This collection hasn’t aged a day—perhaps because the social and intellectual problems Paglia diagnosed 20 years ago are still with us: the exhaustion of the Left-Right paradigm, which is no longer capable of interpreting anything in this age of mass media and globalization; the tunnel vision of academic feminists on sexual assault; the tunnel vision of mainstream feminists on abortion; the fuzzy utopianism of social welfare planners; the corruption of American universities, which are larded up with more money than a New York hedge fund but hide that fact with hollow gestures of chic leftism; the sterility of contemporary cultural criticism; the totalitarian tactics of gay rights activists; and the massive ignorance of science and world religions. ALL STILL WITH US.In 20 essays (and one hilarious transcript of an extemporaneous lecture at MIT), Paglia writes against all of these debilities. Several essays are standouts. In “Rape and Modern Sex War,” she critiques the assumption that sex is merely socially constructed and therefore thoroughly controllable by language. In a review of a Suzanne Gordon book, Paglia implicitly argues that common sense progressive reforms (such as increased vacation time for workers) can be achieved without “sentimental, unlearned effusion” and the “cloying syrup of coercive compassion.” And in “East and West,” Paglia compares Judeo-Christianity with Hinduism and Buddhism to unlock alternate visions of time, space, God, and the body.But the centerpiece of the collection is “Junk Bonds and Corporate Raiders,” her 80 page essay on the state of humanities scholarship. The first half is a take-down of two books on gay studies. To be fair, I think she goes overboard. It’s “nitpicking”: i.e., the critic is so busy finding flaws that she loses her larger argument.The second half, however, when Paglia critiques the humanities departments of the early 1990s, is fabulous. It is worth the full price of admission. It is not the same critique of English departments made by neoconservatives in the early 1990s. Like neocons, Paglia detested the over-politicization of art. However, her model of cultural criticism embraced much more than a typical neocon was willing to embrace. She sees sex, nature, popular culture, all world religions (and not just Christianity), and mass media as central to understanding the high art and literary traditions. Setting her sights on the theoretical trinity of Lacan, Derrida, and Foucault, she persuasively argues that they were parochial figures whose insights did not translate to the American cultural and political scene. As she writes, “anyone culturally awake in the American Sixties was already deeply immersed in all the issues that entered the academy, in grotesquely distorted programmatic form, through the French keyhole in the Seventies” (218).In spite of the high seriousness of the subject matter, the essay is also hilarious. Like a stand-up comic, Paglia has a rapid-fire delivery. Working herself up into a full lather, she seems to enter a visionary space, “a Renaissance cosmology, a divine network of correspondences, where everything is in analogy to everything else” (118), which allows her to make riotous statements like these: “We didn’t need Derrida; we had Jimi Hendrix”; “Foucault, like David Letterman, made smirky glibness an art form”; “Lacan is a Freud T-shirt shrunk down to the teeny-weeny Saussure torso.”But at the same time—and this is why I love this book—there is a real spine of common sense and intellectual insight in the midst of the rhetorical flourishes. She makes brilliant points in every paragraph: critical theory is actually extreme rationalism “masquerading as distrust of reason”; world religions such as Hinduism and Buddhism dissolve European concepts better than deconstruction; Foucault “was struck down by the elemental force he repressed and edited out of his system”; women’s studies should be abolished and replaced with “sex studies,” in which all people with an interest in sex would be welcome.Sex, Art, and American Culture is the best introduction to Paglia’s thinking. It is not a substitute for her first book, Sexual Personae (which I need to get around to reviewing), though it shares common themes. A protest against narrowness and professionalism, it dramatizes how the life of the mind is not only compatible with humor and pleasure but is definitely enriched by them.