Free Women, Free Men — detailed summary

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Free Women, Free Men

Camille Paglia, 2017. Free Women, Free Men: Sex, Gender, Feminism is not one continuous argument written for a single book. It is an anthology of thirty-six pieces published or delivered across several decades, joined by a new introduction.

The collection brings together excerpts from Paglia’s books, lectures, newspaper essays, reviews, interviews, and public interventions. Subjects range from prehistoric art and Madonna to rape, pornography, Title IX, plastic surgery, abortion, university politics, gender studies, football, drinking age, Southern women, Patti Smith, and whether men are obsolete.

The recurring Paglia position is easier to identify than a single narrative. She defends sexual difference, biology, art, free speech, individual agency, and personal responsibility. She attacks academic feminism when it treats women mainly as victims, dismisses male achievement, ignores science, narrows debate, or tries to replace adult risk with institutional protection.

Her introduction gives the collection its clearest positive line: women’s freedom is not advanced by weakening men. Paglia wants strong women capable of living, arguing, competing, creating, and loving alongside strong men.

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Introduction: feminism without the victim identity

Paglia introduces the anthology as a record of her long fight with what she sees as orthodox academic feminism and political correctness.

She presents herself as a feminist formed by the women’s liberation movement but hostile to a feminism centered on grievance, protection, censorship, and a simplified story of male power.

Her model of freedom is demanding. A free woman should receive legal equality and broad opportunity, but freedom also brings risk, bad choices, sexual ambiguity, competition, and responsibility for decisions.

Paglia insists that feminism must know history, religion, art, biology, psychology, anthropology, and popular culture rather than treating gender theory as a closed explanatory system.

The collection then shows that argument applied to very different subjects.

1. Sex and Violence, or Nature and Art

The first and longest essay is an excerpt from Sexual Personae.

Paglia presents nature as amoral, powerful, fertile, destructive, sexual, and indifferent to human wishes. She rejects the idea that aggression, hierarchy, or sexual conflict can be explained entirely by social institutions.

Art and civilization, in her account, are human attempts to impose form on that unstable natural world. She associates this form-making impulse with what she calls the Apollonian: boundary, image, order, distance, and visual definition.

The essay establishes one of her permanent disagreements with social-construction feminism. Culture can redirect sex and aggression, but it did not invent embodied sex difference from nothing.

2–4. Venus, Nefertiti, and Madonna

Three short art essays illustrate Paglia’s way of thinking through female images.

In 2. “The Venus of Willendorf,” the prehistoric figurine represents fertility, earth, bodily abundance, and the overwhelming power of nature.

In 3. “Nefertiti,” Paglia finds the opposite tendency: stylization, geometry, distance, aristocratic self-command, and the transformation of biological woman into a hard visual icon.

In 4. “Madonna: Animality and Artifice,” she praises Madonna’s ability to manipulate costume, sexuality, femininity, religious imagery, and self-invention. For Paglia, artifice is not false consciousness. It can be a form of power.

Together the essays reject a feminism that treats female display, beauty, or sexual theatricality as automatically imposed by men.

5. Rape and Modern Sex War

This essay states one of Paglia’s most controversial positions.

She calls rape a serious crime but argues that modern feminism often misleads young women by describing sexual environments mainly through rights and male culpability while underemphasizing danger, alcohol, ambiguity, and personal risk management.

Paglia wants universities to teach young adults that freedom includes exposure to bad people and bad judgment. She strongly resists treating female students as children who can be made safe through expanding codes and administrative supervision.

Her focus is agency: women should know the world can be dangerous and act with that knowledge rather than being promised complete institutional protection.

6–10. The university, harassment, and pornography

A group of pieces from the 1990s attacks academic feminism and the expanding administrative regulation of sex.

In 6. “Junk Bonds and Corporate Raiders,” Paglia describes women’s studies as intellectually narrow and wants the study of sex rebuilt around history, science, anthropology, psychology, art, and open argument among people with different views.

In 7. “The MIT Lecture,” she criticizes poststructuralist academic language, defends popular culture and fashion as serious subjects, and attacks educational models that teach women to understand themselves primarily as victims.

In 8. “The Strange Case of Clarence Thomas and Anita Hill,” Paglia enters a specific American political controversy. She is skeptical of Anita Hill’s account and of the transformation of old, disputed workplace allegations into a national model of sexual harassment.

In 9. “The Nursery School Campus,” she argues that universities have become paternalistic while claiming to liberate students. Administrative rules, in her view, infantilize adults and weaken the humanities.

In 10. “The Return of Carry Nation,” she attacks Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin’s anti-pornography politics. Paglia defends pornography and sexual representation as parts of a much older human artistic and erotic history that cannot be reduced to male domination.

