‘FREE’ CAMILLE PAGLIA! Kathy Shaidle looks back on the initial impact of Paglia, as reflected in her new book, Free Women, Free Men, which Shaidle described as “a superb introduction to Paglia’s vision for the uninitiated, and a sobering, timely reminder to us old culture warriors that all apparent victories are only tomorrow’s battles, in drag:”

In one of many litanies devoted to her (now forgotten) feminist foes, Paglia blasts the “diarrhea prose” of one unfortunate, and calls another “Mrs. Fifties Tea Table.” (I spat laughing.) Rather than serving to settle old scores, in the great tradition of all aging polemicists, Free Women, Free Men seems calibrated to shaking them awake.

And why not? Contra Sayre’s law, the stakes of these particular academic feuds were, in fact, the highest imaginable: The minds of college students—future parents, citizens, bosses, leaders—were being poisoned. Paglia clearly saw her role as that of stomach pump, and still does.

But the same clarion quality that means every fresh Paglia piece is Drudge-worthy news to this day makes reading a compendium like Free Women enervating rather than energizing. As the dates at the bottom of these pages remind us, her earliest acidic denunciations of political correctness, campus speech codes, and “rape culture” are almost thirty years old. Any real-world impact they had was clearly fleeting.

Hence this recent headline at Minding the Campus: “How a Generation Lost Its Common Culture.” In his 1980 book, The Third Wave, Alvin Toffler coined the phrase “the demassified media,” to describe a media that had only just recently made the transition from three commercial broadcast television networks to a cable TV system that promised narrow-casted channels to every interest from 24-hour news to 24-hour rock music to 24 hour home and gardening tips – and interactive computer networks, which then consisted of CompuServe, The Source, and privately-owned bulletin boards. Contra its more elderly denizens such as Ted Koppel, a demassified media is quite a healthy and useful thing. A demassified, balkanized culture will soon find itself going to war over tribalism and politics, as the last three decades have shown. However meager her ultimate success, I’m glad Paglia is fighting the good fight from inside the barricades.