactive and, like Duchamp's masturbatory chocolate grinding machine, productive of pleasure. At present, wed to our innumerable digital devices as we are, I think we see machines in terms more of homely Cornellian amusement than of futuristic Warholian anxiety.

Cornell also beat Warhol to making avant-garde movies, first editing forgotten, discarded films with results like the dreamy, hypnotic Rose Hobart (which incurred the wrath of Dali, who, to the dismay of the nervous and timid Cornell, swore that the American artist had stolen the idea of how to make a surrealist film out of his brain), then collaborating with underground filmmakers who shot footage under his direction. But Cornell's relationship to pop culture, unlike Warhol's, was essentially romantic: Warhol reproduces the experience of being assaulted by garish images of sex, violence, and product, a world in which Liz Taylor, Elvis Presley, and Campbell's Soup (or Jennifer Aniston, Justin Bieber, and iPods) are our intimate familiars whether we like it or not; Cornell, in contrast, is interested not in the big, triumphant brands, but in the discards and detritus of pop culture. Cornell loves pop culture transfigured by the pathos of its own transience. The destiny of pop culture, for Cornell, is the opposite of the destiny of art: to not last, and therefore to inspire a Proustian yearning for the past. Part of his project as an artist is to recover the irrecoverable – like Proust, except that he has projected his personal memories onto impersonal objects and beautiful, glamourous movie stars, who, as the appellation suggests, are as distant as constellations. And this pathos touches Cornell as well, the ultimate collector-fan who lived only through pop culture. Cornell anticipated not only Pop Art but also our internet Age of Fandom and the nostalgic hipster appropriation of the mass culture of their youth.

Cornell, Hipsters, and Twee Aesthetics

Cornell, however, is entirely without self-protective hipster irony; he belongs to the line of pop-loving major American artists with a broad strain of childlike naivety, which includes Warhol and David Lynch. Notably, all three were religious, though none of them Protestants: Warhol was raised Catholic, while Cornell found Christian Science as an adult and Lynch Transcendental Meditation. Lynch's twisted version of American pop culture is his surrealist reimagining of the “innocent” 1950s and early 60s of his youth: like Cornell, he's a fan of “teeners” (Cornell's Lynchian word for “teenagers”). Also like Cornell, he's fascinated by performers (usually but not always female) and performances, and is as much of an obsessive connoisseur of diner pie and coffee or a chocolate milkshake at Big Bob's as Cornell was of Automat pie, soda pop, and luncheon rooms where he watched the drab young waitresses with empathy, desire, and perhaps a wistful sex-crossing identification. (In her chapter on Manet's At the Cafe, Paglia suggests that the artist may empathize with the careworn, dreamy working girl staring into space on the left bottom of the painting.) Unlike Warhol and Lynch, however, Cornell never succeeded in making his own curious personality into a brand, possibly because by the time of the full ascendency of the mass media in the 1960s he was already a Beckettian depressed old man.

I see a continuity between Cornell's sensibility and the anti-ironic “twee” strain of hipsterism that's perhaps been most successful in indie music, where it's epitomized by bands like Animal Collective and of Montreal, the latter of which essentially is the elfin Kevin Barnes, whose pop sensibilities are matched only by the aggressive manic-depression related in his autobiographical lyrics and his Kate Bush-like natural affinity for the theatrical and avant-garde. The nature themes of Animal Collective, which seem like they're on the border between environmentalism and the nerd orientation, made notorious by the internet, “furry,” also rhyme with Cornell's concerns. Cornell stuck to birds – like fellow mother-dominated, candy-munching, reclusive object-maker Norman Bates – but his younger brother Robert, who was afflicted with cerebral palsy, and for whom Cornell felt a twinlike closeness, made drawings of an imaginary world of animal characters that sounds like the children's books envisioned by Jerry Lewis's unbearably twee, infantile, comics-addicted character in Artists and Models (1955), Frank Tashlin's pre-Pop satire of pop-crazed America in the form of one of its most characteristic products, a Martin and Lewis vehicle.

