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Camille Paglia Quotes
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Camille Anna Paglia is an American academic and social critic. Paglia has been a professor at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, since 1984. Paglia is critical of many aspects of modern culture, and is the author of Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson . She is a critic of American feminism and of post-structuralism as well as a commentator on multiple aspects of American culture such as its visual art, music, and film history. In 2005, Paglia was ranked No. 20 on a Prospect/Foreign Policy poll of the world's top 100 public intellectuals.

✵ 2. April 1947
Camille Paglia photo
Camille Paglia: 326 quotes46 likes

Camille Paglia Quotes

“Feminist anti-porn discourse virtually always ignores the gigantic gay male porn industry, since any mention of the latter would bring crashing to the ground the absurd argument that pornography is by definition the subordination of women.”

Camille Paglia

Source: Vamps and Tramps (1994), "No Law in the Arena: A Pagan Theory of Sexuality", p. 65

“Feminism has exceeded its proper mission of seeking political equality for women and has ended by rejecting contingency, that is, human limitation by nature or fate.”

Camille Paglia

Source: Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990), p. 3

“Even the most morbid of the rape ranters have a childlike faith in the perfectibility of the universe, which they see as blighted solely by nasty men. They simplistically project outward onto a mythical "patriarchy" their own inner conflicts and moral ambiguities.”

Camille Paglia

Source: Vamps and Tramps (1994), "No Law in the Arena: A Pagan Theory of Sexuality", p. 25

“Women's studies is institutionalized sexism.”

Camille Paglia

Source: Sex, Art and American Culture : New Essays (1992), Junk Bonds and Corporate Raiders : Academe in the Hour of the Wolf, p. 242

“Art advances by self-mutilation of the artist.”

Camille Paglia

Source: Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990), p. 54

“Contemporary feminists, who are generally poor or narrowly trained scholars, insist on viewing history as a weepy scenario of male oppression and female victimization. But it is more accurate to see men, driven by sexual anxiety away from their mothers, forming group alliances by male bonding to create complex structures of society, art, science and technology.”

Camille Paglia

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

“Feminism has tried to dismiss the femme fatale as a misogynist libel, a hoary cliche. But the femme fatale expresses woman's ancient and eternal control of the sexual realm. The specter of the femme fatale stalks all of men's relationships with women.”

Camille Paglia

Source: Sex, Art and American Culture : New Essays (1992), p. 15

“Lesbian feminists, for all their ideals of sisterhood and solidarity, can treat each other with a fickleness, a parasitic exploitativeness, and vicious spite that have to be seen to be believed.”

Camille Paglia

Source: Vamps and Tramps (1994), "No Law in the Arena: A Pagan Theory of Sexuality", p. 80

“Western culture from the start has swerved from femaleness. The last western society to worship female powers was Minoan Crete. And significantly, that fell and did not rise again.”

Camille Paglia

Source: Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990), p. 8

“Woman was an idol of belly-magic. She seemed to swell and give birth by her own law. From the beginning of time, woman has seemed an uncanny being. Man honored but feared her. She was the black maw that had spat him forth and would devour him anew. Men, bonding together, invented culture as a defense against female nature. Sky-cult was the most sophisticated step in this process, for its switch of the creative locus from earth to sky is a shift from belly-magic to head-magic. And from this defensive head-magic has come the spectacular glory of male civilization, which has lifted woman with it. The very language and logic modern woman uses to assail patriarchal culture were the invention of men.”

Camille Paglia

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

“Madonna won my undying loyalty by reviving and re-creating the hard glamour of the studio-era Hollywood movie queens, figures of mythological grandeur. Contemporary feminism cut itself off from history and bankrupted itself when it spun its paranoid fantasy of male oppressors and female sex-object victims. Woman is the dominant sex. Woman’s sexual glamour has bewitched and destroyed men since Delilah and Helen of Troy.”

Camille Paglia

Source: Sex, Art and American Culture : New Essays (1992), p. 10

“The only antidote to the magic of images is the magic of words.”

Camille Paglia

Break, Blow, Burn (2005)

“From Stonewall to the first AIDS alert was only twelve short years. In the Eighties and early Nineties, displaced anxiety over the horror of AIDS turned gay activists into raging nihilists and monomaniacs, who dishonestly blamed the disease on the government and trampled on the rights of the gay majority, and whose errors of judgement materially aided the rise and consolidation of the far right. AIDS did not appear out of nowhere. It was a direct result of the sexual revolution, which my generation unleashed with the best intentions, but whose worst effects were to be suffered primarily by gay men.”

