In part I of this video series Factual Feminist Christina Hoff Sommers sat down with Camille Paglia, professor at the University of the Arts, to talk about the poor state of contemporary feminism and how it has evolved (worsened?) over the last three decades.
CHS: Do you know that 21 years ago — I don’t know if it was today, but close to today — we were interviewed by Ben Wattenburg for the AEI program think tank, which aired on PBS. And the question was, “Has feminism gone too far?” I looked at the transcript and it’s amazing because all thing we were saying are truer today than they were 21 years ago about the excesses of feminism, the victimology, the male bashing, the panic over sexuality. At the time, 21 years ago, we were confident that it would be corrected, it was simply too mad to succeed. But it’s still here.
CP: I know! Well, we sent out the early warnings. You, heroically in the late 1980s, were in direct confrontation with Women Studies professors at a time when I could not get published, and finally after my first book Sexual Personae was released in 1990, you wrote to me and told me of your problems. We discovered each other as allies and our status, which seems to me as ‘truth tellers’, is historically unchallenged. And I think people are going to wake up and start realizing that if they’d listened to us to begin with, we wouldn’t have these problems now.
CHS: We wouldn’t. And it was so obvious to me, I was criticizing the feminist theories at the American Philosophical Association, and what they were writing at the time was just warmed-over Marxism, with so much animist to American society, to men, to art, to beauty. And it seemed to me that it wouldn’t take long for it to correct itself. But it was never corrected. And what happened is you and I, we did, I believe won the argument: the journalists agreed with us and the court of public opinion was on our side. THEY won all the assistant professorships, they just quietly worked. They didn’t care about criticism because all criticism is by definition backlash.
CP: Well a lot people drop out of graduate school. The really free thinkers — the independent minds — couldn’t take the kind of conformism and the PC ideology that they had to cow down to. I got letters like that, once I was known in the early 90s. Letters from all over the country from former graduate students who said they knew they had no future in the profession because of total brain dead attitude you had, servile sickle attitude you had to have certain received opinions.
CHS: Absolutely! And in our interviews 21 years ago, you mentioned, this sort of Kremlin-esque feeling in feminism; this Kremlin-like environment with so much censorship, ex-communication and so forth. Students today don’t realize that there had been this purge of anyone who was a dissident. I happened to have tenure when I started criticizing it, but it would be career-diminishing or career-annihilating to criticize feminism. Even more so today.
CP: Right. Well, when I was a graduate student at Yale — which was 1968-1972 — I was the only person doing a dissertation on sex at the graduate school. And I had trouble getting a job because of it.
I was the only openly gay person at the Yale graduate school! There were a lot of closeted people. And I didn’t have a sex life, ok? I thought it was important to put my gay identity out there.
But from the very start, as feminism’s ideology cohered and solidified, I could not have a single conversation with a feminists either inside or outside the academy. They could not stand, just as you say, anti-art, anti-rock-n-roll, anti- Rolling Stones. They would not take seriously anything that has to do with biology and hormones or anything like that. I was completely ostracized. I belonged to the pro-sex wing of feminism, also pro-art, pro-beauty, pro-fashion, pro-Hollywood all of these things.
CHS: Pro-glamour
CP: Pro-glamour, exactly. Then thanks to Madonna, there was this new dissident wing in the 90s which won. The pro-sex wing of feminism won. We won all these gains but now the institutionally entrenched feminists and commissars have brought it all back to square one again. All the new things we won in the 90s and the pro-sex insurgency are gone again.
###
In the second part of this series, Christina Hoff Sommers and Camille Paglia examine the origins of intersectional feminism and “safe spaces”, and discuss Paglia’s own interpretations of feminism—what she labeled over the years as “amazon feminism”, “drag queen feminism”, and “street smart feminism.”
CHS: I gave a lecture at Oberlin and Georgetown a year ago, and they organized safe spaces for students who were “triggered” — a Philosophy professor was going to induce PTSD. What they objected to is that I might have some ideas that invalidate their experience.
