Camille Paglia: evaluation

Transcript context

…In any case, I remember something to that effect. The question is, do you think that feminism has evolved beyond that, or is it just sort of running that same record dry? It’s really shocking. When I arrived at Smith, they had papered the walkway, in fact, as people walked in with all these hostile and uncomprehending things. People had no idea what my real ideas were. The whole PC thing was escalating out of control at that point. It’s really shocking. Here is a woman, a middle-aged woman at that point, I’m in my 40s, who had spent 20 years writing a book that had been rejected, and finally was published by Yale Press. A book on the whole history of the Western civilization, and this is the treatment that I got at Smith College? This is one of the bastions of the Seven Sisters, one of the most noble names in the history of modern women’s education. That just shows you how ideology really is very distorting. Feminism is going through phases. I call myself a feminist, absolutely. I simply belong to a dissident wing of feminism, and I think that the error made by all these people was not to understand that my wing of feminism had been suppressed and silenced at that point for 25 years. Eventually, we won in the ’90s, the pro-sex wing of feminism, thanks to Madonna, who wasn’t a feminist. But because of Madonna’s foregrounding of sexual themes and so on, it allowed us to break through the over-control by the Steinem politburo at that time. [laughter] I’ll take another question, but you’ll still get to say more.…

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