New Paglia is always worth reading, and Free Women, Free Men is not an exception. That being said, if you’ve read her other books you’ve already read this one. If you’re tired about hearing about Doris Day and “my 1960s generation” or “my baby boom generation” (as I am), you’ll be tired at many points in this book. I wrote that line before I saw Dwight Garner’s NYT review, in which he says, “The problem, for the reader of ‘Free Women, Free Men,’ is that she repeats the same arguments and anecdotes over and over again. Reading this book is like being stranded in a bar where the jukebox has only two songs, both by Pat Benatar.”

Yes. And many of the pieces date poorly. Does anyone care about Madonna’s BDSM-inflected music video from the ’90s? It may have been a vital moment in pop culture, but almost all pop culture is ephemeral, as pop culture itself likes to imply, or remind us. Or how about Anita Hill? That was a name I needed to back-check: my first inclination was, “Anita who?”

That being said, there is much to like in Free Women, Free Men, starting from the first page:

The premier principles of this book are free thought and free speech—open, mobile, and unconstrained by either liberal or conservative ideology. The liberal versus conservative dichotomy, dating from the split between left and right following the French Revolution, is hopelessly outmoded for our far more complex era of expensive technology and global politics.

It is always useful to call for free thought and speech, especially when both seem weirdly under fire, from left and right (later in the introduction, Paglia writes, “The title of this book exalts freedom as an indispensable condition for the incubation and flourishing of individualism”). Despite how tedious reading yet more about Doris Day and Madonna may be, sometimes we look to past predictions to see how they might be right. This Paglia line, originally from 1997, is particularly prescient: “Too much tolerance too fast can produce a puritanical or fascist backlash” (142). Had I read that in August I would’ve laughed. Now I realize that I was wrong and that is fascist backlash is possible. We don’t really learn from history—not collectively, anyhow—and facts don’t change our minds. In some ways the state of knowledge is better than ever before; we can learn almost anything, immediately, but in other ways the state of knowledge is worse: incorrect memes proliferate, and they enable the fascist backlash, though that backlash may be enabled by people who know not what they do.

That line about tolerance and backlash occurs nearly midway through the book and it’s easy to miss. But it’s also emblematic of the way Paglia spouts ideas like water from a Greek fountain. They are ceaseless, and take the eye away for a moment and new ideas take the place of the ones just experienced. In this way she is, or is close to being, an artist.

She also calls for real equality rather than special privileges or hand-holding; she says, for example,

What was distinctive in those emancipated women—and here loom my later problems with second-wave feminism—was that they never indulged in reflex male-bashing: they accepted and admired the enormity of what men had accomplished and were simply demanding a fair chance to prove that women could match or surpass it. Their inspirational record of unapologetic ambition and plucky, resourceful self-reliance was the foundation for my later philosophy of equal opportunity feminism.

That being said, she can also be fond of nitwitisms like, “The sexes are at war.” Nonsense. It’s nonsense now and has been nonsense as often as it’s been said. In that domain we live in a positive-sum world, not a zero-sum world, and in many ways Paglia gets that. Yet she won’t quite admit it.

While I admire parts of Free Women, Free Men, I wish for another book like Sexual Personae. In her conversation with Tyler Cowen, however, Paglia said that what she considered to be Volume II of Sexual Personae she actually published as individual “articles.” A shame. Nothing she’s published since that, however interesting it may be at times, matches it. I will reiterate that new Paglia is worth reading, but be ready to skip the sections that you have in effect already read.