Camille Paglia and Christina Hoff Sommers historic interview on contemporary feminism

AEI resident scholar and Factual Feminist Christina Hoff Sommers interviews Camille Paglia, professor at the University of the Arts, on the state of contemporary feminism and how it has evolved over the last three decades.

This is part one of a nine part series featuring Christina Hoff Sommers and Camille Paglia, so be sure to check back each day this week for new videos. (We will add them to this post.)

PART 2 NOW UP:

Here’s a look back at their interview 20 years ago.

Christina Sommers, what has feminism become?

MS. SOMMERS: The orthodox feminists are so carried away with victimology, with a rhetoric of male-bashing that it’s full of female chauvinists, if you will. Also, women are quite eager to censor, to silence. And what concerns me most as a philosopher is it’s becom every anti-intellectual, and I think it poses a serious risk to young women in the universities. Women’s studies classes are increasingly a kind of initiation into the most radical wing, the most intolerantwing, of the feminist movement. And I consider myself a whistle-blower. I’m from inside the campus. I teach philosophy. I’ve seen what’s been going on.

MR. WATTENBERG: Camille, what has feminism become?

MS. PAGLIA: Well, I have been an ardent feminist since the rebirthof the current feminist movement. I’m on the record as being — as rebelling against my gender-role, as being an open lesbian and so on.In the early 1960s I was researching Amelia Earhart, who for me symbolized the great period of feminism of the ’20s and ’30s just after women won the right to vote. When this phase of feminism kicked back in the late ’60s, it was very positive at first. Women drew theline against men and demanded equal rights. I am an equal opportunity feminist. But very soon it degenerated into a kind of totalitarian’group think’ that we are only now rectifying 20 years later.

More: http://www.pbs.org/thinktank/transcript132.html