Camille Paglia

Source: Vamps and Tramps (1994), "No Law in the Arena: A Pagan Theory of Sexuality", p. 68

“I am a passionate admire of Sappho, but that has to be one of the stupidest sentences I have ever seen in a scholarly book.”

Camille Paglia

Source: Sex, Art and American Culture : New Essays (1992), Junk Bonds and Corporate Raiders : Academe in the Hour of the Wolf, p. 204, on John Winkler’s claim that “Sappho’s consciousness is a larger circle enclosing the smaller one of Homer,” in Winkler’s Constraints of Desire.

“The search for freedom through sex is doomed to failure.”

Camille Paglia

Source: Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990), p. 4

“Sappho is a great poet because she is a lesbian, which gives her erotic access to the Muse. Sappho and the homosexual-tending Emily Dickinson stand alone above women poets, because poetry's mystical energies are ruled by a hierach requiring the sexual subordination of her petitioners. Women have achieved more as novelists than as poets because the social novel operates outside the ancient marriage of myth and eroticism.”

Camille Paglia

Source: Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990), p. 672

“I want to cry out to these young girls: Stop! Think!... For heaven's sake, don't fall down the rabbit hole of the lesbian scene. You will never escape, and your talent will wither on the vine. Your energy will be wasted and absorbed in repetition without progression. Women alone are Spenser's Bower of Bliss, enclosed, comfortable, and dangerous.”

Camille Paglia

Source: Vamps and Tramps (1994), "No Law in the Arena: A Pagan Theory of Sexuality", p. 82

“After the Sixties there was a collapse in almost everything we believed in. It culminated in the biological disaster of AIDS — an answer to every one of us who preached free love. … AIDS is a price paid for sins committed in the Sixties, and by gay men who took free love to extremes throughout the Seventies and had unrestrained, decadent, pagan sex. I support paganism in all its forms, but a price must be paid. I believed in free love, too, but we were wrong. It wasn't the Pope who was the problem. It wasn't the struggle with old-fashioned moral codes that was the problem. It was nature. Nature said, "Guess what? If you're going to be that promiscuous, I will off you."”

Camille Paglia

… I believe that nature rewards things that are in its best interest and punishes things that are not.
Playboy interview (May 1995)

“In today's impoverished dialogue, critiques of liberalism are often naively called "conservative," as if twenty-five hundred years of Western intellectual tradition presented no other alternatives.”

Camille Paglia

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

“Women's studies is a comfy, chummy morass of unchallenged groupthink. It is, with rare exception, totally unscholarly. Academic feminists have silenced men and dissenting women.”

Camille Paglia

Source: Sex, Art and American Culture : New Essays (1992), Junk Bonds and Corporate Raiders : Academe in the Hour of the Wolf, p. 242

“The saints, many of them women, warred with themselves as well as God. The body has its own animal urges, just as there are attractions and repulsions in sex that modern liberalism cannot face.”

Camille Paglia

Source: Sex, Art and American Culture : New Essays (1992), p. 37

“In the summer camp mentality of American universities, the ferocity of genuine intellectual debate would just seem like spoiling everyone’s fun. Ambitious humanities professors go about the business behind a brick wall of “theory,” which they imagine is the dernier cri, but which has long been out of fashion, even in Paris. Drab, uncultivated philistines, without broad knowledge of the arts, have seized the top jobs in the Ivy League, simply because they have the right opinions and know the right people. In the past twenty years, conferences became the infernal engine driving the academic profession. The conference crowd, an international party circuit of literary luminaries ever on the move, was put together by the new humanities centers. These programs had the initially laudable aim of fostering interdisciplinary exchanges outside the repressive framework of the conservative, static and over-tenured university departments. But the epidemic of French theory was abroad in the world. The humanities centers quickly became careerist stockyards, where greedy speculation and insider trading were as much the rules of the game as on Wall Street.”

Camille Paglia

Source: Vamps and Tramps (1994), p. 101

“I hate dogma in any form. I hated it in the Catholic Church and Girl Scout troops of the 1950s, and I hate in in gay activism and established feminism today.”

Camille Paglia

Source: Vamps and Tramps (1994), p. 104

“The women's movement is rooted in the belief that we don't even need men. All it will take is one natural disaster to prove how wrong that is. Then, the only thing holding this culture together will be masculine men of the working class. The cultural elite — women and men — will be pleading for the plumbers and the construction workers. We are such a parasitic class.”

