Camille Paglia: Trending quotes (page 12)

“It would be ridiculous to claim that gay men are interested only on other gay men and would never ogle straight men in barracks showers. When I heard this one on TV, I burst out laughing. Anyone who belongs to a health club knows better. Sexual tension and appraisal are constants, above all among gay men, who never stop cruising everything in sight. Seduction of straight studs is a highly erotic motif in gay porn.”

Camille Paglia

Source: Vamps and Tramps (1994), "No Law in the Arena: A Pagan Theory of Sexuality", p. 87

Men , Health

Camille Paglia

Playboy interview (May 1995)

Hate , People , World , Thinking

“The born-yesterday French-besotted faddists, addicted sniffers of wet printer’s ink, think they’re starting on the ground floor; so they’re condemned to another hundred years of trial and error. The rest of us can safely ignore them.”

Camille Paglia

Source: Sex, Art and American Culture : New Essays (1992), Junk Bonds and Corporate Raiders : Academe in the Hour of the Wolf, p. 202

Error , Thinking

“Women have conceptualized less in history not because men have kept them from doing so but because women do not need to conceptualize in order to exist. […] Fetishism, for instance, a practice which like most of the sex perversions is confined to men, is clearly a conceptualizing or symbol-making activity. Man’s vastly greater commercial patronage of pornography is analogous.”

Camille Paglia

Source: Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990), p. 20

Women , Men , Sex , History

“I feel that the moment a date happens that it’s a social encounter that is potentially a sexual encounter. And the question of sex needs to be negotiated from the first moment on.”

Camille Paglia

Source: Sex, Art and American Culture : New Essays (1992), The Rape Debate, Continued, p. 70

Sex , Feeling , Question

“For me, the Profumo affair symbolizes the evanescence of male government compared to women’s cosmic power.”

Camille Paglia

Source: Sex, Art and American Culture : New Essays (1992), p. 11

Women

“My position on date rape is partly based on my study of The Faerie Queen, as detailed in a full chapter in Sexual Personae: in 1590, the poet Edmund Spencer already sees that passive, drippy, naive women constantly get themselves into rape scenarios, while talented, intelligent, alert women, his warrior heroines, spot trouble coming and boldly trounce their male assailants. My feminism stresses courage, independence, self-reliance, and pride.”

Camille Paglia

Source: Sex, Art and American Culture : New Essays (1992), p. 304

Women , Intelligence , Courage , Study

“As a philosopher sympathetic to Foucault recently remarked to me, Foucault failed in each of his major inquiries and, in desperation, went further afield from his areas of expertise. The History of Sexuality is a disaster. Page after page is sheer fantasy, unsupported by the ancient or modern historical record.”

Camille Paglia

Source: Sex, Art and American Culture : New Essays (1992), Junk Bonds and Corporate Raiders : Academe in the Hour of the Wolf, p. 187

History

“The Faerie Queene is the most extended and extensive meditation on sex in the history of poetry. It charts the entire erotic spectrum, a great chain of being rising from matter to spirit, from the coarsest lust to chastity and romantic idealism. The poem’s themes of sex and politics are parallel: the psyche, like society, must be disciplined by good government. Spenser agrees with the classical and Christian philosophers on the primacy of reason over animal appetites. He looks forward to the Romantic poets, however, in the way that he shows the sex impulse as ultimately daemonic and barbaric, breeding witches and sorcerers of evil allure. Like the Odyssey, The Faerie Queene is a heroic epic in which the masculine must evade female traps or delays.”

Camille Paglia

Source: Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990), p. 188

Sex , Way , History , Evil

“Gay and straight men have much more in common than do gay men with lesbians or straight men with straight women. Every man must define his identity against his mother. If he does not, he he just falls back into her and is swallowed up. This is the agonizing myth-pattern in the comic, matricidal Psycho (1960), one of the hauntingly emblematic films of our time.”

Camille Paglia

Source: Sex, Art and American Culture : New Essays (1992), p. 23

Women , Men , Time

“[W]earisome as it may seem, women must realize that, in making a commitment to a man, they have merged in his unconscious with his mother and have therefore inherited the ambivalence of that relationship.”

Camille Paglia

Source: Vamps and Tramps (1994), "No Law in the Arena: A Pagan Theory of Sexuality", p. 46.

Women

“With their propagandistic frame of mind, feminist leaders never admitted that their opponents could be equally motivated by ethics.”

Camille Paglia

Source: Vamps and Tramps (1994), "No Law in the Arena: A Pagan Theory of Sexuality", p. 39

Motivation

“The thrill of terror is passive, masochistic, and implicitly feminine. It is imaginative submission to overwhelming superior force.”

Camille Paglia

Source: Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990), p. 267

Imagination

“All the genres of philosophy, science, high art, athletics and politics were invented by men. But by the Promethean law of conflict and capture, woman has a right to seize what she will and vie with man on her own terms.”

Camille Paglia

Source: Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990), p. 9

Men , Law , Art , Science

“The signal failure of the academic Marxists is in their obliviousness to the transformation of modern labor. In the age of mass media, power has shifted its meaning and loci. Capitalism, whatever its problems, remains the most efficient economic mechanism yet to bring the highest quality of life to the greatest number. Because I have studied the past, I know that, in America and under capitalism, I am the freest woman in history. Union blue-collar jobs now routinely pay higher salaries than are earned by most teachers. Physical labor, as a concrete skill occupation, is free of the soul-destroying office politics suffers by the Marxists' demonized managerial class, who take their jobs home with them and are in a continual funk of anxiety and neurosis. … Unharried weekend leisure time is the center of working-class American life in ways the academic Marxists, resentfully marking papers and endlessly pressed for time, simply don't see.</b”

Camille Paglia

Source: Sex, Art and American Culture : New Essays (1992), Junk Bonds and Corporate Raiders : Academe in the Hour of the Wolf, pp. 247

Life , Age , Way , Home

“It is no coincidence that while some major female artists have married, very few have borne children. The issue is not conservation of energy but imaginative integrity. Art is its own self-swelling, proof that the mind is greater than the body.”

Camille Paglia

Source: Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990), p. 660

Children , Art , Imagination

“The real butches are straight … dealing with and controlling men makes you stronger.”

Camille Paglia

Source: Vamps and Tramps (1994), "No Law in the Arena: A Pagan Theory of Sexuality", p. 81

Men

“I collected 599 pictures of Elizabeth Taylor — some people find that obsessive. I collected 599. Not 600, but 599. I feel that genius and obsession be the same thing. It is rare when a woman is driven by obsession. Similarly, it is rare when a woman is a genius. That's why I said one of my most notorious sentences, that there is no woman Mozart because there is no woman Jack the Ripper. Men are more prone to obsession because they are fleeing domination by women. They flee to a chess game or to a computer or to fixing a car, or whatever, to attempt to complete their identities, because they always feel incomplete.”

Camille Paglia

Playboy interview (May 1995)

Women , Men , People , Cars

“The female body’s unbearable hiddenness applies to all aspects men’s dealings with women. What does it look like in there? Did she have an orgasm? Is it really my child? Who was my real father? Mystery surrounds women’s sexuality. This mystery is the main reason for the imprisonment man has imposed on women. Only by confining his wife in a locked harem guarded by eunuchs could he be certain that her son was also his.”

Camille Paglia

Source: Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990), p. 22

Women , Men

“Oil painting and color, said Michelangelo, are for “women and the lazy.” His sharp-edged Apollonian style is the only way to beat back mother nature.”

Camille Paglia

Source: Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990), p. 158

Women , Color , Way , Nature