Christina: Do you know that 21 years ago, I don't know if it was today, but close to
today we were interviewed by Ben Wattenberg, for the AEI program Think Tank which aired
on PBS, and the question was, "Has feminism gone too far?" and I looked at the transcript
and it's amazing, because all of the things we were saying are truer today than they were
21 years ago... Camille: Absolutely. Christina: ...about the excesses of feminism, and 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, too mad to succeed, but it's still
here. Camille: I know. Well, Christina, we sent up early warnings. You, heroically in
the late 1980s, were in direct confrontation with women studies professors, at a time when...
Christina: At a time when, as philosophers... Camille: Yes, 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. And we'd discovered each other as allies,
and that our status, it seems to me as truth tellers, is historically unchallenged. And
I think that people are going to start to wake up and to realize, if they had listened
to us at the beginning, we wouldn't have these problems now. Christina: We wouldn't, and
it was so obvious to me, I was criticizing the feminist theorists at the American Philosophical
Association, and what they were writing at the time was just warmed over Marxism. It
was so much animus to American society, to men, to everything, to art, to beauty and
it seemed to me, it wouldn't take long for it to correct itself. It was never corrected,
and what happened is you and I...we did...I believe won the argument, and 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. Camille: Well, a lot of people dropped 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 kowtow to. I got letters like that. Once I was
known in the early '90s, letters came from all over the country from former graduate
students who said they knew they had no future in the profession, because of a total, kind
of brain dead attitude you had, a servile, sicko fantasy that actually you had to have
to certain received opinions. Christina: Absolutely and in our interview 21 years ago you mentioned
this Kremlin-esque feeling in feminism. It was a Kremlin-like environment, so much censorship
and excommunication, and so forth, and students today don't realize 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. Camille: Right. Well, when I was a graduate student at Yale which
was 1968 to 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,
okay? I thought it was important to me to put the gay identity out there. But from the
very start, as feminism's ideology cohered and solidified, I could not have a single
conversation with feminists, either inside or outside the Academy. They could not stand...again,
just what 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, but I belonged to the pro-sex wing of feminism, also pro
art, pro beauty, pro fashion, pro Hollywood, all of these things were anathema. Christina:
Pro glamor. Camille: Pro glamor. But then thanks to Madonna, there was this new dissident
wing in the '90s, which won. The pro-sex wing of feminism won. Christina: Right. Camille:
But now we won all these gains, but the institutionally entrenched, feminist commissars, all right,
have brought it all back to square one again. All the new freedoms we won in the '90s, in
the pro-sex insurgency are gone again.