CP: They’re institutionalizing neurosis.
CHS: It’s absolutely true!
CP: That’s what they’re doing. It’s absolute madness.
CHS: And have you heard the phase, the ‘fashion on campus’ now is called, ‘intersectional feminism’, and it’s supposedly very progressive and it’s going to take feminism to a place where it is taking into account women with multiply marginalized identities, on and on. But all of the women — the practitioner — seem to meet at the intersection of propaganda and neurosis and rage. And they’re bullying people. They’re using feminism now to tell men: “check your privilege.”
CP: Well I think it’s a good idea that feminism be critiqued by class issues, because that’s what I’ve said all along is that what is being demanded is a kind of bourgeois protection — a white middle class girl style. The perfect little girl emerging from her parents living room wants the same kind of protection on the college campus.
I’ve always felt that there was a bourgeois element in this that was never sufficiently critiqued. What I see on the street now are Latino women, African American women who may be middle class but have working class background as I did.
I’m from an Italian immigrant family who are able to handle themselves on the street, are able to speak back, don’t mind having strong voices, and strong gestures.
CHS: Well intersectionality started with those women — it was a group of African American women who were just fed up with the women’s movement attending only to the needs of highly professional middle-class and upper middle-class women. But has been appropriated by mostly middle-class white women on campus.
“Safe space” was actually a word that was used in early black feminism by Black women and Hispanic women, as places where they could just talk to each other, weren’t censored and where they could speak their minds. But now it means a place where, if there is a debate that upsets young women at Brown University, for example, they flee to a safe space. It was described in The New York Times by Judith Shultevitz: they had coloring books, crayons, tapes of frolicking puppies, bubbles… I mean: is this what feminism has come to?
CP: That’s what education has come to. Absolutely. The definition down is “therapeutic resorts.”
CHS: Oh yes! And they have “feelings circles;” they have reflection journals. It’s this odd mix of therapy and anger — the word for this style of activism is ‘cry bullies’ because they’re both victim and victimizer.
That’s the new style of campus intersectionality. They actually do to other people what they claim was done to them. They treat people, they objectify and they stereotype and they demonize and then they try to get these people punished.
CP: Well Christina, this is coming from the public school. It’s coming from the public school of education, which was devoid of knowledge of world history and world geography, and is now nothing but navel-gazing and diversity-training and giving all kinds of instructions about social interactions, when in fact, if the atrocities of history were revealed to young people they would able to put their own little hurt feelings into perspective.
CHS: They have no perspective. And I think that because of these anti-bullying programs they’re learning, even the slightest insult is a a major event. “You must bring in the adults!” “It was terrible he called me a name!”
So they come to college thinking that if somebody disagrees with them or says something distressing, it’s a catastrophe.
CP: I called my feminism, “Amazon feminism.” I’ve called is “drag queen feminism”, “street smart feminism,” because drag queens out of all knew how to handle themselves on the street. They could be a six foot tall, African American guy in a dress and he knew how to pull off his high heels and defend himself on the street, and what a tongue they had etc. And now everything is about weakening students not strengthening them.
###
In the third part of this series, Factual Feminist Christina Hoff Sommers and Camille Paglia explain how the fight for true gender equality on university campuses in the 1960s has degenerated into today’s infantilizing policies.
CHS: It’s amazing — this excess of intolerance with Deans and fanatical young feminists and the United States Government. The Department of Education has sent this directive to all the schools that they have to clamp down on harassers and they’ve defined it so broadly that if you overhear someone telling an-off color joke you can bring them up on charges of harassment. So we have this little reign of terror, this hyper puritanism. It’s as though George Orwell’s junior, anti-sex league has occupied feminism.
CP: It’s truly Stalinist, absolutely. I take a very extreme view, which is that college and universities should never interfere in any way with the social lives of the students. It is up to the students to regulate themselves.
If a crime is truly committed it should go the police. A lot of these problems would stop if the universities would confine themselves to education and not to the surveillance of students’ private lives. Now our generation won these freedoms, it was in the loco parentis when we arrived in college.
