Amazon from the Sixties

Free Women, Free Men: Sex, Gender, Feminism
by Camille Paglia
Pantheon, 2017, 315 pages, $50
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Camille Paglia is, perhaps, the world’s only exciting septuagenarian lesbian academic. She champions pornography, football, rock music, poses for photoshoots holding a switchblade, and routinely says things like “Lena Dunham is a big pile of pudding” and Taylor Swift is an “obnoxious Nazi Barbie”. Her new essay collection Free Women, Free Men predominantly consists of two-decade-old, already readily available excerpts, articles and lectures, and offers little new material for those who have followed her career thus far. It is presented chronologically, with few annotations. And yet, while much of the book is rehashed, Paglia’s work demands revisiting. Her inflammatory, equal-opportunity feminism is more vital and necessary now than ever.

In 1990 Paglia released the seminal Sexual Personae, immediately uniting a confederacy of feminist intellectuals against her. Through a subsequent series of prominent essays, and impossibly fast-talking television interviews, Camille Paglia proceeded to kick the life out of the PC feminist movement, and by the end of the decade found herself on the winning side of a culture war. By 1999, she was practically taking a victory lap:

most of the positions for which I was pilloried when I came on the scene a decade ago, with the publication of my long-delayed first book, are now scarcely controversial at all, so sweeping has been the victory of libertarian feminism, which is in tune with a younger, sassier generation of feminists.

In 2017 that is, of course, no longer true. Regressive feminism has returned, emboldened by the social media echo chamber, and it remains to be seen if Brexit and Trump signal a genuine turning of the tide, or merely a temporary reprieve.

The crux of Paglia’s worldview is that biology, rather than an imagined patriarchy, shapes gender and society. She opens Sexual Personae (and, in quoting it, Free Women, Free Men) by declaring, “In the beginning was nature.” This is an attack on Marxists, post-colonialists, gender theorists, and everybody else in the academy seeking to blame a malicious, man-made superstructure for the world’s ills. Her biological-determinism, which seems like common sense for those of us without a PhD in brainwashing, was categorically rejected by her contemporaries. They dismissed Paglia first as an attention seeker, then as a crackpot, then as a Nazi. It was similar to the reception awarded of late to Milo Yiannopoulos, who has been doing a campy Camille Paglia impression for the last few years.

After several dozen pages, Free Women, Free Men moves from academia to invective. Paglia’s attacks on her contemporary feminists make for thrilling reading. She says of Andrea Dworkin: “she pretends to be a daring truth-teller but never mentions her most obvious problem: food”, going on to call her “pudgy, clumsy, whiny”, and later “pasty, bilious and frumpy”. Admittedly, these critiques were probably more palatable when Paglia first wrote them, when Dworkin was still alive. More than anything, she finds her enemies boring: “every year, feminists provide more and more evidence for the old charge that women can neither think nor write”. Paglia takes aim at alleged victims of sexual assault, college rape tribunals, and everything else then, as now, held sacrosanct by campus feminists. She expressly states her intent to purge degenerates from the feminist movement, like the identitarian “anorexics, bulimics, depressives, rape victims, and incest survivors”. There is room only for the strong in Paglia’s brand of “modern Amazonism”.

With her gender war all but won at the turn of the millennium, Paglia turned her attention to aesthetics, and she has spent the last fifteen years penning books on poetry, cinema and high art. Many of the more recent essays in Free Women, Free Men are charming, but lack the urgency of her earlier work. She celebrates the reality television show Real Housewives, encourages teenagers to drink, observes that women in their thirties who don’t have children are unhappy, and longs for a time when plastic surgery will make women even sexier. Quickly, one notices that Paglia is anecdotally repetitive. Too often she reminisces about her childhood adoration of Amelia Earhart, or her early proclivity for transvestism at Halloween. One must forgive this; academics are too busy having interesting ideas to have interesting lives.

Thankfully, towards the end of Free Women, Free Men, politically correct progressivism is back on her radar. From 2014 onward, with her old enemies resurgent, Paglia returned to the fore. The final chapters of Free Women, Free Men, including an interview with Spiked and the essay “On Abortion”, are Paglia at her visceral, wrathful best. She attacks the term “rape culture” (“a ridiculous term—mere gassy propaganda, too rankly bloated to critique”), Hillary Clinton for not rising “to prominence through her own talents”, and the hypocritical “anti-war, anti-fur, vegan” activist movement which is “so stridently withholding its imagination and compassion from the unborn”.

It is worth noting, and has been noted by her detractors, that almost all of Camille Paglia’s concerns are conservative. She worries that “the epidemic of divorce as well as the spread of drugs among the young should tell us that all is not well with Western culture”. She despises those who seek to “normalise abortion”. And yet she has always maintained, far from obviously, that “obviously, I am no right-winger”. Instead, she insists she represents “the essence of the Sixties, which is free thought and free speech”. As a result, many of the stances taken in Free Women, Free Men are exhilarating, and completely untenable. She grants personhood to the unborn and calls “pro-choice” “a cowardly euphemism”, and yet she is pro-abortion. She accepts that this view is pro-killing, but deems it necessary for a woman’s autonomy. So frank and powerful is this stance that Louis C.K. has recently taken it for the opening of his new stand-up special. Ethically, though, it doesn’t hold up, and Paglia knows it. She praises “the superior moral beauty of religious doctrine that defends the sanctity of life”.

Time and time again, she openly cedes the moral high ground to conservatives. She herself identifies as a non-gendered person, while warning that transgenderism is a sign that Western civilisation is about to collapse: “I will continue to celebrate androgyny, but I am under no illusions about what it may portend for the future.” She diagnoses the disease, but refuses to prescribe the treatment. She stands for the “essence of the Sixties”, but knows full well that it is a fleeting essence, which cannot possibly be maintained. The flaw of a libertarian society is that it cannot long remain a libertarian society. As Richard John Neuhaus put it, “where orthodoxy is optional, orthodoxy will sooner or later be proscribed”. And as Robert Frost put it, “nothing gold can stay”.