Free Women, Free Men: Sex, Gender, Feminism

The 'voice crying in the wilderness' that speaks to millions.

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 d...