Mapplethorpe and unlike most feminists, I viewed fashion photography as a major modern art form. My longtime favorite photographers were Richard Avedon, David Bailey, and Helmut Newton, each of whom had a unique flair for capturing the essence of personality via moments of random choreography. Another inspiration for my outré photo shoots was David Bowie’s stunning sexual personae during his Ziggy Stardust period of the early 1970s. (I regret there is no space to reprint my catalog essay, “Theater of Gender: David Bowie at the Climax of the Sexual Revolution,” commissioned by the Victoria & Albert Museum for its 2013 exhibit of Bowie costumes in London.) It must be stressed that my flamboyant media presence lasted scarcely four years and was boosted by the official book tours for three bestsellers in a row (1991–94). After that, like the Roman general Cincinnatus returning to his plow, I simply resumed my cherished seclusion as a teacher and writer. As I often say, I’m just a schoolmarm!
The title of this book exalts freedom as an indispensable condition for the incubation and flourishing of individualism. My libertarian feminism, which takes the best from both liberalism and conservatism but is decidedly neither, places freedom of thought and speech above all ideology. I am an intellectual first and a feminist second—an ethical commitment to truth-seeking that I urge aspiring young writers and artists to adopt. The Free Speech Movement, led by a fiery Italian-American, Mario Savio, erupted at the University of California at Berkeley in 1964, the year I entered college. It was a cardinal moment for my generation. The anti-establishment stance of the Free Speech Movement represented the authentic populist revolution of the 1960s, which resisted encroachments of authority by a repressive elite. How is it possible that today’s academic left has supported rather than protested campus speech codes as well as the grotesque surveillance and over-regulation of student life? American colleges have abandoned their educational mission and become government colonies, ruled by officious bureaucrats enforcing federal dictates. This despotic imperialism has no place in a modern democracy.
Erosion of liberals’ fidelity to free speech can be partly traced to the Civil Rights Act of 1968 (following the landmark 1964 act), which imposed federal penalties for crimes committed because of “race, color, religion or national origin.” The demarcation of certain groups for special protection, later extended to gender and sexual orientation, split them from the general populace by defining them as permanent victims, burdened by an inescapable past. I strongly oppose the categories of “hate speech” and “hate crimes” that arose from that law and others throughout North America and Europe. The laudable attempt to make reparation for past injustice unfortunately created segregated zones of new privilege and drew government into curbing the exercise of free speech. As I argued in Vamps & Tramps, government has no right to intrude into or speculate about the thinking or motivation of any citizen, except during the sentencing phase after criminal conviction.
The freedom to hate must be as protected as the freedom to love. It is only when hate crosses over into action that the law may properly intervene. Without complete freedom to explore the piercing extremes of human emotion, we will never have great art again. Even comedy, a genre descending from the bawdy fertility cults of antiquity, has always been predicated on the violation of taboos. The free speech idealism of the 1960s was galvanized by the daring, sardonic culture-hero, Lenny Bruce, who transformed stand-up comedy into biting and often profane social commentary, leading to his repeated arrest for obscenity. On today’s campuses, students’ rowdy natural instincts for mischievous transgression are being policed by dour, neo-Victorian agents of coercive compassion. Comedy has become yet another victim of political correctness.
Freedom in the gender realm means the freedom of each sex to define its history and destiny without blame or harassment. If women seek freedom, they must let men too be free. Men who demean or subjugate women are not free, because they are signaling their secret fear of female power, which remains near total in the still murky and anxiety-ridden realm of procreation. But men have every right to claim credit for their vast achievements in conceiving and constructing the entire framework of civilization, from the great irrigation projects of ancient Mesopotamia to today’s global electronic grid. Impugned and silenced by feminism, men stoically go on doing the dirtiest, most dangerous and thankless work in modern society.
Feminism must end its sex war, which is stunting the maturation of both girls and boys. Upper-middle-class career women in the Americas and Europe blame men for their unhappiness. But the real cause is systemic. In the shift from the agrarian to industrial and now technological era, women have lost the daylong companionship and solidarity they once enjoyed with other women when they ruled the private sphere. In a new world where men and women share the same ambitions and workplace, perhaps a mutual incompatibility or creative tension between the sexes may have to be tolerated. But what is indisputable is that women do not gain by weakening men. An enlightened feminism, animated by a courageous code of personal responsibility, can only be built upon a wary alliance of strong women and strong men.
FREE WOMEN
FREE MEN
1
SEX AND VIOLENCE, OR NATURE AND ART
In the beginning was nature. The background from which and against which our ideas of God were formed, nature remains the supreme moral problem. We cannot hope to understand sex and gender until we clarify our attitude toward nature. Sex is a subset to nature. Sex is the natural in man.
Society is an artificial construction, a defense against nature’s power. Without society, we would be storm-tossed on the barbarous sea that is nature. Society is a system of inherited forms reducing our humiliating passivity to nature. We may alter these forms, slowly or suddenly, but no change in society will change nature. Human beings are not nature’s favorites. We are merely one of a multitude of species upon which nature indiscriminately exerts its force. Nature has a master agenda we can only dimly know.
[Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson, 1990, Chapter 1, excerpt]
Human life began in flight and fear. Religion rose from rituals of propitiation, spells to lull the punishing elements. To this day, communities are few in regions scorched by heat or shackled by ice. Civilized man conceals from himself the extent of his subordination to nature. The grandeur of culture, the consolation of religion absorb his attention and win his faith. But let nature shrug, and all is in ruin. Fire, flood, lightning, tornado, hurricane, volcano, earthquake—anywhere at any time. Disaster falls upon the good and bad. Civilized life requires a state of illusion. The idea of the ultimate benevolence of nature and God is the most potent of man’s survival mechanisms. Without it, culture would revert to fear and despair.
Sexuality and eroticism are the intricate intersection of nature and culture. Feminists grossly oversimplify the problem of sex when they reduce it to a matter of social convention: readjust society, eliminate sexual inequality, purify sex roles, and happiness and harmony will reign. Here feminism, like all liberal movements of the past two hundred years, is heir to Rousseau. The Social Contract (1762) begins: “Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.” Pitting benign Romantic nature against corrupt society, Rousseau produced the progressivist strain in nineteenth-century culture, for which social reform was the means to achieve paradise on earth. The bubble of these hopes was burst by the catastrophes of two world wars. But Rousseauism was reborn in the post-war generation of the Sixties, from which contemporary feminism developed.
Rousseau rejects original sin, Christianity’s pessimistic view of man born unclean, with a propensity for evil. Rousseau’s idea, derived from Locke, of man’s innate goodness led to social environmentalism, now the dominant ethic of American human services, penal codes, and behaviorist therapies. It assumes that aggression, violence, and crime come from social deprivation—a poor neighborhood, a bad home. Thus feminism blames rape on pornography and, by a smug circularity
