Yet, while Paglia’s potential readership is a minority, the timing of Provocations is perfect. Jordan Peterson and Jonathan Haidt have recently joined a sparse but stentorian chorus of voices in defense of the Western canon and against the politicization of higher education, reviving debates that raged decades ago, when Paglia’s dissertation advisor Harold Bloom had to forego a customary Q & A after a public lecture on Shakespeare to avoid being mobbed by Wellesley College faculty eager to attack the patriarchy he allegedly represented. At least a small number of the intellectual catacomb dwellers can still enjoy Paglia’s epigrammatic sermons: “Beautiful women are a fascinating conflation of nature and art.”

For the sake of disclosure, I count myself among these catacomb dwellers. I have had a two-and-a-half decade-long intellectual crush on the author of Provocations, ever since I discovered her writings in the mid-1990s, while in graduate school at Brown. The elegant erudition of Sexual Personae (never mind the fact that it took Paglia a decade to get it published) reaffirmed my faith that, contrary to appearances, scholarship was not yet dead. There was still room for clearly-worded, evidence-supported arguments that incorporated aesthetic judgment. Sex, Art, and American Culture (1992), Paglia’s first collection of essays, with its reprint of “Junk Bonds and Corporate Raiders: Academe in the Hour of the Wolf,” was revelatory. Having completed my primary schooling in a society steeped in ideology and propagandistic lies (the USSR), I instinctively saw through the false idols worshipped by many of the faculty at Brown. Now I had an explanation for why the indiscriminate use of French theory to the detriment of other approaches was indeed as toxic as I had always suspected. Paglia’s debunking of the “four legs good, two legs bad” mentality that ostracized people seen reading The New Criterion, or using formal analysis, or citing Walter Pater, was a breath of fresh air. Her “street-smart feminism” seemed similarly logical to me: in the early 90s, as college co-eds were bombarded with warnings about date-rape, I could not wrap my mind around the idea that a scantily-dressed young woman could enter what Paglia called the “testosterone flat” of a frat house, get smashed, and then expect equally smashed brothers to remember that she is a lady. Paglia’s second collection of essays, Vamps & Tramps (1994), cleared that issue up. I was so taken by her common sense (both scholarly and mundane) that I acted like a Jehovah’s Witness in proselytizing her writings to anyone who would listen. I even briefly considered asking her to be on my dissertation committee, until I came to my senses. It was 1998, and Camille Paglia was emitting a steady radioactive glow. It was impossible to imagine completing my doctorate with this academic enfant terrible overseeing my efforts.

Provocations is Paglia’s third collection of essays on a broad range of topics. Last year she came out with a more focused volume titled Free Women, Free Men, which addressed sex, gender and feminism. Some of the entries on these subjects reappear in Provocations. Between Vamps & Tramps and Provocations she published The Birds (1998), a monograph on the eponymous movie), Break, Blow, Burn (2005), an analysis of forty-three poems, and Glittering Images (2012), another collection of analyses, this time of twenty-nine visual images.

Like Nabokov’s Strong Opinions, Provocations contains essays, lectures, short articles, and interviews. Some, like “Dance of the Senses: Natural Vision and Psychotic Mysticism in Theodore Roethke,” and “‘Stay, Illusion’: Ambiguity in Shakespeare’s Hamlet” are original scholarly articles. Others, like “Cults and Cosmic Consciousness: Religious Vision in the American 1960s,” “Free Speech and the Modern Campus,” and “The North American Intellectual Tradition” are well-researched, comprehensive historical surveys. One of the most brilliant essays in the volume is “Theater of Gender: David Bowie at the Climax of the Sexual Revolution,” which was Paglia’s hefty contribution to the catalogue for a retrospective exhibit of Bowie’s costumes at the Victoria & Albert Museum in 2013. Her erudite contextual analysis traces the genesis of Bowie’s hybrid, eclectic persona to nineteenth-century Romanticism, and epitomizes what she calls the “respectful illumination” of the artist and the artwork. In these longer essays (some of which originated as lectures) the language is flowing, lucid, and jargon-free, while Paglia’s authorial voice retains the appropriate scholarly detachment. Her tone changes in the pieces written for digital consumption. In her online Salon articles, as Paglia notes, it becomes “punchy, scrappy, take-no-prisoners,” a suitable mode for a “myth-critic and pagan cultist.” Paglia’s embrace of popular culture made her a pioneer of Internet writing by academics. Her seamless move from print op-eds on current issues to digital columns for Salon proves that she was a good student of Marshall McLuhan. For Paglia the Internet had a double allure. It provided the opportunity to create hybrid text incorporating both word and image, while serving as an uncensored communication platform for “an invisible, subterranean resistance movement.”

