nature and culture.” Furthermore, my key idea is that art itself is a line drawn against nature.
My dissident brand of feminism is grounded in my own childhood experience as a fractious rebel against the suffocating conformism of the 1950s, when Americans, exhausted by two decades of economic instability and war, reverted to a Victorian cult of domesticity that limited young girls’ aspirations and confined them (in my jaundiced view) to a simpering, saccharine femininity. I have written elsewhere about my eccentric symbols of gender protest via transvestite Halloween costumes: Robin Hood at age five; the toreador from Carmen at six; a Roman soldier at seven; Napoleon at eight; Hamlet at nine. I took inspiration from wherever I could find it—from Classics Illustrated comic books and Courvoisier ads for Napoleon Cognac to the local church’s Stations of the Cross and my parents’ worn copy of Stories from the Great Metropolitan Operas.
But never in my passionate identification with heroic male figures was I encouraged by concerned but misguided adults to believe that I actually was a boy and that medical interventions could bring that hidden truth to life. On the contrary, by being forced to learn coping strategies for surviving in society, I was freed to develop my talents in other ways that have proved invaluable over time. When recently asked how I “identify” or describe myself, I replied, “Non-gendered entity.” However, except in very rare conditions of true hermaphroditism (a congenital disorder), the DNA of every cell of the human body is inflexibly coded as male or female from birth to death. While respect and legal protection are owed to anyone who for whatever reason seeks to shift positions along the intricate spectrum of sexual personae (the Latin word for theater masks), changing sex is scientifically impossible.
Social pressures on girls in the late 1950s and early 1960s were heavy and relentless. The cultural dictators were chirpy, all-American blondes like Doris Day and Debbie Reynolds, with their compulsive cheerfulness. At Girl Scout camp, I melted into the woods to escape the happy mass singing of Doris’s mega-hit, “Que Sera, Sera,” around the campfire. At school, teachers appreciated my academic efforts but were routinely exasperated by my blundering inability to fit into the sedate, deferential girl slot. After my role in some pushing and shoving in line, my fifth-grade teacher made me stay after school to look up the word “aggressive” in the dictionary—as if it were a heinous mortal sin for girls. My eighth-grade teacher irately pulled me out of class to demand that I sit at my desk without moving or shaking any part of my body—a then baffling shaming incident that has made me enduringly sympathetic to the plight of physically active boys imprisoned in a public school system dominated by female teachers.
My only escapes from the repressive homogeneity of that period were through pop culture (wide-screen Hollywood epics and rock ’n’ roll) and archaeology: I adored the monumentality and megalomania of Egyptian sculpture and architecture. When my parents could finally afford their first TV set (I was twelve), late-night movies became my gateway to the past. I discovered Katharine Hepburn, who electrified me. Her early films of the 1930s and ’40s, where she often played hard-charging career women or lordly socialites, were a revelation. I had never seen a woman so sharply definitive and assertive, so fearlessly abrasive. What I did not realize at the time, given the scarcity of information about pop culture (still dismissed as evanescent trash), was that I was channeling through Hepburn the epochal defiant spirit of first-wave feminism: her mother and aunt had been nationally prominent activists for suffrage and birth control, and Hepburn herself had campaigned as a small child at suffrage events. I drew up a detailed chart of Hepburn films and studiously checked off each time I was lucky enough to see one, with broadcast date.
In high school, I went wild over Amelia Earhart, about whose mysterious 1937 disappearance over the Pacific I read in a 1961 article in The Syracuse Herald-Journal. For three years, to the puzzlement of my schoolmates, I feverishly pursued a research project about Earhart—systematically plowing through old newspapers and magazines in the sooty basement of the downtown Syracuse library, writing hundreds of letters of inquiry, and visiting spots associated with Earhart on side detours from family car trips. I was given access to Earhart’s archives at Purdue University and had a private appointment at the National Air Museum in Washington, D.C., where a curator opened a vault to show me Earhart’s medals and awards. I visited the house where Earhart was born in Atchison, Kansas, and the Opa Locka airfield in Florida where she left American soil on her last flight. I even briefly met her younger sister Muriel in a restaurant in Medford, Massachusetts.
Through Earhart, about whom I wrote a 77-page tenth-grade history project that I hoped to turn into a book, I learned first-hand about what would become my favorite period of feminism, the two decades just after American women won the right to vote in 1920. There were so many bold personalities and high achievers like Katharine Hepburn in every field—Dorothy Parker, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Dorothy Thompson, Lillian Hellman, Clare Boothe Luce, Pearl S. Buck, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Mary McCarthy, Babe Didrikson, Margaret Bourke-White. What was distinctive in those emancipated women—and here loom my later problems with second-wave feminism—was that they never indulged in reflex male-bashing: they accepted and admired the enormity of what men had accomplished and were simply demanding a fair chance to prove that women could match or surpass it. Their inspirational record of unapologetic ambition and plucky, resourceful self-reliance was the foundation for my later philosophy of equal opportunity feminism.
My Earhart project gradually receded after the thunderclap of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1949), the English translation of which was given to me for my sixteenth birthday in 1963 by a Belgian woman colleague of my father. I was stunned by de Beauvoir’s imperious, authoritative tone and ambitious sweep through space and time. I began to dream of a book on the grand scale, a magnum opus that would incorporate all of my intense fixations, from archaeology to pop culture. That book, Sexual Personae, would take shape in the early 1970s as a study of androgyny for my doctoral dissertation at the Yale Graduate School. Revised and expanded, it was finally published in 1990 as a 700-page illustrated volume by Yale University Press, after rejections of the manuscript by seven publishers and five agents.
The vicious attacks on Sexual Personae by academic and establishment feminists (who in most cases had plainly not bothered to read it) will stand, I submit, as an indictment of the sorry process by which important political movements can undermine themselves through the blind insularity of their ruling coteries. Blow-by-blow chronicles of my public clashes with leading feminists and their acolytes, including documentation of their outlandish libels against me and my work, can be found in my two essay collections, Sex, Art, and American Culture (1992) and Vamps & Tramps (1994). Gloria Steinem in particular surely stained her legacy by her baseless remarks.
Compiled in this new collection is a selection of my most representative articles, excerpts, lectures, and interviews on sex, gender, and feminism since the release of Sexual Personae over a quarter century ago. I believe that my heterodox ideas and conclusions continue to have manifest resonance for many readers because they are based not on a priori theory and received opinion but on wide-ranging scholarly research and close observation of actual social behavior in our time. What is demonstrated here is the consistency and continuity of my libertarian feminist positions, which predate the publication of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique in 1963 and her co-founding of the National Organization for Women in 1966, universally considered the birth of second-wave feminism. In its July 8, 1963 issue, Newsweek magazine published as its lead letter to the editor my protest about the exclusion of women from the American space program:
Valentina Tereshkova has won the distinction of becoming the first woman to be launched into space 35 years to the day after Amelia Earhart was the first woman to fly across the Atlantic. Miss Earhart’s lifelong fight for equal opportunity for American women apparently still remains to be won.
CAMILLE A. PAGLIA
Syracuse, N.Y.
The letter was headlined “Cosmonautka and Aviatrix” and accompanied by a dramatic photo of Earhart in her leather flying
