The Prostitute, The Comedian -- And Me

In 1990, when I began reading Camille Paglia's Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson, I was so excited that I would only put her book down to sleep, eat or turn a trick. It lay on my bedside table next to the phone, a small supply of condoms tucked inside the front cover. Whenever I slipped into Sexual Personae to unwrap one, I felt vindicated. What better way to pay tribute to Paglia's ideas? One evening, after attending a PONY (Prostitutes of New York) planning session, I found myself at Performance Space 122 in Manhattan's East Village. I was nearly thrown down the stairs, in my high heels, by a (female) performance artist who accused me of "reading Camille Paglia". I had committed heresy -- by suggesting that women are often the privileged sex -- and was forced to defend myself with a Saks Fifth Avenue shopping bag filled with PONY mail. Swinging my paper weapon around in wild desperation, I escaped down the steep staircase, hobbled somewhat by my favorite shoes.

As my terror gave way to inspiration, I realized that I was destined to meet with the intellectual diva who had helped to inspire this angry feminist assault. THE PROSTITUTE, THE COMEDIAN -- AND ME was originally published in Puritan (Number 31) in the winter of 1993, as part of an interview series focusing on the sexual attitudes of well-known authors and artists. I am greatly indebted to Stan Bernstein, the creative force behind that series, for his editorial guidance, and to the entire staff of Puritan magazine. -- T.Q.

TRACY QUAN: Your view that men have created civilization to escape Woman's dominance is very different from the feminist notion of male domination. Quite honestly, it's a point of view I would expect to hear from a prostitute -- because most prostitutes understand that aspect of women's power. I've also noticed a knowledge of prostitution which many feminists lack. Did you have a lot of friends who were in "the life"?

CAMILLE PAGLIA: I never knew a prostitute in my life... I studied history. My conclusions also come from observing -- movies, media, reading -- and also from seeing prostitutes on the street.

The movie Butterfield 8 had a huge impact on me. When Elizabeth Taylor (playing Gloria the call girl) said, Sic transit Gloria mundi, I loved it: a call girl using this famous Latin phrase of the Pope's! I see a parallel between prostitution and being a monk or a nun.

TQ: One of my aunts is a nun. I think I'm the only niece who relates to her lifestyle, because I'm a hooker.

CP: There's something similar -- a very organized way of dealing with sexuality, with human issues. The prostitutes I see near the University of the Arts look very competent, very professional. They look fabulous! I've always felt that prostitutes are in control of the streets, not victims. I admire that -- zooming here and there, escaping the police, being shrewd, living by your wits, being street smart. I think that with prostitution, getting the money is control. I identify with that. In college and even in high school, I did not as a woman like the situation of giving it away for free.

I view the prostitute as one of the few women who is totally in control of her fate, totally in control of the realm of sex. The lesbian feminists tried to take control of female sexuality away from men -- but the prostitute was doing that all along.

TQ: Many feminists would disagree. They paint this outlandish caricature of the whore -- she's powerless, and totally victimized.

CP: Feminists like to quote these absolutely specious statistics, a typical trick of the feminist movement of the last twenty years. For example, they'll say the majority of prostitutes have been sexually abused as children. But there's no evidence for this! The most successful prostitutes are invisible, because the sign of a prostitute's success is her absolute blending with the environment. She's so shrewd, she never becomes visible. She never gets in trouble. She has command of her life, and her clients. The ones who get into the surveys have drug problems or psychological problems. They're the ones who were sexually abused. Feminists are using amateurs to condemn a whole profession. This is appalling!

I'm against the harassment of prostitutes. Unless they are actually interfering with people's movements, they have a perfect right to be doing what they're doing.

TQ: Why, in your view, does prostitution exist?

CP: It exists because men's sexuality is not fully absorbed in marriage. In fact, the problems of being married produce other sexual needs -- not for all men certainly, but most. Prostitution exists for sexuality to be free from the duties and obligations of home, for the man to be free as a sexual agent. A lot of the sex which an ordinary gay man has is very close to what a prostitute has with a straight man. It has to do with keeping the sex impulse free.

TQ: Some "pro-sex" (or "sex-positive") feminists have told me they'd like to see more women buying sex.

CP: They're misunderstanding what prostitution is. Prostitution is Woman's command of men! No woman should ever have to pay for sex. In the sixties I thought everything would be equal: women would want sex just as much as men; we'd have as much porn for women as for men. But over time, that hasn't happened, and my thinking has evolved. I cannot believe anyone would still say that. What kind of woman would pay for sex?

TQ: A woman who wants to be serviced by a professional?

CP: Xaviera Hollander, who I really admire, said that now and then she had female clients. I love her book The Happy Hooker. She describes a movie star who wanted to be tied up with her husband's neck ties and ravished by two women with a dildo. And Xaviera was being unusually moralistic, saying, "I've never understood this. I thought such a beautiful creature should be treated tenderly!"

