Camille Paglia: Quotes about men (page 2)

“We must examine the degree to which we coddle middle-class girls. There is something sick about it. The girls I see on campuses are often innocuous, with completely homogenized personalities, miserable, anorexic and bulimic. The feminist movement teaches them that it's men's fault, but it isn't. These girls go out into the world as heiresses of all the affluence in the universe. They are the most pampered and most affluent girls on the globe. So stop complaining about men. You're getting all the rewards that come with the nice-girl persona you've chosen. When you get into trouble and you're batting your eyes and someone is offending you and you are too nice to deal with it, that's a choice. Assess your persona. Realize the degree to which your niceness may invoke people to say lewd and pornographic things to you — sometimes to violate your niceness. The more you blush, the more people want to do it. Understand your part of it and learn to parry. Sex talk is a game. The girls in the Sixties loved it. If you don't want some professor to call you honey, tell him.”

Camille Paglia

Playboy interview (May 1995)

Love , Men , People , World

“[Feminism] is alienating women from their own bodies … because they don’t understand that they have something that men want, okay? So they’re encouraged to interpret all male lust as oppressive and victimizing and negative, instead of seeing that it is up to them to husband this flame. They have a flame, and it’s enormously powerful…”

Camille Paglia

Source: Vamps and Tramps (1994), "No Law in the Arena: A Pagan Theory of Sexuality", p. 259

Women , Men , Understanding

“Men who shrink from penetration of the female body are paralyzed by justifiable apprehension, since they are returning to our uncanny site of origin.”

Camille Paglia

Source: Vamps and Tramps (1994), "No Law in the Arena: A Pagan Theory of Sexuality", p. 79

Men

“Feminism, in all fields, has yet to produce a single scholar of the intellectual rank of scores of these learned men [e. g., Bruno Snell, Albin Lesky, Denys Page] in the German and British academic tradition.”

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

Men , Learning

“I believe that the shocking toll of AIDS on gay men in the West was partly due to their Seventies delusionism that a world without women was possible. All-male energies, unbalanced and ravenous, literally tore the body apart.”

Camille Paglia

Source: Vamps and Tramps (1994), "No Law in the Arena: A Pagan Theory of Sexuality", p. 69

Women , Men , World

“Gay activism has been naive in its belligerent confidence that “homophobia” will eventually disappear with proper “education” of the benighted. Reeducation of fractious young boys on the scale required would mean fascist obliteration of all individual freedoms. Furthermore, no truly masculine father would ever welcome an feminine or artistic son at the start, since the son’s lack of virility not only threatens but liquidates that father’s identity, dissolving husband into wife. Later there may be public rituals of acceptance, but the damage will already have been done. Gay men are aliens, cursed and gifted, the shamans of our time.”

Camille Paglia

Source: Vamps and Tramps (1994), "No Law in the Arena: A Pagan Theory of Sexuality", p. 86

Men , Education , Confidence , Boy

“Tranvestism is far more common among men, I noted, because it originates in the primary relation of mother and son.”

Camille Paglia

Source: Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990), p. 508

Men

“Women have been discouraged from genres such as sculpture that require studio training or expensive materials. But in philosophy, mathematics, and poetry, the only materials are pen and paper. Male conspiracy cannot explain all female failures. I am convinced that, even without restrictions, there still would have been no female Pascal, Milton, or Kant. Genius is not checked by social obstacles: it will overcome. Men's egotism, so disgusting in the talentless, is the source of their greatness as a sex. […] Even now, with all vocations open, I marvel at the rarity of the woman driven by artistic or intellectual obsession, that self-mutilating derangement of social relationship which, in its alternate forms of crime and ideation, is the disgrace and glory of the human species.”

Camille Paglia

Source: Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990), p. 653

Women , Men , Sex , Mathematics

“She is so deluded that she genuinely believes she speaks for all women. She's a victim of her own success. I liked the early Steinem. There was once a survey conducted for Time about who would make a good candidate for the first female president, and I wrote in Gloria Steinem. But now? Gloria Steinem is dissing men and dissing fashion and she's out having her hair streaked at Kenneth's. She became a socialite with a coterie. A lot of middle-aged white ladies still love her, but the media have been negligent regarding her.”

