While her first book climbed the bestseller lists, humanities professors in seminars and at conferences, in editorial meetings and on hiring committees, were meting out justice to any heretic committing the old sin of explaining disparate outcomes and conditions for men and women in terms of nature, rather than ascribing them entirely to patriarchy and heteronormativity. But here was the opening sentence of Sexual Personae (1990): “In the beginning was nature.” With that heresy, Camille Paglia burst into public life. Feminists had good reason to be confident. It shouldn’t surprise anyone that for 30 years women have earned a majority of all doctoral degrees in English and foreign languages. In particular, never even hint that there might be some basis in nature for differences between men and women. The graduate students and untenured professors in attendance took it as a brutal career lesson: never expose yourself to this sort of takedown. I can’t recall what the guest speaker said in his feeble reply, but neither he nor anyone else in the room dared challenge her. The feminist Romantic scholar who responded to his presentation, however, proceeded to explain, impatiently and peremptorily, how this clueless fellow did not know what he was talking about. When I was finishing graduate school at UCLA in the late 1980s, a British scholar, unquestionably liberal, came to campus to discuss his paper on “Male Feminism.” Modest and earnest, he summarized his paper’s account of how men could participate in feminist critique.
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