For five years, art history professor and controversial pro-sex feminist Camille Paglia has been quiet—at least by the standards she set in the 1990s when she sparked controversy for everything from questioning the existence of date rape to hailing Madonna as "the future of feminism." During the Obama era, she published one book and occasional viral essays, like her Sunday Times cover story about how Rihanna is the new Princess Diana. Most her time revolved around teaching at the University of the Arts and studying artifacts from Native American tribes who lived in southeastern Pennsylvania 10,000 years ago. This week, though, Paglia returns with a new book, Free Women, Free Men: Sex, Gender, and Feminism, collecting her greatest hits about gender, sex, and feminism from 1990 to 2016.
The collection includes an essay about Nefertiti from Paglia's 700-page 1990 tome Sexual Personae, a 2014 lecture about the strength of southern women in the country, an ode to the Real Housewives, and multiple essays about diminishing free speech on college campuses. Throughout the book, Paglia laments how the mainstream feminist movement has revolved around educated white women and forgotten working class women—and men, like the sanitation workers whom she believes do not receive enough credit for their dangerous work. (More on that later.) Together, the essays argue that for women to be free, men must be free too.
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