From siren7@mindspring.com Tue Oct 21 18:21:04 PDT 1997
(The term "PC feminism" as used in this article means feminists who have embraced the "political correctness" approach to feminism, which means censoring and otherwise suppressing the expression of ideas that differ from theirs, and which includes definitions of correct sexual behavior and thought that exclude many modes of sexuality. I use it because I recognize that many feminists reject those ideas. In fact, in my view it's very possible to be both a feminist and a Gorean slavegirl -- but not a PC feminist and a Gorean slavegirl.)
One of the things I find most striking about Camille Paglia is the similarities between the way she and John Norman are treated by PC feminists and mainstream media -- considering how very dissimilar they are as writers and thinkers.
John Norman, for those who aren't aware of his work, is best known as the author of a series of fantasy novels about the planet Gor, where men are men and women are their sex slaves. The series was a mixture of sword and sandals fantasy and soft core bondage and dominance porn, done with such drive and conviction that it attracted both fantasy fans and BDSMers. Despite Norman's considerable weaknesses as a prose stylist, the series was quite successful, extending to 26 novels, and according to some sources, becoming the best-selling fantasy series ever.
Many fantasy fans claim to have initially read the series for its Edgar Rice Burroughs-like fantasy aspect, only to be turned off eventually by the B&D elements and the extended antifeminist rants that Norman's characters often engaged in. (Whether you agreed with Norman's ideas or not, the rants were extremely repetitive and dull.) But clearly, many readers enjoyed the B&D as well, as it became quite prevalent at the seventh novel and continued unabated for the next 19 novels.
Norman's Gor novels predated Paglia's appearance on the cultural horizon, appearing at the time when PC feminism reigned supreme. Therefore, his novels were met with ferocious resistance by those feminists who were aware of them.
(Despite the controversial sexual aspects of Norman's novels, they never attained the cultural prominence of Paglia's work, perhaps because the times were wrong for them, perhaps because Paglia is a much better self-promoter than Norman, perhaps because Norman didn't have as many ideas, or express them nearly as well, as Paglia does. Also, the books were packaged as fantasy novels, not soft-core bondage porn, or intellectual screeds, although they were a little of all of these.)
Still, science fiction and fantasy is a fictional arena which attracted feminist women, and they responded angrily to Norman's novels. When Norman was on panels at science fiction cons, there were LOTS of angry questions from the audience. You could cut the tension with a knife.
Norman complained publicly that the PC feminists in academia, particularly the institution where he was a tenured professor of philosophy, were trying to block his advancement. If they could have bumped him out of his job, they probably would have, but that tenure thing saved his derriere. (Note: this is all hearsay on my part, things I have heard reported online, except for the complaints about feminist academics seeking to block his advancement -- it's clear from some of the passages from Captive of Gor that Norman did feel that that was happening. Whether or not it was actually happening is another matter.)
Paglia's conflict with PC feminists is more direct and more public, with PC feminists directly attacking her, while she is not at all shy about publicly attacking them. And as a lesbian and an avowed feminist, she's much harder to personally attack than Norman, whom they can dismiss as a male sexist pig-dog scum. They actually have to attack Paglia's ideas, a much tougher assignment than attacking her gender or her sexuality, and a much tougher assignment than attacking Norman's ideas as well.
About the best they have been able to do is complain that since Paglia has so many ideas and promotes them so well, they must not be very good ideas. They must be shallow ideas that lose substance when the glare of publicity is absent. Still, Paglia's ideas have spread around popular culture, even though feminists in academia and elsewhere have fought them tooth and nail.
Norman's basic Big Idea is that the brand of feminism/humanism that preaches absolute equality between the sexes is flawed, since it fails to take fundamental biological differences between the sexes into account. This is actually a pretty sound idea with a lot of social and biological science behind it, but feminists dismissed it as just another attempt to get women back in the kitchen, barefoot and pregnant. Unfortunately, Norman's repeated rants in his novels did nothing to advance his cause -- he did not expand or explain his ideas in greater detail, merely repeated them more loudly.
Norman and Paglia are birds of a feather because they both hold ideas about relations between the sexes that are different from those held by PC feminists, and those held by mainstream culture. Both were opposed by feminists because their divergent viewpoints. Despite their widely divergent views, they are linked by their opposition to the simpleminded equality preached widely in academia even today. If you haven't read Paglian's work, read it -- she's a much more entertaining writer on intellectual subjects than Norman, with a great grasp of pop psychology and classical culture. Her ideas make an interesting prism for examining Norman's ideas.
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