Bob Dylan once said that he’d never run out of material because “man can’t change.” This applies to the so-called battle of the sexes. It will always be afoot, changing only boundaries and battlefronts, and therefore author and intellect Camille Paglia will never run out of material. In her collection of essays spanning three decades, she doesn’t further the conflict as much as calling for real progress. She tries to make sense of the way we live now. And plenty sense, she does make.

Paglia writes about two main themes: modern feminism and contemporary academia. Fair enough. Most writers cover only two or three topics within their lifetimes, but pigeonholing this author into just two themes would be a gross simplification. While modern feminism and academia can be explosive topics—and the author admits to dropping bombs down the hatch and into their coveted halls—she delivers a common sense approach to her analysis that is often avoided on those fronts. By questioning their misguided efforts to achieve noble goals, she ends up challenging the working precepts of feminism and academia today.

Among her most common sense articles is “Rape and Modern Sex War.” It was originally an op-ed piece for the New York Times and ultimately one of her most contentious essays. Although she claims that the piece was diced and sliced by both editors and detractors across the globe, its message is clear: Rape is an unacceptable crime in a civilized society, but women will always need to be careful. Accepting that men can be a combustible breed, only a small fraction of one percent are rapists. Still, that fraction, given the right circumstances, can be dangerous, and a woman roaming freely in society must be alert to her specific dynamic and situation. Any person for that matter must be responsible for her/his own safety whenever possible. This simple advice evoked the ire of modern feminists, who on campus have positioned all incoming freshman males as potential rapists and therefore induced stifling constraints like overprotective mothers. They found the author’s call for personal responsibility to be insensitive if not outrageous, which is stunning for organizations hoping to train young men and women to go out into the dirty world. This reaction to Paglia’s article—revisited within the book’s introduction—delineates both the naiveté and recklessness of modern feminism and academia as a combined force.

“The Modern Campus Cannot Comprehend Evil” furthers the argument of academic regression. Campuses have transformed into idealistic and protective havens that fail to identify the evil inherent in mankind. With the infantilizing of students and the naive commitment to state of mind politics, students inside the campus bubble are left vulnerable by their own actions and to those who prey upon risky choices. Perhaps the author might have additionally recognized the indoctrination of campus-wide atheism, which ignores evil en route to debunking the existence of God as an all-powerful entity for good. Essential to the Judeo-Christian tradition and other religions is the battle between good and evil and, most importantly, the understanding of each. While campus religious indoctrination is no less acceptable than promoting atheistic beliefs, the campus chapel relationship continues to be dismantled, cutting off an avenue for students to learn about evil or at the very least know of its existence. In the absence of informed caution, there will be blind, misguided fear once trouble bursts the campus bubble, and a scared and ignorant group is historically easy to manipulate.

In “Are Men Obsolete?” the author explores the male as endangered species. As absurd as it sounds, the extinction of men, or at least the erasure of maleness, is a hallmark of radical feminism. As women continue to populate power positions within society, it’s the men who predominantly perform the dirty, hair-raising jobs, and when dark times arrive, women still glance at the men, if only furtively so, to get moving and fight for the risky solutions. And men do without question. While there will always be exceptions on both sides of the divide, they will be rare, and the reaction will be predictable along gender lines, driven by a combination of innate sensibilities and nature. She concludes by pointing out that the end of men would undoubtedly, outside of a sci-fi-horror-like society, result in the extinction of women as well. Each sex requires the other, and it’s time to acknowledge the strengths of each going forward.

Few will argue that feminism began as a righteous equality movement that demanded inclusion in a male-dominated society, but as the author points out, modern feminism has morphed into a disgruntled separatist scheme keen on exaggerating and vilifying male uniqueness. Its extreme elements want to erase maleness altogether, and in doing so, they have diminished what is unique and powerful about womanhood in order to create an idealistic homogeneous society. Why do you think millennial males so soundly ignored the January 2017 vagina monologues in Washington DC? In a modern world, it should make no difference whether one has a vagina or not. But of course it matters. Still, modern feminists have rejected biology and the undeniable differences between men and women that have equally shared in the shaping of civilization. It’s a kind of suicide of thought that willingly blinds itself to half of the facts.

This reckless course has been heartily supported by academia and enforced by a super-parental control body on campus that suppresses free speech and thought. As a result, intellectual discourse has suffered irreparable harm, not to mention damaging a generation of male creativeness and entrepreneurship. The modern male has to escape academia to succeed, rather than grow within its crucible. In truth, the modern female would do well to absorb as little of this poison as possible and work to secure her power position within society, not by force or politically correct control, but by her uniqueness and innate skill.

Paglia questions why modern academia has selected a course of thought suppression over its seminal nature of thought crucible—that once-hallowed proving ground for analyzing any idea. Great American thinker Eric Hoffer has the answer: The universities have been overrun by intellectuals (mostly of the modern Feminist and Marxist variety or some combination of the two), and the intellectual longs to turn the world into a giant classroom in order to indoctrinate their singular vein of thought. Everyone else gets punished severely for thinking out of line. Throughout history, we’ve seen this bloodless behavior repeated by those who usurp power.

Policies on campus and in government appear to be fear-driven and fear-inducing, but luckily we have Paglia bravely speaking out against the intellectual zombies that seek to stunt true progress and real intellectual discourse. Certainly she’s taken hits from various quarters for her outspokenness, but as this collection of essays proves, she has stood the test of time. More importantly, her arguments are as bulletproof as anyone’s anywhere and worthy of authentic discussion. In a time of regressive thought and destructive trends, Paglia is one of mans’ best friends.

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