11–12. Feminism beyond the American academic script

In 11. “A White Liberal Women’s Conference,” Paglia attacks Western feminist universalism after the 1995 Beijing women’s conference. She argues that affluent Western activists can project their own priorities onto women in societies with different economic, family, religious, and political conditions.

In 12. “Loose Canons,” a review centered on Germaine Greer, Paglia criticizes sweeping feminist revisions of the Western canon. She wants serious historical scholarship instead of treating past art mainly as evidence in a prosecution of men.

Both essays defend intellectual scale. A gender theory that ignores class, history, region, religion, and the actual voices of women outside the professional Western activist world becomes another form of provincialism.

13–16. Title IX, women leaders, academia, and football

These short essays apply Paglia’s anti-protection argument to institutions.

In 13. “Men’s Sports Vanishing,” she criticizes the use of Title IX proportionality rules when men’s college sports are cut to change the sex balance of athletic programs. She treats the loss of male teams as a real cost rather than an acceptable side effect of women’s equality.

In 14. “Coddling Won’t Elect Women, Toughening Will,” she argues that women seeking leadership need resilience and political toughness rather than increasingly protective harassment rules.

In 15. “Academic Feminists Must Begin to Fulfill Their Noble, Animating Ideal,” Paglia calls for a broad reform of gender studies: more science, history, ideological diversity, popular culture, and intellectual competition.

In 16. “Gridiron Feminism,” she uses American football as a metaphor for professional life. Competition can be hard, rough, unfair, and emotionally unpleasant; women seeking power should learn to compete rather than expect the field to become gentle.

17. The Modern Battle of the Sexes

This substantial essay gives one of the collection’s clearest histories of Paglia’s feminism.

She praises early feminists, Mary Wollstonecraft, and figures such as Germaine Greer while arguing that later feminism became too willing to describe Western civilization as a system built by men for male benefit.

Paglia insists on counting male contribution to science, engineering, construction, technology, art, exploration, and the infrastructure of modern life.

She does not conclude that women are incapable of the same work. Her complaint is historical and moral: a movement asking men to recognize female achievement should not train women to treat male achievement as morally suspicious or invisible.

Reconciliation, for Paglia, requires gratitude in both directions.

18. American Gender Studies Today

This short piece argues that “feminism” is not one coherent American bloc.

Paglia distinguishes regional, religious, political, and generational traditions. She criticizes the close identification of mainstream feminist organizations with one political party and wants feminism to remain a large argument rather than a loyalty test.

19–20. Body image and plastic surgery

In 19. “The Cruel Mirror,” Paglia uses art history to show the huge range of body types represented as beautiful, fertile, noble, erotic, or powerful across different periods.

Her proposal is educational: art can weaken the tyranny of one contemporary beauty standard by showing that ideals change.

In 20. “The Pitfalls of Plastic Surgery,” she treats cosmetic surgery with ambivalence. It can be an exercise of adult choice, but a culture of surgery can also narrow faces and bodies toward a standardized youthful template.

Paglia again refuses the simple oppression model. A woman changing her appearance may be acting, not merely submitting. The harder question is what kind of visual culture shapes the desire.

21. Feminism Past and Present

This essay returns to feminist history and personal responsibility.

Paglia argues that American feminism often simplifies its own past. She discusses figures including Victoria Woodhull and Margaret Sanger, including uncomfortable connections between reform movements and ideas such as eugenics.

Her political principle is equality under adult standards. She opposes treating women as a permanently protected class because special protection can reproduce the paternalism feminism originally fought.

Freedom, in Paglia’s formulation, has to include consequences.

22–24. Desire, high heels, and BDSM scholarship

These pieces show Paglia moving between popular sexuality and academia.

In 22. “No Sex Please, We’re Middle Class,” she is skeptical of purely medical explanations for low female desire and emphasizes culture, relationship dynamics, erotic imagination, and class manners.

In 23. “The Stiletto Heel,” she treats the high heel as an aggressive artistic object: impractical, dangerous, sculptural, erotic, and chosen for effects that cannot be reduced to male coercion.

In 24. “Scholars in Bondage,” she criticizes academic writing on BDSM for burying a rich sexual subculture under theory. Paglia prefers historical knowledge, art, literature, gay culture, and close attention to actual practice.

25. Gender Roles: Nature or Nurture

This essay condenses Paglia’s biological argument.

She rejects the claim that sex roles can be understood as products of socialization alone. Hormones, reproductive biology, physical dimorphism, sexuality, and long evolutionary history matter alongside culture.

Paglia worries that elite institutions can mistake their own experiments with gender neutrality for universal human nature.

She does not deny variation or social influence. Her target is any theory that needs biology to contribute almost nothing in order for equality to be politically secure.

