Controversial feminist and author Camille Paglia slammed Facebook executive Sheryl Sandberg as "insufferably smug," and said her book about women in the workplace was "dishonest."
Paglia alleged that Sandberg concealed her "affluent lifestyle" in the book Lean In, according to a Tuesday interview in Broadly. Sandberg's feminism, according to Paglia, reflected the "excessively bourgeois or white middle-class assumptions" undergirding contemporary feminist thought.
"I thought her bestselling book, Lean In, was utterly dishonest in failing to acknowledge how the affluent lifestyle of women executives like herself requires a rotating squad of servants and nannies, whom she has carefully kept invisible," Paglia said.
She also derided "privileged white middle-class girls at elite schools" for their inability to express themselves "forcefully," arguing that their request for college administrators to intervene in their dating lives was "neurosis and hysteria."
"They have to run to parental proxies on campus grievance committees to intervene for them. This isn't feminism—it's neurosis and hysteria," Paglia said.
Paglia's book Free Women, Free Men: Sex, Gender, and Feminism, released on Tuesday, attacks contemporary feminism's class bias and ignorance of male achievements.
During the interview, she attacked upper-middle-class women for spouting "snide anti-male feminist rhetoric" and remaining blind to men's "constant labor and sacrifices."
"The bourgeois blindness of feminist leaders to low-status working-class labor by men is morally corrupt!" Puglia asserted.
Paglia also urged students to resist "nanny-state college administrators," who she said were, "at root Stalinist autocrats who despise and suppress individualism."
"Push back against the nanny-state college administrators who subject you to authoritarian surveillance and undemocratic thought control!" Paglia said.
She tied "crippling student debt" and limits on campus speech, suggesting both came from an "administrator master class."
"There is no excuse whatever for the grotesque rise in tuition costs, which has bankrupted families and imposed crippling debt on students trying to start their lives. When will young people wake up to the connection between rampant student debt and the administrator-sanctioned suppression of free speech on campus?" Paglia asked.