A few words, please, before I go into my comrades and rivals. First of all, I stand on my own. I don't run with any pack, and I rarely speak out in support of anyone. I don't really have rivals, because that would suggest that there is someone who is actually at my level, and that is totally not the case. I trash talk every feminist and anyone who disagrees with me, so I don't really have—much less need—comrades. I have a particular fondness for gay men, however, and for drag queens, because they aren't afraid to let it all out and speak their minds. Though I don't consider them "comrades," I do like Madonna and Sandra Bernhard—oh, and Barbra Streisand. They've got moxie. I have been quoted as saying something along the lines of: the only thing people will remember about my enemies is what I have said about them—a cruel, but sad, reality.

Comrades

Harold Bloom

Let me just say that getting an endorsement on your book from the formidable Dr. Bloom is like having Francis Ford Coppola give the thumbs up to your first film. In other words: big dealio. So it says a lot that Bloomie loved my book Sexual Personae and said that it was "an enormous sensation" that "compels us to rethink the question of the literary representation of human sexuality" (source).

Bloom has always had my back—I've called him my mentor every since my first years as a precocious Yale graduate student. After all, when I first proposed the idea of my dissertation, he proclaimed, "My dear, I am the only one who can direct that dissertation!" (source).

Simone de Beauvoir

I've got mixed feelings about this legend, but props to The Second Sex. My dad gave me this book when I was a teenager—a very formative moment, as they say. I have often cited receiving this book as the birth of my intellectual self. Unlike hysterical feminists who just enjoy pointing the finger, good ol' Simone works from a position of Enlightenment thinking, where rational thought gives the old heave-ho to all sorts of hand-wringing. The Second Sex quickly became my intellectual manifesto.

Germaine Greer

She's one of those awesome old-school feminists. Germaine swept me off my intellectual feet when I was a wee graduate student. I even compared her to Oscar Wilde for the charismatic and spectacular way she presented herself on the lecture circuit. When someone had the nerve to insult Greer's looks, I retorted, "An intellectual has an obligation to look haggard" (source), although I admit that I haven't let my own looks go…

Rivals

Naomi Wolf

This author and feminist critic (look, she wrote a book called Vagina: A New Biography: 'nuff said) and I got into a smack-down in the pages of Cosmopolitan magazine. You heard me right: not New York Review of Books, but Cosmo, as it's known to its readers.

We got into it about role models, because Naomi thinks the whole idea of role models is bad and that every woman should be her own role model. Thanks for the affirmation, but it just doesn't work that way. Young girls these days look at pop stars like Taylor Swift and Katy Perry, who do not offer any models of behavior.

As I say, "If young women try to take that boppy persona into the workplace, they will be marginalized forever as pretty airheads" (source), to which Naomi responded: "God bless Camille, but women are thoughtful and critical—they're not going to define themselves based on whoever the culture throws up." She should spend more time on a high school campus or at the mall. These girls don't give a hoot about Michelle Obama.

Christopher Hitchens

Look, I know he's dead, but he still manages to get on my nerves, what with his whole snooty intellectual anti-God shtick. When it comes to religion, Hitchens was just such a hater—he couldn't even appreciate religion's relevance to Western art and culture. I feel like I really honed in on the problem when I called him "a sybaritic narcissist committed to no real ideas outside his personal advancement" (source). Don't get me started on the title of his book God is Not Great—puh-leez!

Feminists

My digs against feminists are way too numerous to list here, but I have dished out some gems, like when I said that "feminism today is anti-intellectual" and "defined by paranoia" (source), and I stand behind those remarks.

"Never Back Down" is one of my personal mottoes. Feminists get prickly when I refer to myself as the greatest female mind of my generation—or some variation of that. And for some strange reason, they take offense when I say that Simone de Beauvoir plays second fiddle to my one-woman band. Feminist academics are the worst, by the way, so I just told them to "suck raw eggs and eat my dust." 

Let's just do a little rundown of some of the gems I have offered about feminists (source):

• Carolyn Heilbrun: "Mrs. Fifties Tea Table"
• Judith Butler: "Very small potatoes" and "derivative and unlearned"
• Carol Gilligan: "prim, solemn"
• Marilyn French: "acridly cynical"
• Hillary Clinton: "ice queen"

Are you surprised that these people don't like me?

Susan Sontag

Here's a good one. Susan Sontag tried to claim on TV—on TV––that she had never heard of me. That's clearly her idea of a diss. Well, if she had never heard of me, why did she suggest that I throw together my own rock band, huh? How did she know I like rock?

Well, I've heard of her, and I'm not afraid to say that she is "boring," "solipsistic" and "dull" (source). I regret that I ever held her up as an icon of feminist and cultural thought. I'm not her heir; I'm of a different order.

Hillary Clinton

Yawn. Oops, I nodded off just thinking about Hillary. Imagine—a woman with that much smarts and power letting herself be buffeted about by that lout of a husband. I am afraid I won't take back calling her a "feminazi" in the pages of Salon.com, and I could never even fathom her as a presidential candidate. Now, mind you, I would have voted for her had she become the Democratic candidate, but that's only because I want Democratic appointments, not because I think she could get over her card-shark approach to politics.

French Critics

Grrr… about that Foucault and Lacan and all the rest of the "French rot" (source). I have a huge bone to pick with those Post-Structuralists. Such poseurs. I've always said we should leave Post-Structuralism in France, where it belongs. N'est-ce pas? We English-speakers will keep our Shakespeare and Chaucer, thank you very much.

And while I'm on a roll, I'll add that all of this French theory doesn't actually do anything. It talks a bunch of political nonsense, but has nothing to do with the politics of the people. Everyone jumped on the French theory bandwagon in the 1970s and '80s because they thought it would help them climb the academic ladder; now that jargon-ridden blather has gone the way of the horse-drawn wagon.