ELIZABETH DOLE IS NOT MAN ENOUGH TO BE PRESIDENT | PAGE 1, 2
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Dear Camille:
I completely agree with your dismay over Gwyneth
Paltrow's winning best actress. First Mira, now Gwyneth; Jesus, if all it
takes is parents in the biz to win an Oscar, is Tori Spelling next?
As your disgust with Paltrow is well-established, do you have an opinion
on Rose McGowan, the busty, black-haired bad girl who stars in
"Jawbreaker"? She was born on an Italian sex commune, so perhaps that's
where she got her lethal persona. Her jaw-dropping measurements leave
stick-figure Paltrow in the dust. Speaking of whom, what was she thinking
on Oscar night with that dress? She looked
like a 10-year-old dressing up in Mommy's clothes. Didn't anyone tell her
that you need boobs to fill out a low-cut dress?
I saw McGowan in "Devil's Child," an HBO trash-flick where she was a
teenage slut who stabbed people. All hail the Lolita femme fatale! I'm
less than enthusiastic about Marilyn Manson, her gender-bending fiancé, but
who cares what guy is on the arm of a foxy babe like her? Along with bad
girl Christina Ricci, might McGowan's tempestuous Irish-American persona
bring in a new generation of voluptuous brunets to kick the flat asses of
WASPy first-graders Gwyneth P. and Helen Hunt? I'd love to see Rose do a
Liz Taylor on Gwyneth's Debbie Reynolds!
Lillie
Dear Lillie:
Thanks for your terrific letter! Yes, showbiz nepotism and clannishness have
distorted Academy Awards voting in the acting category twice in recent years.
Neither Mira Sorvino nor Gwyneth Paltrow deserved Oscars for their respective
performances. The artistic stature of the Academy Awards has certainly been
diminished.
Last weekend, I had a chance to eyeball Paltrow anew in HBO's broadcast of
"Great Expectations," last year's disjointed modernization of the Charles
Dickens novel. Once again, I was repelled by Paltrow's shallowness -- the
ludicrous obviousness as she concentrates ever so hard on "being sexy"; the
thin lips, clamped teeth, whiny nasality and smirky prep-school mannerisms;
the supercilious, manipulative princess airs. I would be curious to know how
broad is Paltrow's African-American fan base (I suspect it's zilch).
But the weekend had its splendors: USA network aired two Sharon Stone films
back to back, "Basic Instinct" (1992) and "Intersection" (1994), in which the
long-tressed Richard Gere drives his posh car off a cliff. Even expurgated
for TV, "Basic Instinct" still sizzles with Stone's blinding charisma, molten
sensuality and keen intelligence. My partner Alison and I were in ecstasy as
we watched Stone sweep imperiously through those films. What a relief to gaze
raptly at a real star -- rather than at that overhyped ingénue, the vapid
Paltrow.
As a devoted fan of Jane Austen's "Emma," I will never forgive Paltrow for her
inexpressibly stupid performance in the 1996 film of that name (it should have
been called "Pile of Crap"). The queasy-making, spindly necked Paltrow, who
wangled the role of Emma by blackmailing the producers into auditioning no one
else, didn't have a rat's ass idea about Austen's novel or the character she
played -- who is one of my favorite female personae in literature. Emma has
been far better done (as I observed in my analysis of "The Birds") by
Tippi Hedren as the deliciously superficial dilettante, Melanie Daniels.
I'm sure Salon readers will be tantalized by your vivid description of the
lip-smacking charms of Rose McGowan -- whom I will eagerly study when
"Jawbreaker" is released on video. It must be McGowan, then, who got up
Courtney Love's nose on Hole's short, ill-fated tour with Marilyn Manson.
Anyone who can sock it to an ersatz Beverly Hills Dionysian like Love gets
high marks in my book!
Dear Camille:
Every weekend, I watch "Beyond the News" and "This Evening With Judith Regan"
on the Fox News Channel and am totally dismayed at the conservative attitudes
the shows' hosts and guests display. Most disturbing is that this
conservatism is coming from women like Wendy Shalit and Danielle Crittenden,
who frequently appear on these shows to promote their books, "A Return to
Modesty" and "What Our Mothers Didn't Tell Us," respectively. These women
claim that saving sex for marriage, putting marriage and family before a
career and marrying young are what will make women happy. I wanted to hear
your thoughts on this, because to me, this ideology seems to set the women's
movement back about 40 years and is the epitome of what I don't want in life.
How can these women claim that solely being a mother and a housewife will make
all women happy? Are they nuts?
Brianne Beazley
Dear Ms. Beazley:
Fox News Channel, unavailable in some markets (such as Philadelphia), is
performing a real cultural service by regularly featuring conservative or
unorthodox viewpoints in what is still a heavily liberal climate in the major
media. In the 1990s, cable television has been instrumental in liberating
alternative voices after their long silencing during the PC era. In the 1970s
and '80s, for example, national newscasters would routinely turn to Gloria
Steinem or the president of NOW for "the woman's point of
view" -- when neither one spoke for all feminists, much less all women.
It's healthy for feminism to have conservative women challenging its basic
premises. After its resurgence in the late 1960s, the women's movement did
expand career opportunities for women, but let's face it, it has not brought
sexual happiness or universal fulfillment. Sex roles are in flux, and men
are shrinking. Women don't know what they want. And affluent middle-class
young women, who might secretly long to settle down, marry and procreate, are
being relentlessly forced along a career track that they may have little
desire or hardiness for. The roles of mother and homemaker, which Betty
Friedan's "The Feminine Mystique" (1963) portrayed as a dead end, do need to
be revalorized. Feminism should be about options.
The feminist establishment never tried to understand the legitimate points
raised in the 1970s by Phyllis Schlafly, the
foremother of female conservatives. As a consequence, the Equal Rights
Amendment, into which so much feminist energy and hope had been poured,
suffered an ignominious defeat. Similarly, many pro-choice feminists, with
their strident anti-male rhetoric, arrogantly underestimated the ethical
weight of objections to abortion and helped foment the backlash that still
endangers the lives of abortion-clinic workers stalked by lunatics with bombs
and rifles.
Danielle Crittenden, former head of the conservative/libertarian Independent
Women's Forum (which made the first successful challenge to the liberal
hegemony of NOW), seems to be a thoughtful critic of current mores, though
questions have been raised about her privileged economic status, which makes
staying at home a whole lot easier. As for Wendy Shalit, I cannot take her
book seriously, since it is such a lumpy hodgepodge of many people's ideas,
including my own. I view Shalit as a spoiled, beadily ambitious fantasist who
has dated her way to the top of the conservative heap. Gosh, it sounds like
preening, pretty-in-pink Paltrow all over again!
Postscript: In honor of Women's History Month, the Los Angeles Times asked me
to write about my teenaged passion for Amelia Earhart. The article, detailing
my obsessive three-year research project on Earhart, appeared on March 24.
March 31, 1999
Does your exploratory committee need a map? Ask Camille.
