abyss of nature. Two excerpts are reprinted here: my diptych of a Stone Age statuette, the Venus of Willendorf, contrasted with the Egyptian bust of Queen Nefertiti. These passages are odes in the prose-poem style of the Oxford aesthete, Walter Pater, one of Wilde’s principal mentors.
Sexual Personae was reasonably well-received by most reviewers. It was my piece on Madonna in The New York Times later in 1990 that made me instantly notorious. Background details of the circuitous genesis of this and my other articles in that inflammatory period can be found in “A Media History” in Sex, Art, and American Culture. In 2010, The New York Times featured this piece as one of its most significant and influential op-eds in the 40 years since it had invented that now standard form. What caused a storm was first, my open attack on the normally protected feminist establishment and second, my closing sally, “Madonna is the future of feminism,” which was widely ridiculed as preposterous. But that prophecy would come true in the rise and resounding victory of long-silenced pro-sex feminism in the 1990s. Furthermore, my cheeky use of slang, which was debated by the editorial board, broke long-standing rules of decorum at The New York Times and opened the way for later writers like Maureen Dowd. Finally, the piece started a stampede for op-eds among humanities professors, who had previously considered writing for newspapers beneath their dignity. It was mainly historians, economists, and political scientists who had been doing op-eds before.
Six weeks later, New York Newsday published my op-ed on date rape, which remains the most controversial thing I have ever written. Syndicated in regional newspapers from coast to coast in haphazard truncated form, it caused a huge backlash. There was a coordinated campaign, evidently emanating from feminist groups in the Midwest, to harass the president of my university with demands for my firing. That article, often reprinted in freshman-composition course packs at state universities, caused me endless trouble throughout the 1990s. It led to picketing and protests at my outside campus lectures and to my own walk-offs (to avoid fisticuffs) from Austrian and British TV talk shows and even from the stage of Queen Elizabeth Hall in London. My lecture for the latter 1995 event, “The Modern Battle of the Sexes,” was commissioned by the BBC and is reprinted here.
I still stand by every word of my date-rape manifesto. Women infantilize themselves when they cede responsibility for sexual encounters to men or to after-the-fact grievance committees, parental proxies unworthy of true feminists. My baby-boom generation demanded and won an end to the in loco parentis parietal rules, and it is tragic indeed how so many of today’s young women seem to long for a return of those hovering paternalistic safeguards. As a career college teacher, I want our coddling, authoritarian universities to end all involvement with or surveillance of students’ social lives and personal interactions, verbal or otherwise. If a real crime is committed, it should be reported to the police. Otherwise, college administrations should mind their own business and focus on facilitating and funding education in the classroom.
Many pieces in this book critique and lampoon prominent feminists, on campus and off. (My first scholarly publication, written in grad school, was “Lord Hervey and Pope,” which appeared in Eighteenth Century Studies in 1973: Alexander Pope’s scathing mock-epics, especially The Dunciad, remain a heavy influence.) My long 1991 review-essay for Arion, “Junk Bonds and Corporate Raiders,” was primarily a hostile dissection of post-structuralism, which has in my view distorted gender studies and effectively destroyed the humanities. That was still my theme more than 20 years later in “Scholars in Bondage,” my in-depth 2013 review for The Chronicle of Higher Education of three flawed new books by women academics on bondage and domination. Notable is my use of “corporate” in the Arion title: I was one of the few voices at the time denouncing the escalating corporatization of American universities, which was being exploited by careerist academics masquerading as leftists while obscenely driving up their own star salaries on the competitive national market. Similarly, in my 1992 essay, “The Nursery School Campus,” for The Times Literary Supplement, I fired a prophetic warning shot about the takeover of American universities by an expanding class of intrusive administrators, leading to today’s disastrous loss of faculty power.
Articles here where I took a contrarian position against the feminist establishment include my denial that Anita Hill was a feminist heroine; my attack on Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin as Stalinist fanatics; and my defense of unconstrained reproductive rights while also acknowledging the ethical superiority of the pro-life argument in the abortion debate. Although I voted twice for Bill Clinton, I appear to be the only feminist who publicly condemned him for his abusive treatment of Monica Lewinsky and who protested the casuistry of feminist leaders like Gloria Steinem in hypocritically refusing for partisan reasons to apply basic sexual harassment rules to this deplorable case.
A recurrent theme in these pieces, as in my dissection of gender propaganda in the United Nations documents for its 1996 Conference on Women in Beijing, is the privileged bourgeois assumptions, self-preoccupied and status-conscious, in too much feminist thinking. (Attention to this long-standing problem has finally come to the fore as “intersectionality.”) In the 1990s, when most other feminists were focused on policy matters, I was virtually alone in pressing the issue of the first woman president, for whom I insisted that military history rather than gender studies was the proper college training. I steadily protested the anti-male bias of second-wave feminism and took up the cudgels to defend men’s wrestling and football (as in my sports credo, “Gridiron Feminism”).
Female body image in art and popular culture is addressed in my lecture, “The Cruel Mirror,” as well as in pieces on plastic surgery and the stiletto high heel. My celebration of Bravo TV’s Real Housewives series is predictably oppositional: Gloria Steinem repeatedly criticized and dismissed the show. My 2014 University of Mississippi lecture on Southern women, published here for the first time, examines three female stereotypes: the old mountain woman, the mammy, and the Southern belle. In op-eds written for Time, I call for fertility issues to be addressed in school sex education; for an end to young women’s frightening naïveté about sex crime; and for a repeal of the unjust Age-21 law regulating alcohol sales, which I connect to the sudden date-rape crisis of the 1980s, when riotous fraternity keg parties filled the social gap. My interviews with Deborah Coughlin for Feminist Times and Ella Whelan for Spiked Review highlight the ongoing common concerns of British and American feminism.
Ending the book is my essay on Robert Mapplethorpe’s brilliant, half-transvestite portrait of Patti Smith for the album cover of Horses (1975), which I hung like a sacred icon on my wall at my first teaching job at Bennington College. Mutual friends who frequented CBGB’s music club on New York’s Bowery had recognized the cultural parallels between Smith and me and tried to bring us together. (We were briefly introduced in passing one afternoon when I was at the deserted CBGB’s for a later performance by the proto-punk band Television, but it would have made no impression on her, given that I was unpublished and unknown.) I deeply admire Smith’s respect for great male artists as well as her rejection of feminist rancor toward men. In a 2007 interview with Bust magazine, Smith said, “I never was really concerned with the idea of feminism. As a humanistic person, I’m interested in the human condition. I’m interested in men’s rights just as much as women’s rights. … I’ve never limited myself as an artist or as a human being to a genderized position.”
The Mapplethorpe photo was a major inspiration for my 1991 New York magazine cover photo (reproduced here), taken in the armor room of the Philadelphia Museum of Art for Francesca Stanfill’s very discerning profile: I am doing my glowering best to imitate my idol, Keith Richards, the original model for Smith’s raffish 1970s rock-star hair cut. Also reproduced here, along with the covers of two gay magazines, are several examples of the theatrical scenarios I devised for routine photo shoots requested by magazines and newspapers to illustrate interviews or profiles. I sometimes brought props (whip, chains, sword, switchblade knife) to visually transmit my philosophy of street-smart Amazon feminism directly to the public, bypassing whatever untruths might be planted in the articles themselves