26. Are Men Obsolete?

This is Paglia’s contribution to the 2013 Munk Debate that is also covered in the separate book Are Men Obsolete?

She rejects the proposition that men have become obsolete and points to the enormous male contribution to the built and technological world.

Paglia’s characteristic provocation is that strong women should be able to acknowledge male achievement without feeling that their own status has been diminished.

27–28. Sex education and the drinking age

In 27. “Put the Sex Back in Sex Ed,” Paglia argues that sex education should teach reproductive biology, fertility, bodily development, and health more seriously. She thinks schools often discuss social identity and risk while failing to communicate the biological facts of reproduction clearly enough.

In 28. “It’s Time to Let Teenagers Drink Again,” she attacks the American drinking age of twenty-one as a form of infantilization. Paglia prefers cultures where younger people learn public drinking under social observation rather than being driven toward secret binge drinking.

Both pieces express the same adult-responsibility instinct, though on very different policy questions.

29. Cliquish, Tunnel-Vision Intolerance Afflicts Too Many Feminists

This interview returns to Paglia’s conflict with organized feminism.

She criticizes ideological conformity, hostility to biology, and the exclusion of dissenting feminists. She wants feminism to survive through open conflict rather than by narrowing the range of acceptable positions.

The piece also touches on gender identity and androgyny, which Paglia places within a larger historical pattern of cultural experimentation.

30. Southern Women

One of the longer essays is a study of female personality and regional culture.

Paglia describes Southern American archetypes: mothers, belles, matriarchs, performers, religious women, and women whose force is expressed through speech, family authority, hospitality, sexuality, or style.

The essay resists a flat model of female power. A woman may have little formal political authority and enormous practical authority inside family and community life.

Paglia also uses Southern culture to examine the interaction of race, class, religion, manners, motherhood, and female self-presentation.

31. The Modern Campus Cannot Comprehend Evil

Written after the murder of University of Virginia student Hannah Graham, this short piece attacks what Paglia sees as an overly administrative model of sexual danger.

She argues that some predators are not products of misunderstanding, alcohol policy, or insufficient consent education. Institutions also need a vocabulary for deliberate predation and evil.

Paglia again tells young women to take risk seriously rather than assuming institutional rules can remove dangerous people from the world.

32. Why I Love The Real Housewives

Paglia defends reality television as a source of social observation.

She enjoys The Real Housewives for its display of female competition, friendship, status, performance, alcohol, aggression, reconciliation, and personality.

The point is consistent with her larger method: popular culture often reveals behavior that ideological theory cleans up or refuses to see.

33. What a Woman President Should Be Like

This piece, written during the politics of the mid-2010s, asks what female political leadership should look like.

Paglia wants women politicians with independence, force, humor, command, and the ability to withstand attack. She is hostile to the idea that female leadership should be sold through vulnerability or protected from the brutality of normal politics.

34. Feminist Trouble

Paglia returns to the history and future of feminism.

She criticizes anti-pornography feminism, ideological conformity, and a model of professional female success built around the life pattern of affluent elites.

She is especially interested in motherhood, childcare, and class. Professional women can buy freedom by transferring domestic labor to poorer women, including immigrant workers. A feminism that celebrates the first woman’s liberation while ignoring the second woman’s labor has not solved the underlying problem.

Paglia wants social structures flexible enough for women to combine work, earlier motherhood, family, and different life sequences without one professional template becoming the definition of liberation.

35. On Abortion

Paglia describes herself as strongly pro-choice while criticizing language that erases the moral seriousness of abortion.

She sees reproductive control as central to women’s freedom, but she refuses to describe the fetus as meaningless biological material simply because that makes the argument politically easier.

The essay acknowledges the moral force of the pro-life view and the violence inherent in abortion while still defending legal access.

For Paglia, political freedom becomes intellectually dishonest when it requires people to deny what the act actually involves.

36. What’s in a Picture: Patti Smith

The final essay analyzes Robert Mapplethorpe’s cover photograph of Patti Smith for Horses.

Paglia reads the image as a compact statement of female artistic power and androgyny. Smith appears neither conventionally feminine nor as a woman imitating a man; costume, posture, gaze, and photographic style create a self-authored public identity.

It is an appropriate ending for the collection. Paglia’s feminism is most comfortable when women are active makers of form rather than passive products of a system.

What joins the collection

The thirty-six pieces disagree in scale and subject, and many belong to the political moment in which they were written. The thread joining them is Paglia’s refusal to build female freedom out of female fragility.

She wants women to study the world rather than be protected from it, to know the body rather than explain it away, to acknowledge male creation without surrendering female ambition, and to accept that adult liberty includes risk and responsibility.

Her feminism needs men because human culture does. Strong women, in Paglia’s model, do not require weak men in order to be free.

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