Isaac Butler and Rosa Campbell are both historians and writers whose latest work focuses on the culture war of the 1980s and 1990s: Butler’s The Perfect Moment: God, Sex, Art and the Birth of America’s Culture Wars chronicles how the battles between the religious right, America’s artists, and the Federal government gave us the political and cultural landscape Americans live in today; Campbell’s The Book that Taught the World to Orgasm and then Disappeared: Shere Hite and the Hite Report tells the story of the best-selling, world-changing 1970’s study on the sex lives of American women, and what both it and its disappearance can teach us about sex and culture today. They recently got together over zoom to discuss their books, censorship, pornography, capitalism, and art.Article continues after advertisement
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Isaac Butler: I want to start by asking you the simplest of questions, because—look, I love your book, and your book is doing this thing that is like catnip to me, which is reaching back and rescuing this hugely important, paradigm-shifting work from the dustbin of history. I had never heard of Shere Hite or The Hite Report before reading your book. How did you discover them? And how did you come to decide to write a book about it?
