R E C E N T L Y
The sexual symbolism of Ted Kaczynski's crimes
Deconstructing the Kennedys
Should an economist wear a short, tantalizing black dress to work?
Prozac is for wimps
The nanny trial, "Boogie Nights" and feminist writing about men
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A L S O
About Camille Paglia
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C O L U M N I S T S
Sexpert Opinion
Bestseller Hell
Spice of Life
Telling a book by its cover
Right On!
Word by Word
Ask Camille
New Year's wish for the Reverend Al
Let's talk about race
Sound Salvation
Unzipped
The Awful Truth
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A S K_C A M I L L E +|+ C A M I L L E+P A G L I A
Dear Camille:
Does Clinton's sexual appetite invalidate or conflict in any way with his
support of women's causes? Just because he's the president, and just because
he appears to pursue sex, does that make him a misogynist?
Ray Gordon
Dear Ray Gordon:
Thank you for the fascinating question. Naturally, in the wake of its
lightning-quick Clinton crisis coverage, Salon has been flooded with messages
from its international readership.
For example, Bewildered Male declares, "For the life of me, I don't understand
female passion about Clinton." Noting that "Anita Hill is given victim-sainthood for having seen a pubic hair," he asks, "can you please explain why
women -- even my wife -- love to love Bill Clinton?"
Another writer, using the piquant sobriquet Draft Libby in 2000, exclaims,
"Are you as frustrated as I am with feminist takes on the Clinton scandal?"
Evan Allen takes the strawberry cupcake for his query: "Did the president's
penis peregrinate into the private parts of a barely post-pubescent intern?"
He sees poetic justice in Clinton's finally getting nailed: "Personally, I
feel this is the result of his (and other politicians') knuckling under to the
Anita Hill-driven nuttiness of some sexual harassment laws."
I'm glad you have refocused attention on the "misogynist" charge, which
William Ginsburg, the lawyer for ex-intern Monica Lewinsky, speculatively
attached to Clinton but has strategically backed away from. "Misogyny,"
meaning hatred of women, has been the big crutch term of contemporary
feminism. Everything uncomfortable or unpalatable in sexual relations is
attributed to misogyny by feminists inside and outside academe. Hence their
absurd insistence on a "war" supposedly going on against women -- as in that
sourpuss Marilyn French's virulently anti-male "The War Against Women" (1993)
or in Susan Faludi's shrill, sloppy screed, "Backlash: The Undeclared War
Against American Women" (1991).
In "Sexual Personae" and elsewhere, I have argued that "misogyny" is a
hopelessly inadequate word for analyzing or understanding the turmoil that has
been going on between the sexes since the Stone Age. For hatred of women I
substitute fear of women -- illustrated, I contend, by
the whole gorgeous corpus of world mythology, with its horrific monsters and
vampires and sizzling femmes fatales, who live again in Hollywood.
Bill Clinton's "sexual appetite," as you put it, intrigues me as a theorist of
sex. I'm immensely enjoying the spectacle of feminist leaders twisting
slowly, slowly in the wind as they try to defend the debaucheries of the
standard-bearer of the Democratic Party -- their none-too-secret affiliation,
which they constantly elevate above feminist principle. (I speak as a
registered Democrat long repulsed by their ruthless, back-room partisanship,
which has so distorted and limited the women's movement.)
Freud, whom Gloria Steinem and company threw overboard, offers the only key to
Clinton's strange psyche. The feminist high muckety-mucks are having a
little compulsory remedial education these days, a crash course in basic
psychology. How amusing to see the arrogant authoritarians turned into
tolerant libertarians overnight! Those who so censoriously intruded into the
sex lives of American citizens on campus and in the workplace are now
performing slithery contortions of self-exculpating casuistry worthy of the
Borgia popes.
Notorious for doing four things at once (e.g., watching TV, reading, eating
and talking on the telephone), Clinton is literally omnivorous: He would
gobble up all the hamburgers and women in the world, if he could. The book he
reportedly gave to Lewinsky, Walt Whitman's "Leaves of Grass," contains
the line, "I am large, I contain multitudes." Clinton is the ultimate
democratic -- that's small "d" -- president. He wants to suck everything up, have
it all, cram life with every sensation and emotion. His moods go up, down
and sideways (like his rumored bent organ?). He's always behind; no day is
long enough. He has the complexity of a great star -- like Judy Garland or Joan
Crawford. Yes, the only analogies to him are female, not male.
As polls show, a majority of the American people are in uneasy love with
Clinton and forgive him every fault, including compulsive lying. But love
affairs are dangerously mercurial. Should Clinton's electrifying energy and
transcendent self-belief begin to flag, the public will go cold and rend him
limb from limb. He is the prodigal son now, but he could still end up
crucified.
Exactly what drives Clinton's appetites? Fatherless, he was reared in
matriarchy. He reveres women but fears their all-engulfing power. His
feisty, florid, ribald mother, Virginia -- so strong that even the dominatrix
Barbra Streisand fell under her influence -- would be succeeded by her rival and
opposite, the male-willed Hillary Rodham, a fanatically focused, high-minded
Puritan who took Bill under her wing as a lovable but ever-straying son, whom
she molds like clay but can't control outside her atelier.
Clinton's crimes are incestuous: He makes the whole world his family and then
seduces and pollutes it, person by person. Remember how then-Gov.
Clinton, hot and sweaty from jogging, jovially stained Jim McDougal's
expensive new leather chair? -- something his Whitewater partner never forgot.
N E X T_P A G E | Is Hillary Clinton a lesbian?
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