Camille Paglia: Feminism's Equal-Opportunity Offender

"There is no female Mozart because there is no female Jack the Ripper."

Even though you know author Camille Paglia is famous for her shock value, statements like that one are likely to bring you up short. What do Mozart and Jack the Ripper possibly have in common?

Paglia, in town recently to promote her new book ("Sex, Art and American Culture"), thinks she has the answer: It's because both men were aberrations from the norm, at extreme ends of the scale, and women reach neither "the heights nor the depths" that men reach.

Is anatomy really destiny for creative artists such as composers, painters, playwrights, poets, novelists, sculptors and choreographers? Paglia thinks so.

"I do not believe that the historical absence of great women composers, mathematicians, and philosophers is entirely due to social factors, that is, to woman's lack of access to education and mentoring," Paglia writes.

That's why, in her view, there's a comparative dearth of great women composers, mathematicians, philosophers, chess masters, obsessed computer hackers . . . and sex criminals and mass murderers.

Paglia thinks it's a difference in male and female brains, borne out in recent studies that show women are able to use both spheres simultaneously, while men use only one at a time. That difference means men have more capacity for what she calls "tunnel vision and laser focus."

"I always have people asking me, how can you lecture at such a speed, then suddenly break in and say, `Quit talking and put your feet down' to your students, and also be planning the evening meal in a back corner of your mind? I think it's because women can do so many things at once, and they pick up so many more things at once - social insights, emotions of those around you, reading the inner state.

"Men are stupid. They can't read these things at all. Women are hypersensitive to the environment, but they're also less inclined to be obsessive. To be an artist, you have to be an egomaniac, you have to give up on the traditional social niceties. You have to be vicious."

A portrait of the artist as stupid and vicious?

Well, not exactly. Paglia, a humanities professor at University of the Arts in Philadelphia who made her fame with her 1990 mega-book about the history of the arts, "Sexual Personae," says she's often asked by music professors why some of the most talented women composers drop out of the program.

"Women are not happy just pleasing ourselves," Paglia believes.

"Women garden, they keep their husbands happy, they make life good. Once I thought, this is betraying your gifts. But now I think it's honorable to create the next generation, to make a good family and to give yourself to that family. Men are such babies; women's maternal attitude keeps from men the knowledge of their real dependency. But women should have the choice to devote themselves to home and family, without feeling forced along the career track, denying all their impulses as women."

Now you know why Paglia is known as the equal-opportunity offender. I have yet to see a piece that she's written (and she's written plenty, on subjects as diverse as the Mike Tyson rape trial to the woes of Woody Allen and Mia Farrow) that didn't deeply offend someone. And that's exactly the reaction for which Paglia hopes.

She takes extreme views, sometimes ludicrous and indefensible ones, because Paglia sees it as her God-given duty to stir up thought and expression. That she herself hardly fits her picture of women as gardening homemakers is a fact easily tossed aside: "My obsessive, monomaniacal development of my own achievement makes me an aberration."

What a bizarre world view: Men are babies, yet potential Beethovens and Shakespeares. Women really run things, but they're limited, successful primarily in the verbal arts because of their intuitive powers, but unable to produce the "cold analytical stuff" like great music.

Now before you jump-start those typewriters for angry letters to the editor, remember Paglia's views are not necessarily shared by the management. What's so teasing about those views is that there is often a germ of truth in there somewhere, underneath all that outrageousness.

But not always - as all you stupid babies out there would agree.

Free mime: The Seattle Mime Theatre is giving away free tickets to nonprofit groups serving young people, with a sci-fi "unfaithful adaptation" of Hans Christian Andersen's "The Emperor's New Clothes" on the boards from Thursday until Oct. 24 at 915 E. Pine, fourth floor (324-9899).

Tech alert: Don't say we didn't warn you. Philips Consumer Electronics has just unleashed its DCC (digital compact cassette) player/recorders in Japan ($799), and we are not next (France, Germany, Holland and the United Kingdom get them next month, followed by the U.S. launch in November.)

Melinda Bargreen's column appears Sundays in the Arts & Entertainment section.