Camille Paglia's Target Practice

"Then she should stick to dancing and not make us watch her on the big screen," I sulk.

"Absolutely. There was a great period, and you can't take that away from her, when she was the crest of the wave of the world, the whole world. All right? Okay? And now her influence is so everywhere, we don't need her anymore. Now she's in a terrible period. Why is she trying to act?

"It's really sad," Paglia continues, without pause. "Here's one of the most famous women in the world, and I'm a writer who's a fan, and we've had a million opportunities to get together... Spin magazine tried to bring us together, Penthouse tried to bring us together, Esquire tried to bring us together, and HBO wanted to do a My Dinner With Andre type of format with Madonna and me. And Madonna wouldn't do it. And I'm like a major intellectual of the world. Okay, all right?"

"I don't think she really likes strong women," I volunteer.

"I know. I got to know Sandra Bernhard a little bit. And she told me about how Madonna just drops people. I hate that. I'm Italian, I'm very loyal. Now she's Italian, too, so what is that about? If Madonna's Italian, she should be having friends for life. Okay? All right? What is this? She goes through people and drops them? I got an earful not only from Sandra, but also from her collaborator, John Boskovich. And he said, 'Sandra is friendly with, like, the manicurist that she knows from high school. And Madonna is too grand for that. Madonna has to be the number-one person in the room at any time.' That's what happens if you never sit around and schmooze with people, you never learn anything. And so she's always performing. Like on 'Letterman,' what are we talking about? This is a major star, and she is doing what a 17-year-old starlet would do. Why does she have to do anything? A major star should be grand. I'm talking about Dietrich's kind of class. I mean, you come out, you just sit there, all we want to know is: 'What did you have for breakfast this morning? Or yesterday? What are you doing tomorrow? What's been happening in your life?' Let the camera just look at you. And you can see her screaming inside. She's pathetic. She's so removed. But the SEX book, that was the last straw. I think it's embarrassing. There is nothing remotely sexy about that book. And this thing with the lesbian skinhead ... they look like plucked chickens. Okay, all right?"

"Okay," I say. All right, already. "Who do you think is sexy onscreen?"

"Well, I loved Sharon Stone's performance in Basic Instinct. I'm one of the only feminists who went for that film. I'm not sure if she'll ever find another vehicle as great as that again. I hope she doesn't say, 'Well, now I've done that sort of Whores of Babylon routine, now I've got to have a serious script to show my other sides.' I don't want to see her other sides! I want her to stick with it, because there's an incandescence, that femme fatale persona, that we want to see more of. I love the idea of a femme fatale, because every woman is fatal to every man. Woman dominates the universe. So I feel that in Hollywood cinema and the great art films, the European art films, they all love this thing of the femme fatale.

"I realize that I have a kind of gay guy way of looking at things, and I feel a lot of cinema is about sexual personae. It's about presentation of 'self.' I love any footage of Sharon Stone arriving at an opening. She stands there and she does this thing with her eyes, and she just glitters, glitters, glitters. I love that, because I love mannequins, I love the fashion model, I don't think that the fashion model is an oppressor. Okay? All right?"

I'm exhausted already. "I remember you said this thing about Meryl Streep..."

"What I said was that Meryl doesn't translate, she is stuck doing those accents to hide the fact that there isn't much there. Try dubbing her for a movie house in India... there'd be nothing left except that horsy face, moving its lips. I hate the way she whines that women are paid less in Hollywood. Men get paid more because the men have not renounced their glamour! All right? Okay? Meryl Streep comes on like this new breed of actresses. Their attitude now is: 'We're not going to play that old Hollywood game anymore. We're actors, not actresses.' Excuse me, okay, that's what Hollywood is about, that's what people pay to see. Don't be bitching that you're not being paid, because the men are doing the action and adventure things, they are sticking to the traditional lines of masculinity, they have not renounced their masculinity or their glamour. Clark Gable, Gary Cooper, well, you still have men acting like that. The women made a serious error when they renounced glamour. Now, Sharon Stone knows how to do it. People want that. Whitney Houston, she can do it all. She can look boyish, she can look glamorous, every time she comes out it's like a lovefest, she's so glamorous. This has to do with how the gods were looked at..."

"Who else do you see doing good work? I know you've got opinions on everything."

"Oh, God, yes," she says, taking a sip of water before bravely relaunching.

"Meg Ryan drives me crazy. I can't take her seriously, because I saw her on 'As the World Turns.' I think she is so fucking bland. She's such a hypocrite, too, and this is on the record, because she won't speak to her mother."

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