“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, that it was simply too mad to succeed. But it’s still here.”
This is how American Enterprise Institute Scholar Christina Hoff Sommers describes the persistent maladies of modern feminism in a newly released interview she filmed recently with social critic Camille Paglia. Both feminists, the two agreed that their warnings from decades earlier are “truer today.”
“People are going to start to wake up and realize that if they had listened to us to begin with, we wouldn’t have these problems now,” added Paglia.
Hoff Sommers noted that when the two began leveling their constructive criticisms of feminism in the late ’80s and early ’90s, feminists were beginning to write what was essentially “warmed over Marxism” and attacks on American society as a whole. And while Hoff Sommers believed she and Paglia “won the argument” of the day — and at the time had the media on their side — the radical feminists began infiltrating college campuses as professors.
“They just quietly worked. They didn’t care about criticism because all criticism is by definition backlash,” Hoff Sommers said with a laugh.
Paglia added that “the really free thinkers, you know, the independent minds couldn’t take the kind of conformism and [politically correct] theology that they had to kowtow to.”
She said that once she became well known in the ’90s, she would receive letters from graduate students from all over the country telling her that they were leaving the profession because of a “brain-dead attitude … a servile, sycophantish attitude” toward certain opinions.
Hoff Sommers asserted that those daring to criticize modern feminism typically suffer career consequences and “excommunication.” She had tenure when she began criticizing the modern movement, but if she hadn’t, she would have suffered. It’s what makes it so difficult for sane minds on campus today to stand up to the absurdities of the modern grievance culture — if they don’t have tenure, they risk losing their jobs for being insufficiently enthusiastic about their destructive narrative of how the world works.
Paglia discussed her time as a graduate student at Yale, being the only openly gay graduate student at the time, and writing a dissertation about sex. She said she couldn’t have a conversation with feminists on campus because she didn’t share their negative views of, well, everything.
“I belonged to the pro-sex wing of feminism. Also pro-art, pro-beauty, pro-fashion, pro-Hollywood,” Paglia said. “Back then, thanks to Madonna, there was this new dissident wing in the ’90s — which won — the pro-sex wing of feminism won.”
But now, Paglia said, after so many gains, the entrenched ideology of victimhood and male-bashing are back.
Sadly, the two women didn’t discuss a solution for how to fight back against the current ideology of victimhood over empowerment. The two were able to counteract the narrative in the ’90s because the media was on their side and noticed the insanity. But today, the frog is nearly boiled. The media are more likely to frame the modern outrage activists as the reasonable ones, insisting that anyone who doesn’t believe in “microaggressions” or that “trigger warnings” should be appended to classic literature are somehow in the wrong, and that it is the screaming, whining, demanding, vocal minority who are the righteous.
It’s going to take far more than just Hoff Sommers and Paglia, or even another Madonna, to fix the narrative and restore this time around.
Ashe Schow is a commentary writer for the Washington Examiner.
