Camille Paglia: Both Sides of the Sheet
Camille Paglia is the author of Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (Vintage) and, most recently, of Vamps and Tramps: New Essays (Vintage)
Tracy Quan: Some lesbians say it's a double betrayal if your girlfriend sleeps with a man. Do you agree?
Camille Paglia: Gosh, that's certainly not my attitude at all! It would be worse for my girlfriend to have sex with a woman. I would think it's perfectly natural to have sex with a man. Those kinds of lesbians are not my friends -- they're anti-men. But I'm unusual because I accept the premise of heterosexual attraction.
TQ: You've been in a relationship with Alison Maddex for three years. Can you imagine sleeping around behind her back?
CP: I would never dream of it! If I were to fall in love, or if I were interested in having sex with someone else, I would do whatever I wanted. But you must tell the person you are involved with and take the consequences.
TQ: Are you proposing a code of honor for cheaters?
CP: If you're going to be sophisticated enough to be two-timing people, you'd better have the courage to deal with it directly. Take the hit! Now, if that means you're suddenly terminated in a relationship, that's just too frigging bad -- most people, as far as I can see, are too weak. They fear being alone more than anything, so they have these things going on simultaneously. My major relationships before this always ended when the women were going with somebody else and not telling me.
In the large kinship groupings of the lesbian world, it's all musical beds. They're constantly two-timing each other, secretly, but they remain within the kinship tribe. So everyone knows that this one has been with that one who has been with that one... like a soap opera. But, on the whole, lesbians are much more fanatical than gay men about monogamy because lesbianism is All About Mom.
TQ: Shall we talk about some famous cheaters?
CP: Feminists are constantly carrying on about how Picasso treated women --
TQ: Did he cheat or did he just have a harem?
CP: He had a harem but he played them off against each other and he was unfaithful. As far as I'm concerned, how he conducted himself in his love life is irrelevant to the greatness of his achievement. A powerful man should have a powerful libido. That's my attitude. On the other hand, I was critical of Prince Charles for putting his mistress, Camilla, into the public eye -- letting her preside as hostess at his country estate.
TQ: But royal mistresses are an institution. Charles II, for example, had both a Catholic and Protestant mistress, for political reasons, didn't he?
CP: But Charles II and his court world did not have to deal with the glare of the media. The people of England as a whole had no idea because there was no mass media then. Prince Charles behaved in a totally unprofessional manner. He did not understand how the opinion of the public was so crucial. He treated Diana in an undignified manner. Marriage is meaningless except in so far as there is a public face to it. If Diana's authority had been honored by the bureaucracy of the House of Windsor, she would have been more accepting of the affair.
TQ: Are there other men whom you've criticized for being less than professional about their love affairs?
CP: I criticized Woody Allen -- not for cheating, but for doing it secretly. I'm pleased to see that his relationship with Soon Yi has lasted.
TQ: Why?
CP: I identified with Woody. I think Mia's a very strange character -- warehousing all those kids -- and I think she was very sexually remote. Soon Yi became more attractive to Woody because of her filial relationship to Mia. I think he was having displaced sex with Mia and the whole thing was eroticized by the secrecy. Mia's rage came from his secrecy. That whole thing was much more perverse than people understood it to be, but Soon Yi was definitely capable of making an informed choice.
