Tuesday, May 13, 2008
Though you have had one major personal development in your life while writing this book -- I've heard you've become a mother of a young boy. There's advice of your own that I wonder if you've heeded: "Every man must define his identity against his mother. If he does not, he just falls back into her and is swallowed up."
My partner of 12 years, Alison Maddex, gave birth to a baby boy in November 2002 -- Lucien Harry Maddex. I am Lucien's adoptive parent -- but certainly NOT his mother! Alison is Lucien's one and only mother. That "Heather Has Two Mommies" business gives me the creeps! -- and it can only confuse a kid.
I'm completely against that two fathers, two mothers stuff. I think it's gay activism gone horribly awry -- people making political points without regard for a child's realistic social and developmental needs.
I kept Lucien's birth completely out of the public eye because I absolutely detest the circus that Rosie O'Donnell made of her children. Kids should not be subjected to the glare of the spotlight. However, now that I'm back in public after the five years of writing this book, it's perfectly legitimate information.
Going back to "Sexual Personae" for a minute, and that battle with the feminist establishment. What's happening with that now, would you say?
It's over. It's completely over. I won that war! -- or rather, the wing of feminism that I led into the light won the war. Madonna made it possible. In New York magazine's cover story on me in 1991, it was reported that a Yale faculty member had marched with her graduate student in New Haven to return "Sexual Personae" because it was "ideologically unacceptable." A Yale faculty member would return a 700-page Yale Press book by a woman author on the basis of its not passing some p.c. litmus test -- that shows you what was going on!
But things have changed -- at least in the media. The media has moved on, the media has realized that the pro-sex side has won, and it has seen all the anti-porn maniacs as what they are -- fanatical Puritans. When it did a profile on me in 1992, "60 Minutes" sent a woman producer and a camera to the 92nd Street Y when Gloria Steinem was appearing on a panel. The producer stood up at the end and asked a question about me. And they caught Gloria Steinem saying something like, "We don't give a damn what she thinks!" -- at which the audience loudly applauded. They caught her and her entire Manhattan elite in action. But then Steinem learned, once she'd been burned, so that a year later she was saying things about me like, "She has a right to express whatever she feels."
Still, I was systematically excluded and ostracized. When Vanity Fair did a cultural-icons issue a little later, they asked to photograph Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem and me together -- like the different generations. But Steinem refused to pose with me! So Vanity Fair had an inspired solution -- it simply commissioned a full-page caricature. What great revenge -- there were the three of us, Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem and me, posing amicably together in cartoon form!
The point is, this hostility to dissent had been going on for decades in feminism. If they were doing that repressive stuff to me with a bestselling book, what were they doing to ordinary women just trying to open their mouths? So it's great that my side has won so resoundingly. However, the universities are still in the hands of the feminist ideologues. Nothing has changed at the major universities, nothing. The same professors are there, but they're really mad now because they know they've lost! So over the last decade, they've spent a lot of time trying to be me!
They made contracts with trade presses. They wrote Op-Ed pieces. Before me, only poli-sci or history professors would write Op-Ed pieces. You just didn't do that if you were in humanities. In the early '90s, some Harvard woman snob actually said to a reporter about me: "Oh, we don't consider anyone serious who writes articles for the newspaper." That's where things were back then. They all tried to write books directed toward a general audience, and none really succeeded until Stephen Greenblatt's book on Shakespeare -- which as far as I'm concerned is ultimately a product of my pressure on the profession in the early '90s, when I called for literary critics to address the general audience.
As someone who teaches Shakespeare, however, I don't think it's a very good book, even though the New Yorker and the New York Times laid down flat in front of it. Greenblatt's Shakespeare isn't one I recognize from my own study of the plays, and the connections posited between the life and the art aren't particularly sophisticated. The TLS [Times Literary Supplement] reviewer wrote that Greenblatt is "innocent of English history," which of course is just a devastating thing to say about the leader of new historicism whose specialty is Renaissance England and who is head of the Norton Shakespeare editions. But too many books coming out of the Ivy League tend toward the trendy and shallow -- even though the New York media eats them up.
They do get great press. Why?
It's media sycophancy toward the brand-name schools. Because a lot of reporters in the mainstream media went to those schools and want their children to go to those schools, they don't want to disrupt their brand-name value. The alternative press has been completely, cowardly negligent, including the Nation. The leftist press has been out to lunch on this for 25 years -- it's outrageous that this matter hasn't been vigorously pursued. Because these academics mouth leftist sentiments -- even though their lifestyles are ones of ostentatious materialism -- the alternative press has been afraid to appear to take the side of the conservatives who have justifiably been berating the politicization of the campus since the '80s.
Come on, let's look at reality. What important, essential works have come out of American humanities departments in the last 30 or 40 years? The important book just isn't there. Where is the great American scholar that poststructuralism has produced? When Harold Bloom goes, he's the last of the line. These people aren't great scholars -- they have no deep erudition. They just do gimmicky manipulations of other people's research. The people at the top with the power positions and the huge salaries are flashes in the pan -- their work isn't going to last.
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