Jesus Christ, time and Trump makes fools of us all. I didn’t realize when I was having fun making fun of ol’ Camille that our country would be collapsing under the weight of Fox News Hosts with political ambitions.
Anyways here’s that essay:
Camille Paglia is hateful to me because of the pettiness of her motivations. Despite her anti-academic stance, Paglia’s attack on feminism was motivated by an academic differentiation between nurture and nature. If this had remained in the academy, then Paglia would have been a harmless kook. But Paglia took her crusade against feminism into pop-culture and let herself be used by reactionary forces to attack “the extremes of campus feminism.”
What makes this particularly sad is that this was happening in the 1990’s when rape culture was only beginning to be called out. And these beginnings of ideas about consent were met with a huge overreaction from conservatives aided by “just-asking-questions” liberals from the New York Times.
I’m also like everyone else as well. To make an embarrassing confession; when I first started reading about feminism, Gloria Steinem and Paglia were the only writers I had read. And of course, knowing nothing about much of anything at age 19, I loved both.
I bought into Paglia, not realizing that her whole edgelord shtick was based in being a tool of the right wing. So, some of my animus is dictated by the fact that my younger self bought into this nonsense. And like a recovered cult member, I find myself particularly scornful of anyone who believes her to be an important writer.
Eventually, I lost interest in her after trying to read “Vamps and Tramps”, which included a transcription of a video Paglia was in and various profiles from magazines to try to fill it out to book length.
Worst of all was a lengthy attack on Susan Sontag, entitled “Sontag Bloody Sontag” which basically amounted to a recounting of a time Paglia hosted Sontag at her college and Sontag was indifferent to her. Once again, Paglia’s invective originated in personal pettiness. But even in my naivety, I had started to see the limitations of her persona.
This piece is about an essay Paglia wrote about rape in 1991 and how it should have stopped anyone from reading her in the future. Specifically, one paragraph in the essay has annoyed me the more I learned about anything.
I’m not sure why Paglia’s essay about date rape ended up as an opinion piece in the Seattle Times in 1991 but I’m fairly sure that I read it in her first book of essays; “Sex, Art and American Culture.”. The Seattle times version is ponderously titled “Perspective needed: Feminism’s Lie, Denying Realities about Sexual Power and Rape.”. It was later republished in “Sex, Art and American Culture” as “On Rape”.
This essay was probably published due to Katie Roiphe’s “The Morning After” catching on as an attack on “campus feminism”. Paglia was a fan of Roiphe’s and the book’s attack on “take back the night” probably inspired Paglia’s inane thoughts.
“On Rape” is mean-spirited in the way that much of Paglia’s work is. The basic thesis is that Paglia objects to rape being described as an act of power rather than sex. And because of this distinction, she heaps all sorts of insults on survivors of sexual assault as being foolish and naive about male sexuality.
Paglia’s double-glazed Wikipedia notes:
“Paglia's view that rape is sexually motivated has been endorsed by evolutionary psychologists Randy Thornhill and Craig T. Palmer” (who??)
If you would like to read the essay in question before the bad paragraph, I have linked it here.
Suffice to say this essay is nonsense from the first sentence, but I want to focus on one paragraph which I find particularly idiotic.
“Once, fathers and brothers protected women from rape. Once, the penalty for rape was death. I come from a fierce Italian tradition where, not so long ago in the motherland, a rapist would end up knifed, castrated and hung out to dry.”
Paglia often couched her criticisms of feminism by claiming to be a “radical feminist”, but this paragraph is obviously anti-feminist. According to her, the culture of fathers and brothers existed to protect women from rape rather than being complicit in sexual assault.
But what is particularly ridiculous is Paglia’s claim that in Italian culture rapists were routinely castrated by these mythic protectors of women.
This is particularly absurd because even doing a small amount of research turns up the case of Franca Viola. In 1965, Viola was kidnapped and raped by her ex-fiancée Filippo Melodia. Viola was held captive until her father agreed to her forced marriage to Melodia . However, when Viola was freed, her father took the surprising step of respecting her wishes and refused to honor the arrangement. Instead, she and her family prosecuted her rapists and the kidnappers.
To explain the social customs of that time, this from wikipedia;
“Melodia offered Viola a so-called "rehabilitating marriage," but she refused, thus acting against what was the common practice in Sicilian society at the time. According to traditional social norms, this choice would make her a donna svergognata, or 'woman without honour' (literally: a 'shameless woman'), as she had lost her virginity but remained unwed.[4] These concepts were not exclusive to Sicily or rural areas; to some extent, they were also implicit in the Italian Penal Code of the time, namely Article 544, which equated rape to a crime against "public morality" rather than a personal offence, and formalized the idea of a "rehabilitating marriage" (matrimonio riparatore), stating that a rapist who married his victim would have his crime automatically expunged.[4][9]” Wikipeda
Viola’s family acted against Sicilian tradition. You could see it as an example of fathers and brothers protecting women, but it was very much against the norm.
“After Viola's refusal to marry her rapist, her family members were reportedly menaced, ostracized, and persecuted by most townspeople. Their vineyard and barn were torched”
This happened only 25 years before Paglia wrote her article. So, one might assume that things had improved a lot in Italian society since then. In fact, the article states that the law forcing women to marry their rapist was taken out the legal code in 1981. So, maybe one could assume that after that was taken out, things improved.
Sexual violence against a person rather than against public morality only became law in 1996, several years after Paglia’s essay was published.
(To explain this because I didn’t initially understand it; sexual violence was defined in Italian law as being an offense against the public rather than as an individual. This meant that a sexual assault ceased to be a crime if the victim married the offender, thus taking the offense out of the realm of public morality.)
It could only be extreme ignorance that would lead Paglia to claim that the patriarchy was protecting women in the traditional culture of Italy. Most likely, Paglia was naively believing family history, because it’s clear that women were not protected.
One could argue that this part of her argument is a small part, but I think it’s telling of her greater intellectual dishonesty. Paglia believes that women are oppressed by nature rather than by patriarchy. Thus, in her view, it’s patriarchal culture that protects women from rape rather than causing it.
No doubt Paglia thought that her example of vigilante justice was an example of the protection of a more patriarchal culture. But the actual history of the way rape was dealt with in Sicily shows that a patriarchal culture acquiesces to and encourages sexual violence.
Fortunately, the Seattle times did publish a response from several women who worked at Seattle Rape Relief and King County Sexual Assault Resource Center. I include a link here at the end of the essay.