It is under the “Ask Camille” rubric for the Salon that Paglia succumbs to solipsism, which in turn results in some slips of judgment. Her attempt to draw a parallel between herself and the subject of her article “On Ayn Rand” leads her astray, as she praises Rand as “a bold female thinker who should immediately have been a centerpiece of women’s studies programs.” This evaluation of Rand is at odds with historical evidence that reveals the Russian-born writer as a power-hungry, sadistic, manipulative vamp whose ideas about rational egoism were entirely derived from the most unpalatable characters of Russian imperial history, including Dmitry Karakozov, Sergei Nechaev and Vladimir Ulianov (Lenin). Rand’s actual legacy, as far as American history is concerned, is the “subprime crisis” of 2008, which sprang from the Federal Reserve’s failure to regulate the derivatives market. How was this Rand’s fault? At the time of the crisis, the Federal Reserve was headed by Alan Greenspan, Ayn Rand’s favorite disciple, groomed and ideologically reprogrammed in her New York salon. Rand subsequently accompanied Greenspan to the White House, where he was sworn in as the chief economist to the president. After her death, Greenspan became head of the Federal Reserve, where he conducted real-life experiments with the US economy in an attempt to build Rand’s objectivist paradise. Rand was not “the Camille Paglia of the 1960s,” and the difference between them is not rationalism (Rand) vs. mysticism (Paglia), as Paglia informs her Salon readers. Rand was a derivative sociopath whose legacy was a staggering economic calamity, while Paglia is an oppositional intellectual, dedicated to elevating “free thought and free speech over all other values,” who sees “art and the contemplation of art as a medium of intuition and revelation.”

By Paglia’s own admission, her Salon column takes on “the hectoring personae of old-time radio and TV: the host, the standup comic, and the pitchman, a descendant of the carnival barker,” so perhaps inaccuracies are inevitable. When her attention is directed outward, her erudition and common sense often result in staggeringly acute evaluations of the art world, politics, education and religion. Her pithy analysis of the NEA’s debacles during the 1990s culture wars is as riveting as her evaluation of the problems with American higher education. In the first instance she nails the problem by pointing out the “degeneration of standards in our Playskool model of primary education, in which everyone is an artist, without the discipline of technical mastery” and the prevalent “feel-good relativism.” Her diagnosis that in the United States “the Left as well as the Right—Stalinism as well as Puritanism—has abused art” is the best explanation I have heard for the current state of grants and museums, most of which are now overseen by liberal-leaning administrators. She argues that, in order to function properly, both art and education need to be depoliticized, rather than function as a “political penny arcade.” An expert provocateur herself, she is against “pointless provocation” of the kind that takes place when publically funded institutions engage in scandalizing the public to prove their open-mindedness, correctly describing that strategy as “adolescent wallowing in slack ‘oppositional’ art.”

Paglia’s expertise in combining images and text drives one of her keenest insights. In a television-dominated environment, where young people are bombarded with disconnected images, there will be a particular need for what she calls “a sympathetic instrument” to analyze them. In “The Magic of Images: Word and Picture in the Media Age,” a version of a lecture at a 2002 conference on literacy, she draws a connection between the decline in the quality of primary education which, combined with the rise of personal computers, has “unmoored” the younger generation “from the mother ship of culture.” In turn, this affects their ability to concentrate or to attain the patience necessary to analyze complex texts, build organized argument, and apply deductive reasoning. Her observation that the Internet’s “addictive unfurling hypertext… encourages restless acceleration,” has since been confirmed by the widespread digital addiction to social media. Time has shown that Paglia was also right about the increasing balkanization and bureaucratization of American higher education, as well as about the importance of popular culture in any serious discussion of art. As Andre Gide said, however, “since no one was listening, everything must be said again.” And that is the point of Provocations: to continue the fight for art, culture and against indoctrination.