Camille Paglia

Playboy interview (May 1995)

“Women will never succeed at the level or in the numbers they deserve until they get over their genteel reluctance to take abuse in the attack and counterattack of territorial warfare. The recent trend in feminism, notably in sexual harassment policy, has been to overrely on regulation and legislation rather than to promote personal responsibility. Women must not become wards and supplicants of authority figures. Freedom means rejecting dependency.”

Camille Paglia

Source: Vamps and Tramps (1994), p. x

“In negotiating with rejected lovers or husbands, women must stop thinking they can make everyone happy. In many cases of harassment and stalking, it is clear that the woman never learned how to terminate the fantasy — which requires resolution and decisiveness on their part. Wavering, dithering, or passive hysterical fear will only intensify or prolong pursuit.”

Camille Paglia

Source: Vamps and Tramps (1994), "No Law in the Arena: A Pagan Theory of Sexuality", p. 47

“Male tumescence is an assertion of the separateness of objects. An erection is architectural, sky-pointing. Female tumescence, through blood or water, is slow, gravitational, amorphous. In the war for human identity, male tumescence is an instrument, female tumescence an obstruction. The fatty female body is a sponge. At peak menstrual and natal moments, it is locked passively in place, suffering wave after wave of Dionysian power.”

Camille Paglia

Source: Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990), p. 91

“Effeminate men have suffered a bad press the world over.”

Camille Paglia

Source: Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990), p. 125

“I am reverential to great stars. I don't want sexual congress with them. The writer in me reveres the artist in them.”

Camille Paglia

Playboy interview (May 1995)

“[Henry] James’s repressions and evasions are many, varied and exhausting. Why more people are not seen rushing shrieking from libraries, shredding James novels in their hands, I cannot say. I used to wonder whether enthusiasm for him was based on identification, since his passive, tentative heroes resemble many academics. Perhaps what is intolerable is his enshrinement in a soporific criticism. So much must be overlooked to crown him with laurel.”

Camille Paglia

Source: Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990), p. 622

“Only utopian liberals could be surprised that the Nazis were art connoisseurs.”

Camille Paglia

Source: Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990), p. 29

“That nature acts differently upon the sexes is proved by the test case of modern male and female homosexuality, illustrating how the sexes function separately outside social conventions. The results, according to statistics of sexual frequency: male satyriasis and female nesting. The male homosexual has more sex than his heterosexual counterpart; the female homosexual less often than hers, a radical polarization of the sexes along a single continuum of shared sexual nonconformity. Male aggression and lust are the energizing factors in culture. They are men’s tools of survival in the pagan vastness of female nature.”

Camille Paglia

Source: Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990), p. 26

“Most people aren't sure what's going to happen on a first date. Given that ambiguity, every woman must be totally aware at every moment that she is responsible for every choice she makes. … protect yourselves. See trouble coming.”

Camille Paglia

Playboy interview (May 1995)

“What I see is not a world of male oppression and female victimization but an international conspiracy by women to keep from men the knowledge of men's own frailty. A strange maternal protectiveness is at work.”

Camille Paglia

Source: Vamps and Tramps (1994), "No Law in the Arena: A Pagan Theory of Sexuality", p. 47

“The evolution of earth-cult to sky-cult shifts woman into the nether realm. Her mysterious procreative powers and the resemblance of her rounded breasts, belly, and hips to earth’s contours put her at the center of early symbolism. She was the model for the Great Mother figures who crowded the birth of religion worldwide. But the mother cults did not mean freedom for women. On the contrary […] cult objects are prisoners of their own symbolic inflation. Every totem lives in taboo.”

Camille Paglia

Source: Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990), p. 8

“The post-war "publish or perish" tyranny must end. The profession has become obsessed with quantity rather than quality. […] One brilliant article should outweigh one mediocre book.”

Camille Paglia

Source: Sex, Art and American Culture : New Essays (1992), Junk Bonds and Corporate Raiders : Academe in the Hour of the Wolf, p. 237

“Running to Mommy and Daddy on the campus grievance committee is unworthy of strong women.”

Camille Paglia

Source: Sex, Art and American Culture : New Essays (1992), Rape and Modern Sex War, p. 53

“I loathe Meryl Streep. She was good in Silkwood, but she began to take herself very seriously. I'm reacting to the horrendous overpraise she has received. She is a calculated actress, a victim of her own WASP culture. I find her totally unconvincing. She has no passion. She has no deep elemental vibration. Jodie Foster is overpraised, too. I thought she was good in The Silence of the Lambs, and The Accused, but she's getting on my nerves.”

