BellaOnline Forums News and Politics Women's Issues Camille Paglia on Gloria Steinem

'Lifetime cable channel deserves huge praise for last week's 'Intimate Portrait' profile of Indira Gandhi, the first woman prime minister of India. The archival footage of the awkward young Indira and the description and documentation of her early family conflicts and steely rise to power were superb, although the coverage of her later years and of the rivalry between her ill-fated sons was rushed and patchy.

However, Lifetime's profile of Gloria Steinem the night before was a disaster -- a scandalous piece of propaganda obviously engineered by Steinem and her girlishly squeaky-voiced friends to whitewash her career after a decade of slippage in her reputation. Steinem was hailed as a 'major figure of the 20th century' by a chum apparently unaware that Steinem is virtually unknown outside the United States and has had no impact on world feminism. If any American feminist is that major figure, it would be Betty Friedan -- whom the program shockingly left unmentioned.

The program ostentatiously drafted and foregrounded every African-American in Steinem's circle to recast her as the Mother Teresa of racial politics -- in order to divert attention, apparently, from the fact that in the 1960s the once-brunette Steinem was a man-hungry party gal in a see-through plastic dress who played the blond card to the max in socialite Manhattan (a fact that Friedan herself famously commented on).

An ex-boyfriend proclaimed on camera that all criticism of Steinem, particularly by radical lesbian feminists who mysteriously indicted her in the 1970s as a false leader and media hound, was based on 'jealousy' by 'ugly' women who resented Steinem's beauty, intellect and 'literary' mastery (loud guffaw from me here -- Steinem's sense of literature is earnest Soviet Realist).

As someone who was viciously attacked by Steinem and her cohorts in the feminist establishment (Steinem said of me in 1992, for example, 'Her calling herself a feminist is sort of like a Nazi saying they're not anti-Semitic'), I actually enjoyed this program for what it inadvertently revealed about the pathology of Steinem's unstable childhood, when she was abandoned with a mentally ill mother and bitten in bed by a rat.

There's a direct connection here to Steinem's adult pose as serene Madonna of the Nations: Her honeyed speech patterns are tense with repressed aggression and, like her wavy, Ali Baba hand gestures, are a technique of seduction to bring starry-eyed women under her spell. Steinem is a cultist, using good works for mind control.

Young feminists have been sold a bill of goods about American feminism. The enormous changes in women over the past 40 years are constantly and falsely attributed to the organized women's movement of the late 1960s and '70s. But that movement was merely a symptom or corollary of a profound transformation in American society after World War II. My generation of bossy, confident, baby-boom women were something brand new in history. Our energy and assertiveness weren't created by Betty Friedan, unknown before her 1963 book, or by Gloria Steinem, whose political activism, as even the Lifetime profile admitted, did not begin until 1969.

Popular culture -- above all rock 'n' roll, with its African-American R&B roots -- did far more to radicalize us than did any feminist leader. The forceful, dynamic women who were my fellow college students at the State University of New York at Binghamton (1964-68) were untouched by feminism. My own brand of Amazon feminism predated Friedan (I've written elsewhere about my Amelia Earhart research project, which began in Syracuse in 1961 and was reported on by the local newspaper).

An honest profile of Gloria Steinem, who in the 1970s and '80s closed Ms. magazine to pro-sex feminists like myself, would examine her role in helping create the present unholy marriage of Democratic activism with celebrity cash and flash. She is at the center of a sanctimonious, genteel feminism that operates by clique and thinks that good intentions trump sleazy means. Steinem's spiritual stepsister is Hillary Clinton.'

Feb. 7, 2001

Salon.com

Notes to a Young Feminist
By Dorothy Allison,
April 28, 2004
A few years ago, there was a conference in Minneapolis on "Feminism and Rhetoric." I went as a doctrinaire, whiny feminist. The focus of my rant was directed at younger feminist theorists who were using an arcane language that I found an obstruction to my understanding. I thought not only was it arcane, it was an act of cowardice because they were talking in such high falutin' language no one knew what the **** they were saying!
So I did my rant about how, if you people don't clean it up, we're lost � you can't keep talking in this language that none of us understands. I just laid into them. Then, feminist theorist Judith Butler gave her talk, and she changed how she spoke � it was as if she were doing a consecutive translation. For every one of those marvelous words she used, she provided an alternative that I actually understood! I did have to, like, listen really close, but I got it, and I followed along! Afterward, half-a-dozen young philosophy students went up to her and, being incredibly nasty and critical, tore her apart for the way she had delivered the talk.
Since then, I have made a study of language. I can actually understand what they're talking about when they say "normative." It's true that sometimes I have to make notes and go look up [censored]. It's also true that I have to drink a lot of coffee and Diet Coke. And I have to, like, focus. If you let your attention wander for an instant, you're into an entirely different philosophical category!
The specificity of the language is sometimes necessary because quite often the subjects being discussed are notoriously complicated, frighteningly dangerous and self-revelatory. Let me assure you that when our feminist scholars, philosophers, speculators and thinkers use this language they're not always talking about a distanced subject but about their specific lives. The sex act they may in fact have committed, enjoyed, desired or refused. They are standing naked, and the only thing holding them up, in some cases, is that complicated language.
What I don't hear at conferences is what did in fact bring me to feminism. So let's go back, let's begin: Rubyfruit Jungle, Riverfinger Women, Meridian, Wise Blood, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, True Story of a Drunken Mother, Snapshots of a Daughter-in-law, The Girl, The Salt Eaters, A Woman Is Talking to Death, Edward the Dyke, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen, The Bell Jar, Big Blonde and authors like Judy Grahn, Elana Dykewomon, Alice Walker, Adrienne Rich, Carson McCullers, Audre Lorde, Lillian Hellman and Joann Ross.
What was the first feminist book you read? Not Our Bodies, Ourselves or The Feminist Mystique. No, take me back. All the way back. Take me back to the trashy books you read. Take me back to the stuff that you read and that you wanted to be. I'm 54 years old. To quote "Sex and the City," I'm abso-****in'-lutely tired. I read theory. I read to train my language and to sharpen my mind. But I write fiction. I write fiction for a specific, deliberate, reasonable, old lesbian purpose. The world I love is not on the page. The world I understand is not reflected on the page. What made me a feminist were occasional glimpses of my real life on the page.
We can talk a lot about mother-daughter transgression and generational resentment for a good couple a million decades, but I came to feminism as a lover. Feminism for me was a love affair. I came to feminism as an escaped Baptist. Feminism for me was a religious conversion experience. I came to feminism as a hurt, desperate, denied child, and I would've killed for the feminist mama who would take me in her arms and make it all make sense. And I've been running after her [censored] ever since.
I do not necessarily believe that someone can make it all make sense. I am, in fact, in love with the feminist ideal of "get used to being uncomfortable, you'll learn something." That is what I need, want, ache for, and I believe absolutely in the future of feminism.
I do not construct feminism as an ethical or moralistic system. When I talk about justice, I am talking about institutions that have ground me and my kind, right down to rock so far back that they owe me. They owe me as a working-class girl. They owe me as a queer girl. They owe me as a raped child. They owe me as a writer who had to raise money and who couldn't write for years because she had to raise money. Yet, I also know that that voice saying "They owe me" is the most dangerous bone in my body. It is a part of me that I have to resist. It is a bone I cannot stand on, feel or shape. Instead, I owe you, my feminist sisters.
Dorothy Allison is the author of 'Bastard Out of Carolina,' 'Cavedweller,' 'Two or Three Things I Know for Sure,' and 'Skin: Talking About Sex, Class and Literature.'