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House of porn
Feminists for Free Expression benefit at Mother
nightclub in New York, New York
The National Review, October 27, 1997
By Jonathan Foreman
It was a very special night at Mother, Chi Chi Valenti's nightclub in Manhattan's meatpacking district. Of course every night is a special night on the corner of 14th and Hudson: it is one of the last places in the city that feels genuinely and excitingly tawdry and decadent. The streets are cobbled and dark, rusty hooks swing outside the meat warehouses, and the occasional transvestite or transsexual prostitute clicks her heels past the clubbers waiting behind a velvet rope.
Tuesday nights the club is called "Jackie 60," a celebration of the late First Lady's style. Saturday is "Click and Drag" night -- an evening devoted to cyber-fetishism -- about which more later. But this Saturday, Chi Chi, looking, in her top hat and veil, as if she had just run off the set of a Jack the Ripper movie, was holding a "Fetish for Freedom" benefit party for a group called "Feminists for Free _Expression." And, most bizarre of all, National Review was on the guest list. For the keynote speaker was Camille Paglia, a hero to libertarians, but on college campuses one of the most hated women in America.
Prof. Paglia was not the only draw. Guests at the benefit were invited to mingle with some of the porn world's most flamboyant and accomplished notables. Betty Dodson, author of Sex for One, was said to be coming, as was Candida Royalle, the pioneer maker of erotic films for women and couples. After the fundraiser we were all invited to stay for the cyber-fetish night, but only if we conformed to the strict dress code: Victorian, Cyber-nerd, Dominatrix, Cyber-slut -- or in black from head to toe, "And that includes your shoes," Chi Chi admonished.
When I got there around 8:30 the place was already crowded. There was a gaggle of male journalists grabbing at the free drinks, and several middle-aged men and women who had that dour ex-hippie Ruth Messinger look, and were probably public-interest lawyers. A few people looked around with undisguised loathing but could not bring themselves to leave. Pretty girls were everywhere, in boots, leather miniskirts, cocktail dresses, set off against a sprinkling of drag queens wearing spectacular costumes. All the women from Feminists for Free _Expression seemed to have the wholesome good looks and charming manners you would expect to find at a PTA meeting in Darien, Connecticut. Most of the straight men around, on the other hand, had the seedy, creepy look you would expect from a fellow who consumes or produces large amounts of pornography. Several times I heard the pick-up line: "So are you a pleasure activist too?"
I didn't know anybody there and I had no idea what Betty Dodson looked like, so I was preparing to use the pleasure-activist line on a stranger when I spotted Al Goldstein. The proprietor of Screw magazine was sprawled on an Empire sofa at the back of the room. I recognized him from cable-access TV, where, on a program called Midnight Blue, the chubby, white-bearded Mr. Goldstein plays a naked Charlie Rose to equally naked female porn stars. They sit there, the camera occasionally zooming in on the woman's breasts, and Mr. Goldstein asks oddly anticlimactic questions like, "So, how long have you been in the industry?" "Who is your favorite director," and, "Was that film shot on video or 16mm?"
After chatting with the amiable and intelligent Mr. Goldstein, I went downstairs to get some of the FFE literature and on the way was handed a magazine called PornFree by a woman in a tiara. On the tables there were some leaflets complaining about Mayor Rudolph Giuliani's "perverted quality-of-life campaign" and advertisements for Miss Vera's academy for men who want to dress and act like ladies. The FFE pamphlets explained that the organization had been set up in January 1992, and that its distinguished advisory board includes Erica Jong, Betty Friedan, and Nadine Strossen, President of the ACLU.
A breathtakingly good-looking blonde in her late thirties wearing an FFE badge came up to me and asked me if there was anything I wanted to know about the organization. She was one of the founders of FFE; she had been a feminist since college, but was a great supporter of Prof. Paglia's campaign against feminist bigotry. The music was very loud at this point, so I hadn't heard her name. She was making a subtle case for the proposition that campus culture was beginning to turn against political correctness when I realized that she was none other than Candida Royalle herself. Unfortunately, before I could ask her about her groundbreaking movies, it was announced that Prof. Paglia was about to speak.
We rushed upstairs. The MC, a fresh-faced cheerleader type, was doing the introduction. Then Camille Paglia bounded on the stage to the cheers of the audience, and after swiveling her hips and punching the air a few times, began to speak.
It was the usual brilliant but slightly crazy performance. She began by praising Betty Dodson and Candida Royalle as, with herself, "founders of the pro-sex line in feminism." She ridiculed Susan Faludi and her best-selling book that claimed there was a "backlash" against women's rights. Then she talked about herself again: her persecution by the feminist establishment, her famous visit to Brown University when security guards had to protect her against students howling for her blood at the behest of their women's-studies professors. She lacerated Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin. They and their supporters were "pod feminists" -- their ideas about art primitive and philistine, their ideas about language and oppression reheated versions of silly and pernicious Parisian Marxisant theory.
Everything she said was true and reasonable and full of insight but couched in such a way that it seemed extreme and slightly absurd. For a professor, her speech was a shockingly disorganized rant --sometimes too crude, sometimes too subtle for her audience, the obsessive self-praise alternating with a serious and convincing attack on Michel Foucault. She preened, she insisted on her unique martyrdom at the hands of the politically correct, she showed off her admittedly extraordinary erudition. The enemy is the "Northeast media elite," she said, sounding like Newt Gingrich in the old days. Political correctness is spreading like a stain out of the Ivy League and into our public discourse, spread by "ignorant upper-middle-class white girls." "Hey, I went to an Ivy League School and I'm not an a -- hole," one of her fans called out. Miss Paglia conceded that this was possible -- after all, she herself has a graduate degree from Yale -- then went on to defend Marv Albert and advocate the dilution of American rape laws. When an undergraduate sleeps with a guy after a drunken party and then regrets it, or a scoutmaster fondles a boy in his charge, that isn't rape, she said. Some of the lawyers looked appalled. "What about Anita Hill?" someone called from the back. Clarence Thomas was about to get the Paglia thumbs-up when she decided instead to continue her attack on Derrida, Lacan, and Foucault, prompting a middle-aged man in the front to explode in anger.
For a while it looked as if he and Miss Paglia were going to exchange blows. But then a young woman asked her about men -- did she really have no grievances against them? Miss Paglia explained that she had always been able to handle men, "and I never needed a lawyer or a grievance committee." She then warned that men mustn't be emasculated by the culture. We "should be more tolerant of male obnoxiousness," she said; it is all part of what enables men "to get it up." There were loud cheers at this point, and Prof. Paglia took the opportunity to bound off the stage and into the night.
For some time, many of those present wore a somewhat dazed _expression. But the party continued. A few hours later, someone explained to me what "cyberfetishism" was all about; like most things in cyberspace it is inferior to the real thing. As for "cyber-nerds," it is nice that somebody finds them attractive, but I just don't get it.