In Artists and Models, Martin and Lewis play bachelor best buddies, an aspiring artist and aspiring writer, who are practically wed to each other and who have an older-younger brother relationship of caretaking and dependency similar to Joseph and Robert's. It's as if the eccentric, unworldly Cornell brothers occupied the same twee fantasy world, of which Robert's was the even more regressive version. After losing his brother Cornell made collages of some of his drawings, which Solomon, in common with the rest of the art world, dismisses as possessing value for Cornell only. The hero of Robert's animal universe was The Mouse King, and in Artists and Models Lewis poses for Dorothy Malone's successful commercial artist as his own mouse character and spends most of the film's climax in a cumbersome, huge-bellied mouse costume, female-identified through his comical “pregnancy” like the archetypal clown. (And that, folks – the symbolic femininity of clowns – I learned from Sexual Personae.) Cornell-like, Lewis's character is stuck in a perpetual adolescence due to his sexual fixation on a fantasy-woman from his comics, the Bat Lady, which leaves him unable to respond to real women.

Solomon, whose psychology is very basic, views Cornell as a tragic figure of thwarted sexuality and independence, and there's little doubt that his was a Jamesian unlived life, though it's hard to say which caused which, his fear of direct experience or his unusually vivid fantasy life. Whichever it was, I find it hard to share Solomon's head-shaking view, even though it's clear that Cornell's depressive tendencies killed him relatively young, a fate he shared with a twee artist of an earlier era, the manic-depressive, nature-loving late Victorian religious poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, who was a celibate like Cornell but unlike Cornell was probably homosexual in orientation. In his early 60s Cornell suffered several losses: his brother died, then his mother, as well as the drug-addicted young waitress who may have been the great love of his life, although they never had a relationship. In a movie melodrama-like conflation of Of Human Bondage and Fritz Lang's Scarlet Street, the young woman, together with her boyfriend, robbed the naive older artist of several of his boxes. Far more selfless, or masochistic, than either Leslie Howard or Edward G. Robinson, Cornell reluctantly pressed charges only to turn around and post her bail, and she repented and left the boyfriend only to end up murdered by a mentally ill acquaintance. Bereft of the two family members, brother-twin and mother, with whom he'd merged his identity and shared a home for his entire life, and the fallen woman he'd hoped to rescue in an imaginary Victorian scenario, Cornell shriveled up emotionally and lost his will to live.

Cornell practised what Paglia would call the masochistic feminine art of self-affliction; like the young Morrissey, whose private Catholic iconography of British northern women and androgynous male movie actors was displayed on The Smiths' album and single sleeves, Cornell made himself into a female Victorian invalid, like Henry James's sister Alice. Cornell's difference from constitutionally similar artists like Morrissey, James, Kevin Barnes, or Emily Dickinson, with whom he identified, is that at no point – as far as I can tell at this preliminary stage of familiarity with his work – did he release his aggression, either in his work or in his life. Instead he seems to have renounced it completely – the impossible, for a Paglian like me, even if that renunciation did help to kill him. Cornell seems to have channeled deviant, serial killer-like impulses of obsessive collecting and compulsive arrangement of his materials into an effervescent creativity from which all traces of the impulses' violence have been erased. This is in stark contrast to David Lynch, whose startling habit of examining animal carcasses out of curiosity is in keeping with the obscene violence in his work, which is locked in Manichean battle with his eccentric vision of innocence. As in Henry James, the price in Lynch of imagining innocence is imagining its violation.

To bring us back full circle: Cornell's last major celebrity crush/Muse was Susan Sontag, perhaps because she was the first pop-age female intellectual, posing languidly in publicity photos, radiating celebrity glamour. Since Cornell, as Solomon points out, preferred female celebrities with a touch of androgyny to them, creating Garbo and Bacall “portrait” boxes and turning Hedy Lamarr into a Renaissance pageboy in a collage, it's no wonder that he was so thrilled by Sontag, with her combination of “feminine” flirtatiousness and sensuality, on the one hand, and “masculine” severity and intellect, on the other. Sontag was an icon of that brief, brilliant period when a wide public remained interested in a high culture that was being invigorated by popular culture and that was, itself, part of popular culture, before high culture became so interested in pop culture that it lost interest in itself.

Coda: My Growing List of Men Who Look Like Samuel Beckett or Each Other