Free Women, Free Men: Sex, Gender, Feminism

Gender questioning has always been and will remain the prerogative of artists and shamans, gifted but alienated beings.

Today, in politically correct America, questions of quality, learning, and intellectual distinction are out of style.

We cannot rely on rigid rules and regulations to structure everything in our lives. There is a blurry line between our professional and private selves. We are sexual beings, and as Freud demonstrated, eroticism pervades every aspect of our consciousness.

The sexual revolution of my Sixties generation broke the ancient codes of decorum that protected respectable ladies from profanation by foul language. We demanded an end to the double standard. What troubles me about the “hostile workplace” category of sexual harassment policy is that women are being returned to their old status of delicate flowers who must be protected from assault by male lechers. It is anti-feminist to ask for special treatment for women.

We have got to make women realize they are responsible, that sexuality is something that belongs to them. They have an enormous power in their sexuality. It’s up to them to use it correctly and to be wise about where they go and what they do. And I’m accused of being “anti-woman” because of this attitude? Because I’m bringing common sense back to the rape discourse?

There was, following the Sixties, an appetite for history, but the people in academe were not willing to do the work necessary to master history and anthropology and so on. Instead, it was sort of like, “Hey, we need history! Let’s see. Oh—there’s Foucault!” It was sort of like that. It’s sort of like ducks when they’re born—the first thing they see, you know? So if they see a vacuum cleaner, they think it’s their mother. They’ll follow the vacuum cleaner. That’s what happened. Foucault is the vacuum cleaner that everyone followed.

All this “Let’s unmask Big Daddy”—this obsession with the weaknesses of big figures. This is infantile. It’s infantile. You read major figures not because everything they say is the gospel truth but because they expand your imagination, they expand your IQ, okay, they open up brain cells you didn’t even know you have.

The second area where feminism is deficient is in its psychology. Right from the start, Kate Millett banned Freud as a sexist. And so we have this horror that has arisen over the last twenty years of feminism trying to build a sex theory without Freud, one of the greatest masters, one of the great analysts of human personality in history. Now, you don’t have to assent to Freud. I don’t read Freud and go, “Oh, wow, he is the ultimate word on the human race”—that’s not how I read! I follow him, and I go, “This is interesting. Now maybe he needs to be supplemented.”

I don’t feel less because I’m in the presence of a beautiful person. I don’t go [imitates crying and dabbing tears], “Oh, I’ll never be that beautiful!” What a ridiculous attitude to take!—the Naomi Wolf attitude. When men look at sports, when they look at football, they don’t go [crying], “Oh, I’ll never be that fast, I’ll never be that strong!” When people look at Michelangelo’s David, do they commit suicide? No. See what I mean? When you see a strong person, a fast person, you go, “Wow! That is fabulous.” When you see a beautiful person: “How beautiful.” That’s what I’m bringing back to feminism. You go, “What a beautiful person, what a beautiful man, what a beautiful woman, what beautiful hair, what beautiful boobs!”

So in the late 1960s, I saw immediately—and still we have this problem, twenty years down the line from the birth of contemporary feminism—that there are two huge areas that feminism has excluded that need to be integrated within it. That’s what I’m doing. That’s my contribution. One of them that was excluded was aesthetics. Right from the start there was a problem with aesthetics, a difficulty with dealing with beauty and with art.