Camille Paglia

Playboy interview (May 1995)

“Nefertiti is like Athena born from the brow of Zeus, a head-heavy armored goddess. She is beautiful but desexed.”

Camille Paglia

Source: Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990), p. 71

“From early on, my father talked to me like an adult. One of the earliest things he did was teach me the Latin names of the parts of the body. He was very analytic. We had no money, but intellectual curiosity was encouraged, and my parents constantly talked with each other. This develops the brain. I remember listening and thinking, listening to voices talking, talking, talking. … My father died of cancer but lived long enough to see me famous, though not long enough to read my book fully. If he were alive I wouldn't be quite so outrageous, speaking about my sex life, for instance. I don't believe in embarrassing my family.”

Camille Paglia

Playboy interview (May 1995)

“Is there intellectual life in America? At present, the answer is no.”

Camille Paglia

Source: Vamps and Tramps (1994), p. 97

“Most of western culture is a distortion of reality. But reality should be distorted; that is, imaginatively amended. The Buddhist acquiescence to nature is neither accurate about nature nor just to human potential.”

Camille Paglia

Source: Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990), p. 13

“I plan to vote for Barack Obama in the Pennsylvania primary because he is a rational, centered personality who speaks the language of idealism and national unity. Obama has served longer as an elected official than Hillary. He has had experience as a grass-roots activist, and he is also a highly educated lawyer who will be a quick learner in office. His international parentage and childhood, as well as his knowledge of both Christianity and Islam, would make him the right leader at the right time. And his wife Michelle is a powerhouse. The Obamas represent the future, not the past.”

Camille Paglia

"Camille Paglia on Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Iran and More" at Salon.com (8 January 2008)

“Men, gay or straight, can get beauty and lewdness into one image. Women are forever softening, censoring, politicizing.”

Camille Paglia

Source: Vamps and Tramps (1994), "No Law in the Arena: A Pagan Theory of Sexuality", p. 65

“Women's studies needed a syllabus and so invented a canon overnight. It puffed up clunky, mundane contemporary women authors into Oz-like, skywriting dirigibles. Our best women students are being force-fed an appalling diet of cant, drivel and malarkey.”

Camille Paglia

Source: Sex, Art and American Culture : New Essays (1992), Junk Bonds and Corporate Raiders : Academe in the Hour of the Wolf, p. 243

“MacKinnon is a totalitarian. She wants a risk-free, state controlled world. She believes rules and regulations will solve every human ill and straighten out all those irksome problems between the sexes that have been going on for five thousand years. As a lawyer, MacKinnon is deft and pragmatic. But as a political thinker, cultural historian or commentator on sex, she is incompetent. For a woman of her obvious intelligence, her frame of reference is shockingly small.”

Camille Paglia

Source: Vamps and Tramps (1994), "No Law in the Arena: A Pagan Theory of Sexuality", p. 108

“Sex cannot be understood because nature cannot be understood. Science is a method of logical analysis of nature’s operations. It has lessened human anxiety about the cosmos by demonstrating the materiality of nature’s forces, and their frequent predictability. But science is always playing catch-up ball. Nature breaks its own rules whenever it wants. Science cannot avert a single thunderbolt. Western science is a product of the Apollonian mind: its hope is that by naming and classification, by the cold light of intellect, archaic night can be pushed back and defeated.”

Camille Paglia

Source: Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990), p. 5

“Let's get rid of Infirmary Feminism, with its bedlam of bellyachers, anorexics, bulimics, depressives, rape victims, and incest survivors. Feminism has become a catch-all vegetable drawer where bunches of clingy sob sisters can store their moldy neuroses.”

Camille Paglia

As quoted in The Quotable Bitch: Women Who Tell It Like It Really Is (2007) edited by Jessie Shiers, p. 167 ISBN 9781599212135

“The Nefertiti bust is one of the most popular art works in the world. It is printed on scarves and molded in necklace pendants and coffee-table miniatures. But never in my experience is the bust exactly reproduced. The copyist softens it, feminizes it and humanizes it. The actual bust is intolerably severe. It is too uncanny an object for domestic display. Even art books lie. The bust is usually posed in profile or at an angle, so that the missing left pupil is hidden or shadowed. What happened to the eye?”

Camille Paglia

Source: Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990), p. 67

“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