But that will always be such a small number of women, compared to what men do. When men go to prostitutes there's a tremendous psychodrama at work. The man engaged in a transaction with a prostitute is trying to resolve some problem he has with the dominance of Woman. The money is a way to detach emotion from it. There's an element of shutting off the dominance of Woman. I applaud that because it's a way to get the masculine impulse free. But women don't need to do that. Most women who pay for sex are pampered women. They have a facial, a massage, a manicure and then -- servicing. It's just like having a masseur.

TQ: One of the co-founders of the International Committee for Prostitutes' Rights, a women's studies professor, called for an alliance between the "Madonnas" and the "whores." What do you think of the feminists who want to eradicate the "whore stigma"?

CP: That's hypocritical. It's such a superficial analysis. They're looking around the current culture to explain things that you need a historical sense to understand. You have to look back over time, at the heritage of these things. The prostitute is not, as the feminists believe, socially constructed. She's dealing with the natural fact of sexuality. The social constructions of our time are Judeo-Christian.

You'll always have the women who are willing to live within the Judeo-Christian institutions, like marriage, with the official sanctions. Then you have the women who are the pagan outlaws. There's a fantastic sizzle for the man, going between them. It's not just something "the patriarchy" has created: good girl/bad girl. It is not. Human nature is split. The needs of the body are impetuous and animalistic -- they could never be contained by these Judeo-Christian codes that are trying to control it.

TQ: Do you see eradication of the whore's stigma as a liberal fantasy?

CP: How can you eradicate the stigma? The prostitute is always going to be an opponent, in some sense, of all the official institutions. The prostitute gains by that sharp identity. If you have that kind of identity, then take personal responsibility for it. Stop asking everyone else to change their attitude. Stop saying "Love me, please, mommy and daddy." The stigma of the prostitute is the badge of her identity. That is why the client goes to her. If he wanted someone without a stigma, he'd go and screw the lady next door.

TQ: How can prostitutes have a meaningful relationship with feminists?

CP: Any attempt to make prostitution somehow reconcilable with the recent phase of feminism is a dead end. Prostitution is a pagan form and current feminism is a puritanical Protestant form.

The prostitute, dealing with men outside the institutions of marriage or religion, sees sexual reality clearer -- and pornography shows lust clearer -- than the feminists see it. Lust is sexual reality, and the prostitute historically knows how to deal with it. The comedian is much more accurate about sex than the feminists. Like a prostitute dealing with a client, the comedian deals with, and is constantly in flux with, the audience.

The comedian has to get a laugh from the audience, just the way a prostitute has to get an orgasm from the client. They are looking looking looking at the audience, constantly reading the audience, just like the prostitute. The prostitute and the comedian are right on the edge, very mentally alert -- working working working with the responses. I'm never in agreement with the feminists. They're off in a box talking to each other. They have an ideology. They are not observing! But the prostitute and the comedian and me: we are observing -- looking at the way people think and act. As the culture is shifting, you're working working working it...

TQ: I wonder if you would have the patience to be a hooker. If you were in the profession, I think you'd be in a more flamboyant area of the trade.

CP: I could have been a fabulous dominatrix if this had been more available twenty years ago. I could have made a fortune and paid off every bill I ever had in my life! Fifteen years ago, when I wrote about nipple clamps in my chapter on Michelangelo, S&M was still in very small esoteric areas of the urban scene. By the time Sexual Personae got into print -- that's how long it's taken -- now S&M is everywhere. My period of experimentation was before all this. If I were young now, I'd certainly be experimenting with S&M because my mind was moving in that direction. But it happened too late for me.

TQ: S&M was once an elite phenomenon. Why is it now so popular in American society?

CP: It also happened in imperial Rome. In the old days, Rome was like our New England. You were, like, dutiful and you thought of the state and the good of Rome. There were all kinds of sumptuary laws -- you couldn't spend money on jewelry, there was a certain way to behave. It was very simple, prudent, frugal, industrious. Suddenly, the culture got very large. It moved from republic to empire, from Rome within Italy to this Mega-Empire! The movie "Cleopatra" with Liz Taylor is very good (even though it was considered a bomb) because it shows that great moment of transition from the old republic into the new empire. And that is when people became much freer. My conclusion is that S&M comes back when people are most apparently free. As religion breaks down, as government and law and order break down, S&M sex bizarrely reappears.

TQ: Another thing about the sexual culture of the classical period -- in Sexual Personae, you point out that a smaller phallus was considered desirable in ancient Greece. How did the preference for the larger phallus evolve?

CP: Most of the world has probably always esteemed a large penis, except for Ancient Greece. I think that was an exception to the rule. In Greece, there was a period of interest in proportion -- they were working out the ideal proportions of the human body. (You know, the same period when they were trying to figure out the dimensions of the Parthenon.) They decided the head should be one-sixth of the total body. The penis, in proportion to this, can't be that big.

Roman statues were in the style of Greek nudes, and nudes that survived from the Greco-Roman period always had small penises. In art, the penis has often been extremely small, imitating the Classical Greek style. Women who went to museums in the nineteenth century and saw these nudes were probably very surprised when they got married and realized the actual proportion a penis has to the male body!