Camille Paglia

On Gloria Steinem
Playboy interview (May 1995)

Love , Women , Men , Age

“I’m saying that men go from control by their mothers to control by their wives, and this is the horror of men’s lives. And feminism refuses to see this.”

Camille Paglia

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

Men

“Feminism, for all its boasts, has not found a single major female painter or sculptor to add to the canon. It did revive the reputations of many minor women, like Frida Kahlo or Romaine Brooks. Mary Cassatt, Georgia O'Keeffe, and Helen Frankenthaler were already known and did not need rediscovery. Artemisia Gentileschi was simply a polished, competent painter in a Baroque style created by men.”

Camille Paglia

Source: Vamps and Tramps (1994), "The New Sexism: Liberating Art and Beauty", p. 115

Women , Men

“One of the most startling discoveries of my career was when I realized that the strongest women in the world are not lesbians but heterosexual women, who know how to handle men.”

Camille Paglia

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

Women , Men , World

“I had crushes on women — actually I loved charismatic, extreme people, women or men. By high school I was saying I must be a lesbian, because if you are attracted to women, you're a lesbian. I was also attracted to men, but I didn't get along with men.”

Camille Paglia

Playboy interview (May 1995)

Love , Women , Men , People

“Middle-class men, neutered by office life and daunted by feminist rhetoric, are shrinking. Lesbianism is increasing, since anxious, unmasculine men have little to offer. Women are simply more interesting to them. Male homosexuality is increasing, because masculinity is in crisis and because maternal consciousness, severed from the support network of the extended family, has become a psychotic system, forcing the young to struggle for life against clinging personal fantasy.”

Camille Paglia

Source: Vamps and Tramps (1994), "No Law in the Arena: A Pagan Theory of Sexuality", p. 90

Life , Women , Men , Family

“All men — even, I have written, Jesus Christ — began as flecks of tissue inside a woman's womb. Every boy must stagger out of the shadow of a mother goddess, whom he never fully escapes.”

Camille Paglia

Source: Vamps and Tramps (1994), "No Law in the Arena: A Pagan Theory of Sexuality", p. 32

Men , Boy , Christ

“Because of the nature of the penis, men have performance anxiety, whereas no woman ever has to prove herself in this way. So men's egos are totally involved in performance, in doing, achieving. An erection is a kind of achievement. So is peeing. As I've said, a boy has to learn to aim in order to no longer be infantile. So it's an accomplishment. The male orgasm is short-lived and transient — and that's the irony of men's sexuality. It's ironic that feminism looks at the penis as power and violence when in fact it is very weak.”

Camille Paglia

Playboy interview (May 1995)

Men , Way , Boy , Nature

“I realize now how lucky I was, in the total absence of role models, to have only men to rebel against. Today's women students are meeting their oppressors in dangerously seductive new form, as successful congenial female professors who view themselves as victims of a rigid foreign ideology.”

Camille Paglia

Source: Sex, Art and American Culture : New Essays (1992), Junk Bonds and Corporate Raiders : Academe in the Hour of the Wolf, p. 213

Women , Men , Success

“A woman simply is, but a man must become. Masculinity is risky and elusive. It is achieved by a revolt from woman, and is confirmed only by other men. Feminist fantasies about the ideal “sensitive” male have failed. Manhood coerced into sensitivity is no manhood at all.”

Camille Paglia

Source: Sex, Art and American Culture : New Essays (1992), p. 82

Men

“No one is “born gay.” The idea is ridiculous, but it is symptomatic of our overpoliticized climate that such assertions are given instant credence by gay activists and their media partisans. I think what gay men are remembering is that they were born different.”

Camille Paglia

Source: Vamps and Tramps (1994), "No Law in the Arena: A Pagan Theory of Sexuality", p. 71

Men , Idea , Thinking

“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

Men , Faith , Universe , Perfection