Camille Paglia’s FREE WOMEN FREE MEN is a collection of 36 previously-published pieces with a new introduction and a modest set of illustrations. The book begins with sections from her magnum opus, SEXUAL PERSONAE which essentially lay the theoretical foundations for the book. These sections are scholarly/theoretical. The remaining pieces include essays, reviews, op-eds and interviews. They are often polemical, always interesting, and reinforce the theoretical underpinnings established at the outset.
The writing is unfailingly lively; in some cases her polemics verge on the Agnewesque. For example, she describes poststructuralism as a “stale teething biscuit [for] the nattering nerds of trendy academe” (p. 120). The thematic organization includes samples from her writings from 1990-2016; despite the breadth of the subject matter, from ancient art to contemporary popular culture and sociology to endocrinology the book coheres very nicely and returns, time and again, to her central position. She argues that science should serve as a central component in all women’s studies and gender studies programs, that every such program should be assessed by independent professionals for ideological bias, and that these programs should require the writings of conservatives as well as dissident feminists. She calls for a massive rollback “of the paternalistic system of grievance committees and other meddlesome bureaucratic contrivances which have turned American college campuses into womb-like customer-service resorts” (p. 181). “If women expect equal treatment in society, they must stop asking for infantilizing special protections. With freedom comes personal responsibility” (p. 182).
Her fundamental belief is that men struggle against Nature, while women embody it. This explains why men labor to organize and to create and why women are more accepting of the plights that Nature visits upon us. One of her major insights is borrowed from Samuel Johnson. Johnson argued that men deprive women of power because Nature has given them so much power to begin with. The relationships and behaviors which conventional feminists decry are directly traceable to the divisions of labor which characterized male/female behavior for millennia. Modern feminist aspirations have been facilitated by the labor-saving devices and human comforts (indoor plumbing, air conditioning, laundry and cooking appliances, and so on) largely created for women by men and by market capitalism. Men continue to do the dirty jobs which make information-work jobs possible. The male-bashing that characterizes much academic feminism is in turn bashed by CP.
The most gratifying aspects of her work are her scholarly procedures. She is a daughter of the enlightenment and of classical antiquity, not a Rousseauan. She holds Rousseau’s thought in contempt. She believes in logic, evidence and reason. She always proceeds historically and her work is studiedly multidisciplinary. She can talk about the history of Egyptian art as easily as Catholic dogma, renaissance poetry, the history of cinema, the history of popular music and the history of science and technology. The result is that she advances thoughtful, informed and nuanced arguments in lively prose.
She is a libertarian, Jill Stein voter, a lapsed Catholic/atheist, a bisexual lover of indefinable gender and, yet, a person whose thought speaks to readers across the political spectrum. She believes in abortion at any and all times but acknowledges that pro-lifers have the moral high ground and she believes in capital punishment for the most heinous of crimes. I would say that she is an academic traditionalist; she believes in evidence and empirical argument. Her fundamental orientation is historical. She loathes the majority of capital-T theory and she abhors ideology that is unsupported by rational argument. She defends the best of the “60’s principles” and excoriates the worst. She recognizes the failings of modern higher education and remains one of its bravest and most searching critics. She is an indispensable voice in our culture, a voice that she self-describes as one ‘crying in the wilderness’ but that voice has great resonance and will endure when all of the fads that she has decried have been forgotten.
The pieces in the collection are of varying lengths, written in multiple genres. All will repay attention and all will bring reassurance to readers who delight in fresh thought and countercultural thought built upon traditional materials, argued with passion and intellectual urgency.
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