Camille Paglia is the University Professor of Humanities and Media Studies at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia. A regular contributor to Salon.com, she is the author of Glittering Images; Break, Blow, Burn; Vamps and Tramps; Sex, Art, and American Culture; and Sexual Personae.
"A compilation of Paglia's best, and most incendiary, previously published essays . . . At times infuriating, at times glittering, Paglia's prose is always biting and relentless" Huffington Post
"Fiercely erudite, freewheeling and sex-drenched . . . The Helen Vendler-meets-Patti Smith grad seminar you wanted but never quite got [. . . Paglia is] a fearless public intellectual and more necessary than ever" New York Times
"Paglia is a brilliant thinker on culture and human nature . . . Inspirational in its tone and its message" Helen Smith, The New Criterion
"Her work is always thought provoking . . . Relatable and enthralling" BUST
ALSO BY CAMILLE PAGLIA
Glittering Images:
A Journey Through Art from Egypt to Star Wars
Break, Blow, Burn:
Camille Paglia Reads Forty-three of the World’s Best Poems
The Birds
Vamps & Tramps: New Essays
Sex, Art, and American Culture: Essays
Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson
FREE WOMEN FREE MEN
SEX • GENDER • FEMINISM
CAMILLE PAGLIA
Published in Great Britain in 2018 by Canongate Books Ltd,
14 High Street, Edinburgh, EH1 1TE
This digital edition first published in 2018 by Canongate Books
Compilation copyright © Camille Paglia, 2017
First published in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Penguin Random House
Information on previous publications and illustration credits appears here
The moral right of the author has been asserted
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 78689 218 8
eISBN 978 1 78689 217 1
CONTENTS
1 Sex and Violence, or Nature and Art
4 Madonna: Animality and Artifice
6 Junk Bonds and Corporate Raiders: Academe in the Hour of the Wolf
7 The MIT Lecture: Crisis in the American Universities
8 The Strange Case of Clarence Thomas and Anita Hill
9 The Nursery School Campus: The Corrupting of the Humanities in the U.S.
10 The Return of Carry Nation: Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin
11 A White Liberal Women’s Conference
12 Loose Canons: Review of Germaine Greer, Slip-Shod Sibyls
14 Coddling Won’t Elect Women, Toughening Will
15 Academic Feminists Must Begin to Fulfill Their Noble, Animating Ideal
17 The Modern Battle of the Sexes
18 American Gender Studies Today
19 The Cruel Mirror: Body Type and Body Image as Reflected in Art
20 The Pitfalls of Plastic Surgery
21 Feminism Past and Present: Ideology, Action, and Reform
22 No Sex Please, We’re Middle Class
25 Gender Roles: Nature or Nurture