For the upper class in Athens, for the people who spent their leisure time exercising and watching the beautiful boys, a small penis may have been a sign of beauty. But the people who were building the Parthenon -- they probably wanted a big penis. Today, in the upper class, you never see obese people. It's socially unacceptable. But in the shopping malls, and in working class life in America, you see lots of obese people. There's no social pressure against it. In the same way, people speaking about us in the future will say, "Well, thin was in. Looking at all the ads from the period, thin was in." Yet, the working class was fat as ever. Same thing here. For a brief moment among the upper class in Athens, a small penis was considered philosophical. It meant you were not driven by animal appetite. It may have had no impact whatever on what was going down on the dock in Piraeus: a big penis was just as in as it has ever been.

TQ: So, the animal appetites were suppressed only among the very effete...

CP: At the same time that you had these great sculptures of the Greek boys with the small penises -- and later in the Hellenistic period -- you also had pottery featuring these satyrs with huge penises. Wild, hilarious scenes! Satyrs, with a half-goat body and a giant penis, chasing down a hermaphrodite or woman or a boy. And they're raping him! You can see clearly that a large penis was animalistic to them. A lot of my ideas about rape are coming from that, the fact that men find rape fun and erotic. It seems so obvious if you look at the whole history of art.

TQ: Candida Royalle, who was an X-rated star in the Seventies, is now producing sex videos with a feminist orientation. I've heard her say that a lot of porn is unrealistic or demeaning to women. How do you feel about feminist porn?

CP: Feminist porn means you remove all the things you don't like. You censor porn to make it subscribe or conform to a prefab ideology. It's diluted. You remove all the lust from it. This idea that porn has to conform to the ethics we live in real life is ridiculous. You can look at things you would not tolerate in real life. You can watch people being whipped or beaten or abused in porn, and you tolerate it because it's in the realm of imagination, of art. Porn gets its charge from taking a taboo and violating it. Porn should be grotesque and coarse, it should do everything possible to offend and humiliate. When people say, "That's irresponsible, we don't want to see that," I say, "Why not?" I want to see everything: the most horrible, the most unimaginable. I want to see it and get a charge off it. Feminist porn's absurd. I'm totally against it. I like regular porn.

TQ: When do real life ethics become a concern in porn?

CP: A lot of people say, "I'm for erotica but I'm against kiddy porn," or "I'm against violent porn." I can understand why people would be concerned about using live children in porn. But I would support kiddy porn drawings and paintings. I mean those Cupids we use on Valentine cards -- that's kiddy porn.

TQ: Or "baby porn".

CP: Baby porn, yes. Caravaggio, half his work is kiddy porn. I told a reporter from the San Francisco Examiner, "What is all this talk about snuff films? I want to see a snuff film." People went crazy. But I don't want to see a real woman being killed! When we go to a mystery movie, we want to see an actress pretending to be dead. Same thing. A truly avant garde film maker today would make a snuff film. A truly avant garde film maker will find the taboo. Where's the taboo? It's in snuff films? Then make a snuff film!

TQ: Candida Royalle and other feminists have contended that we need to see more "real women" in porn, not just the "nineteen-year-old blonde, busty female."

CP: I also am tired of a certain kind of California look which has been done to death, but it's not because they're nineteen and busty. I prefer European-type bodies which are kind of fleshy. The flesh is flowing. I think languor is more sensual than, "Hey! Let's get this stuff out of the way and I'll take on sex with you and then go out and do my aerobics." The American cheerleader thing -- there's a dead element. In earlier porn, the untoned bodies were lewder, more lascivious. This new, hard Amazonian look -- I'm not sure I like it. As for being busty and nineteen years old. Why not?

The whole point is to see something you can't see in ordinary life! Maybe we can enlarge the idea of what constitutes beauty, not to include ugliness or the ordinary, but to include fleshiness.

TQ: Leaving aside the concept of feminist porn, do you think women's porn is here to stay?

CP: Most women don't get a big charge off of voyeurism. It's not satisfying to them. Okay, in the suburbs women go to the video store and choose the porn to watch with their men. But they're still buying it to enjoy in a couple. It's not pure porn. The way an individual male will go out and get a heap of things, and take it back to his apartment and look at it by himself? There are hardly any examples of women doing this. I do, but I'm unusual. The phenomenon of John Hinckley -- a solitary person in a room agitating himself erotically and mentally -- that's male behavior. Feminists, in their approach to art history, believe that men are taught to stare at women and make objects of them. But men are staring because it's biological. There's an aggression thing involving the eye in male sexuality. It's related to hunting. That's why there's an enormous porn industry for men and hardly anything for women. It will never be comparable.

TQ: I was advised by one of Candida Royalle's staff to stop calling their product "porn." It's aimed at women, so they call it "erotica."

CP: Oh, I hate that. This idea of trying to revise what we're doing by calling it "erotica". I reject that. I'm not saying, "I like erotica." I'm saying, "Michelangelo is a pornographer." We have to understand that the Pieta with the nude Christ -- that's pornography. Michelangelo is slobbering over that body. If you can understand the sacredness of the Pieta and simultaneously understand its pornographic elements, then we're very far along the road here, okay?

Original link: http://www.desires.com/1.2/sex/docs/paglia1.html