CHS: I know. Yes. Parietal hours.
CP: Parietal hours.
CHS: Young men wouldn’t be allowed in your room and then if they were there — and this was right before I got to college — you had to have all of your feet on the ground at one time and they would look through your door.. People managed to do things.
CP: In 1964 when I arrived in college, in women dorms the girls had to sign in at 11 o’clock at night whereas the men could run free all night all. WE are the ones who demanded that the authority figures get out of our sex lives.
CHS: And we wanted to be as free and as wild as the boys!
CP: And they said to us: “No. The world is dangerous .We need to protect you from rape” and what we said was, “Give us the freedom to risk rape!” These are freedoms that we won. And now younger generation of girls want the parental figures back in. It is deeply Stalinist, deeply infantilizing, is deeply reactionary. It has nothing to do with feminism! This is a retreat!
###
In the fourth part of this series, Based Mom and Based Goddess explore the #Gamergate controversy and how the radical feminist establishment was not prepared for the strong defense put forth by gamers.
CHS: Can you imagine being a young man on campus today? What I see happening is just the same way that society used to police the sexuality of gay people. It’s now open season on the sexuality of heterosexual males. They are monitored, policed and demonized.
CP: And neutered. They are neutered, by the time they get to the Ivy League they’ve been neutered. Everything has stripped off of them, they’ve been made to feel ashamed of anything virile. They have nothing to identify with.
CHS: They’ve been taught their masculinity is a pathology in need of a cure, and then it’s offered to them in these Gender Studies programs. But it’s not just gender studies, it’s this whole philosophy that demonized men throughout the curriculum. And you’re absolutely right it’s going on in the high schools.
CP: It’s coming out early on. So then people wonder: “Why are video games so violent? Why is there so much porn on the web?” Why? Because the imagination is being repressed and censored! And forcibly cleansed of anything that is authentically animalistic or sexy or vibrant.
So you have all of the imaginative energy of the universe now going into these other forms, where it becomes much more violent and when people see it they say: “Oh this is so atrocious, this is awful.” Well guess what? You’ve made a whole area of life impermissible! You’ve made all kinds of human desires and fantasies impermissible! It has to come out some place and that’s where it is.
CHS: That’s right! What happened last year was that a group of cultural critics from — I guess — liberal arts colleges started writing for video games websites. These cultural critics started to attack the gamers and tell them that their games were sexist, that they were contributing to the rape culture.
But the gamer were not like the young men of the Ivy league. The gamers fought back and this became known as “GamerGate” and the press has completely misunderstood it and defamed the gamers. They were just defending a hobby that they love.
I made a video about them in my Factual Feminist series and defended the gamers so they started to call me ‘Based Mom’. I am a mom and being ‘based’ means being sort of authentic, genuine, no-nonsense and cool, so that’s good. So I’m ‘Based Mom’ on Twitter. You? I’ve been talking about you and they call you a ‘Based Goddess’!
CP: Oh for heaven’s sake. Fantastic! That’s a wonderful comment.
CHS: Gamers appreciate what we’re doing because they had to fight the battle all by themselves. They were confronted.
There are subcultures out there, groups of people — hobbyists — who read comic books. And now these gender critics are coming in. They’re not just at the universities, they’re in all the subcultures, and are turning them into very unhappy places. But they made a mistake when they went after the gamers because the gamers fought back and the gamers know a thing or two about winning. They like to win!
CP: And the entire world of animation, of video games and cartooning are in the realm of pure imagination. They must be protected like art.
CHS: It is, it’s the arts. And the world of gaming is diverse! If groups of women — it’s a small group of very cool gamers, mostly guys and a small group of women —want video games about, I don’t know, “Downtown Abbey”, they can make them.
This video is courtesy of the American Enterprise Institute (AEI).
AEI is a non-partisan public policy think-tank dedicated to research and education on issues of government, politics, economics and social welfare. You can like them on Facebook and follow them on Twitter.