Paglia is obsessed with fluidity. Her insistence on the superiority of the androgen/ transgender model is part of this larger theme, which encompasses thought, as well as sex and gender. Just as she deplores the “therapeutic customer-service operations” that universities have become, she is proud of the “flexibility of [her] system of interpretation.” Paglia’s genuinely interdisciplinary scholarship, equally at ease the verbal and the visual, gives her a clear strategic advantage over compartmentalized disciplines. Her decades-long crusade to give equal consideration to the gems of the canon and popular culture makes her adept to analyze Rhianna’s outfits and John Donne’s poetry. Her war cry for young people questioning their sexuality is “Stay fluid!” And when she refers to herself as “transgendered,” she is not talking about a physical change, which in her view cannot be subjectively mandated, but about her ability to combine the desirable features of both genders—intellectually, psychologically, and perhaps emotionally. Like Vladimir Nabokov, who prided himself that his “lucid,… balanced, mad mind” was able to rein his magical imagery into honed prose, Paglia clearly enjoys having a backstage pass to both the Dionysian and the Apollonian modalities. She is not comfortable within one norm, and prefers straddling the span of both to the limitations of the juste milieu.

This insistence on flexibility and subtlety of interpretation also permeates Paglia’s views on sex, gender and feminism, an area often prone to declaratory statements and oversimplification. Her basic premise, meticulously developed in Sexual Personae, is that women fail to realize their power over men, who are biologically determined to pursue them. Her definition of the “tormented fragility of male sexual identity” recalls one of the lesser known epigrams of Oscar Wilde, printed in a Peter Pauper Press edition that she discovered while in college: “The history of woman is the history of the worst form of tyranny the world has ever known: the tyranny of the weak over the strong. It is the only tyranny that lasts.” One of Paglia’s pet peeves is the pervasive (in both the second and third wave of feminism) view of women as powerless fragile victims, always under assault. She is driven apoplectic by the direction feminism took after Betty Friedan, which presented women as hapless victims of institutionalized patriarchy, in need of special, state-mandated protections. In Paglia’s view, once post-structuralist theory was added into the mix in the late 1980s, the idea of gender as an illusion of language caused a yet further alienation of regular women from the feminist movement, which now succumbed to a “self-referential discourse” aimed at a narrow elite.

While she respects Betty Friedan, and considers Germaine Greer “a feminist colossus—bold, learned and devastatingly witty,” Paglia deplores anti-pornography, men- hating feminists like Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin who, in her view, “perversely turned against the 1960s sexual revolution,” forming a reactionary movement. In an essay entitled “Women and Law,” originally published as a preface to a collection of interviews with female public prosecutors in Brazil, she traces the legal status of women across millennia and through different cultures, up to the birth of feminism, emphasizing the regression into puritanical mores among American feminists of the 1980s. Her conclusion comes in the form of a rhetorical question: “is woman a victim, mutilated by the horrors of history, or is she a capable and resilient agent, responsible for her own actions and desires?” Paglia clearly values capability, bravery and accomplishment—one of the most passionate pieces in Provocations is a paean to Helen Gurley Brown, originally published in The Sunday Times in the aftermath of her death in 2012. And although she does not mention her by name, Paglia is surely an admirer of one of the most accomplished women of the twentieth century: the writer, senator, and twice ambassador Clare Boothe Luce. The way Paglia sees it, the two options women have are either to seek the protection of the state, repeating the centuries-old tradition of male guardianship, or to “value freedom above all, despite its pain and risk.” Her own stance here is unequivocal: in a 2008 Guardian questionnaire she named her greatest fear as imprisonment. “I have to be free!” she said.

The most recent article in this volume is “Movies, Art, and Sex War,” whose original title was “MeToo and Modern Sexuality: Endless Bitter Rancor Lies Ahead.” It spells out Paglia’s opinion on the hash tag phenomenon. As might be expected from a “street-wise” feminist who acknowledges female strength and power, the victimization narrative appalls Paglia. It is clear to her that women will not gain from a movement where collateral damage potentially encompasses the other half of the population. Her “pro-sex” vision has always clashed with the views of the feminists like Kate Millett, whom Paglia labeled “a morose philistine” because of her book Sexual Politics that, according to Paglia, consists largely of “trashing great male authors and artists for their hidden sexism.” #MeToo is a continuation of that male-bashing tendency, an “open sex war—a grisly death match that neither men nor women will win.” Paglia’s well-justified fear is that, far from ending predation of women in the workplace, the revival of decades-old, unsubstantiated allegations will resuscitate stereotypes of women as hysterical, vindictive and volatile. She warns that #MeToo’s legacy will be “endless sexual miscommunication and bitter rancor,”— thus circling back to the warnings of the importance of visual literacy offered in “The Magic of Images.” Paglia’s argument is that, with the waning of the projected image that magnified emotions on screen, young people (whose default mode of communication is imageless texting) will eventually lose the ability to read facial expressions and body language. In short, #MeToo threatens to discredit the essential human emotions behind the Western artistic tradition that Paglia has taught for decades. Provocations is the last call to a society that “can barely survive the anxieties of freedom.”