A S K C A M I L L E
| Camille Paglia's online advice for the culturally disgruntled |
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Illustration by Zach Trenholm
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Dear Camille,
I assume you were raised a Catholic, and therefore, whether you are still practicing or not, you're still in the arms of Mother Church. As such, how did you respond to the death of Mother Teresa? Is she your idea of a saint? Why did Diana's death seem to have a much greater impact on you?
Altar boy
Dear Altar Boy,
As I like to say, once a Catholic, always a Catholic! Although technically a
lapsed Catholic, I am hyperconscious of my Italian Catholic heritage, which I
interpret as subliminally pagan. (Catholic themes run throughout my work but
are treated at length in "The Saint," my memoir article in "Vamps & Tramps,"
and in Thomas J. Ferraro's interview with me in a special Summer 1994 issue
of "South Atlantic Quarterly" devoted to American Catholicism.)
Ex-Catholics, I've often observed, seem to have richly pornographic
imaginations -- as witness Andy Warhol, Robert Mapplethorpe and Madonna.
In her embrace of the suffering and the "poorest of the poor," Mother Teresa
certainly represented the best essence of Christianity as it came from the
real-life Jesus (whose maxims as a charismatic itinerant preacher are
probably the only historically reliable parts of the four Gospels). Over the
centuries, the institutional church certainly wandered away again and again
from that rigorous mission of compassion and self-mortification.
As the Ultimate Nurse, however, Mother Teresa epitomized for me the
caretaking aspect of woman that I as a cantankerous
Amazon warrior have always rejected. Like Friedrich Nietzsche, a major influence on my thinking, I identify with the heroic glory and radiant physical beauty of the
Greco-Roman world and find aboriginal Christianity passive, anti-aesthetic
and dispiriting.
It's no coincidence that Mother Teresa was named after St. Therese of
Lisieux -- that vapid 19th-century French teenager with her armful of
roses who fused in my adolescent mind with twinkly Sandra Dee. My role model
is quite another Teresa -- St. Teresa of Avila, the bossy, inflammatory Spanish
reformer nun and visionary writer who annoyed and unnerved the church
hierarchy of her day.
I'm sure Mother Teresa of Calcutta was a saint by any traditional
ecclesiastic standard. Though she played little part in my imaginative
life -- I was too busy with my voluptuous Venusian vixens from Elizabeth Taylor
to Sharon Stone -- I thought the caviling about her by prudes and sybarites of
the moribund Left was contemptible. (Leftists' distance from the great mass
of ordinary people -- whose interests they pretend to represent -- has become a
sick joke.)
Diana's death was shattering simply because I was such an admirer of hers
since her sudden arrival on the scene 16 years ago. The mercurial Diana had
sizzling female glamour and an underlying butch physicality; she appealed to
the eye -- unlike the wizened Mother Teresa, whose virtues were primarily
spiritual, even as she lay in her open coffin.
I'm surprised and gratified that my theories about the cult of Diana as
half-goddess, half-Madonna -- which were scornfully rejected by many in the
London media elite five years ago -- have now gained such wide acceptance. It
was staggering, in fact, to hear Earl Spencer invoke one of those ideas
(Diana as the huntress who became the hunted) in his funeral eulogy in
Westminster Abbey. Although a month has passed, Diana's death is still
unreal to me -- a sentiment surely shared by countless others around the world.
Dear Camille,
I've been waiting for quite some time for you to weigh in on the Spice
Girls, and the whole concept of "Girl Power." More so than Madonna -- who
has ditched her trashy girl image for supposed legitimacy -- the Spice
Girls represent aggressive female power, and a lot of people are scared of
them. They get trashed as sexist stereotypes, yet they seem to be
entirely in control of their own careers and music. They're certainly
more exciting than most of the Lilith Fair crew -- in particular the
painfully earnest Paula Cole.
What I find interesting is that a lot of the people clucking at the Spice
Girls are men -- I've heard several ultra-PC males complain that they are
"not role models" for girls. As if men know better than women who should
be role models for girls!
But what's unique, I think, about the Spice Girls is that they are
vulgar, making crap jokes and talking about their underwear (not always in
a non-sexual way). Jenny McCarthy also comes to mind. In Ms. Magazine's
"No Comment" section, where they display so-called sexist advertising,
they included McCarthy's Candies shoes ad where she's sitting on the
toilet. While the ad was disgusting, it was also McCarthy's own
choice. What do you think?
Spiced Up in Canada
Dear Spiced Up,
Naturally, I approve of the Spice Girls as splendid embodiments of the
ballsy, vampy, street-smart, take-charge contemporary women I've constantly
called for. I loved the snappy video for "Say You'll Be There," where the
Spice Girls mime not only Diana Rigg of "The Avengers" (one of my idols) but
the posturing personae of "Charlie's Angels," a show dismissed in the 1970s
as empty-headed titillation but that can now be seen as a bold prefiguration
of 1990s-style pro-sex feminism. (See my "homage" to "Charlie's Angels" in
the December 1995 issue of Allure.)
However, the Spice Girls are unlikely to have the enormous impact here that
they have had in England (or to a lesser extent in Canada). Their hip-hop
stances are familiar standard-issue in the United States, where pop
choreography has evolved to a much higher level, as in En Vogue's stunning
video for "Don't Let Go." Even the Spice Girls' manifesto of "girl power"
echoes themes that were extensively treated here four to five years ago -- the
Riot Grrrls' movement as well the confused, clichéd "bad girls" fad in
American women's magazines. Still, the rest of the world clearly needs
radicalizing, so more power to the Spice Girls!
Lilith Fair seems to have been all melting toffee and vanilla jellybeans -- not my kind of snack. A Keith Richards fan like me finds the Lilith Fair view of sensitive, ethereal, mawkish womanhood totally reactionary. But I do like
Paula Cole's hit song, "Where Have All the Cowboys Gone?" which broke into
major airplay on merit alone. The far more talented Ani DiFranco, in
contrast, has yet to produce a well-crafted single that can touch the
sensibilities of a wide range of listeners. There is always an element of
universality in important, lasting music. Alternative rockers, get out of
your ghetto!
Jenny McCarthy's exuberant, hoydenish comedy style reminds me of the great
"Carol Burnett Show," but we'll see whether she can find writers who will
sustain her show (doubtful in today's cheap-trick, no-follow-through
prime time TV). I thought McCarthy's winsomely ribald and Rabelaisian,
reading-on-the-toilet ad not "disgusting" but amazingly clever (I never
dreamed Kate Moss' plush, recumbent, languidly bare-bottomed Calvin Klein
pose could be pornographically surpassed). How delightful that the
pedestrian editors of Ms. -- who have apparently never heard of Marcel Duchamp
or his urinal -- are in a snit over it. The return of Candies shoes, another
shamelessly provocative relic of the 1970s, is probably also giving them
heartburn. Disco inferno!
Clueless? Ask Camille.
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