[This was published in The Thought around the time a review dubbed "Nietzsche in Furs" appeared in New Republic. I wrote it independently of that review – and I'm sure he wrote his independently of mine. I like to think great minds think alike, though that would be immodest.]
Everyone who can read and is alive today should read Camille Paglia's Sex, Art, and American Culture. Her words are firecrackers shocking the reader into shattering new perspectives on sex and life. But be warned: A baptism in her book must not be an end in itself. Her pearls of wit have a dark string attached, her serpentine undertow. Like all grab bags the good comes with the bad.
The book's format is as a collection of essays on Madonna, homosexuality, corporate raiders, date rape, and more. Her never-let-up catfighting is bound to scratch its way to the cauldron of all but the stillest of hearts. She rips off the wool sometimes damaging eyes in the process. Her prose is dizzingly delightful (e.g. "Incompetent amateurs have given prostitution a bad name."), but watch out for the hangover.
"Ms. Nietzsche" I crown her because of her modus operandi: She tears apart every scene on the human stage via the knife of Apollo/Dionysus. Exploring the deep caverns of social existence her concern with conflict is center ring. Sturm und Drang are everpresent in Paglialand. Commenting on a museum's rejection being used as a background for photos of her she discloses, "Both Playboy and the Philadelphia Museum of Art gain by their mutual exclusion. Each is an American institution, with its own tradition and destiny. A strong, vigorous society has the will and ability to draw lines, to make demarcations, to set limits. Identity thrives by conflict and opposition." Heraclitus is reborn.
Her strength is also her weakness. A Nietzsche can't live a sane life. The brimming will-to-power is not a primal force but an ideological self-destruct device. Yet Paglia can provide a heart dose of depth that's severely lacking in feminists and liberals, bent on making the world safe for mediocrity. She sees the Rousseau connection to the Left, but is unable to offer any alternative beyond Nietzsche, Freud, and de Sade. (For the uninitiated, Rousseauists tend to think that society makes people bad. This is an institutional view of evil: institutions are to blame for all social ills.)
Her most important find is her view that the decline of masculinity is the problem of our culture. This raw nugget should be snatched and refined before it gets lost in the torrents that are her writing. If man by nature requires manhood to flower, then the straightjacket feminism of our time is a defoliant. Those puritanical sisters are Agent Orange poisoning our youth into desexed obedience. The "beaming Betty Crockers, hangdog dowdies, and parochial prudes," her catchall for American feminists, are watered-down Josef Mengeles out to amputate penises and pave over vaginas.
Sadly, they're not alone. The assault on masculinity did not begin with the liberal "parochial prudes". Just as Political Correctness has its deep roots going down to Plato, Sparta and the Ten Commandments, the assault on manhood is an ideological hand-me-down. Today's trenchmen – er, trenchwomen are but the latest in a long line of terminators of the human spirit. They want man to bow for the sake of bowing. Mankind on its knees is their utopia.
It's hard to tell when she's joking and when she's straightfaced. Perhaps the essence of wit is to scramble the senses and sensibilities so we don't know which way is up. The redefining of "up" or "sensible" is something left for each of us to do. Like all critics, though, she does have a signpost to lead us out the confusion. But while she's busy with the guards why not roam freely outside the walls. Maybe then somebody will discover something deeper than Freud or Nietzsche. Thus I look at Paglia as a shock treatment not a cure for the numbing present-centeredness and bland semi-rebellion/semi- prostration of our time.