Camille Paglia: Quotes about women

Camille Paglia is American writer. Explore interesting quotes on women.
Camille Paglia: 652 quotes46 likes

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“[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.

“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)

“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

“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

“When feminist discourse is unable to discriminate the drunken fraternity brother from the homicidal maniac, women are in trouble.”

Camille Paglia

on date rape, p. 33
Vamps and Tramps (1994), "No Law in the Arena: A Pagan Theory of Sexuality"

“I want a revamped feminism. Putting the vamp back means the lady must be a tramp. My generation of Sixties rebels wanted to smash the bourgeois codes that had become the authoritarian totems of the Fifties. The 'nice' girl with her soft, sanitized speech and decorous manners had to go. Thirty years later, we're still stuck with her — in the official spokesmen and the anointed heiresses of the feminist establishment… Equal opportunity feminism, which I espouse, demands the removal of all barriers to woman's advance in the political and professional world — but not at the price of special protections for women which are infantilizing and anti-democratic.”

Camille Paglia

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

“It is not male hatred of women but male fear of women that is the great universal.”

Camille Paglia

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

“What feminism calls patriarchy is simply civilization, an abstract system designed by men but augmented and now co-owned by women.”

Camille Paglia

Source: Vamps and Tramps (1994), "No Law in the Arena: A Pagan Theory of Sexuality", p. 26

“The old “double standard” gave men a sexual liberty denied to women. Marxist feminists reduced the historical cult of woman’s virginity to her property value, her worth on the male marriage market. I would argue instead that there was and is a biological basis to the double standard. The first medical reports on the disease killing male homosexuals [i. e., AIDS] indicated men most at risk were those with a thousand partners over their lifetime. Incredulity. Who could such people be? Why, it turns out, everyone one knew. Serious, kind, literate men, not bums or thugs.”

Camille Paglia

Source: Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990), p. 27

“Meryl Streep, in her Protestant way, is stuck on words; she flashes clever accents as a mask for her deeper failures. (And she cannot deliver a Jewish line; she destroyed Nora Ephron’s snappy dialogue in Hearburn.) Streep’s work doesn’t travel. Try dubbing her for movie houses in India: there’d be nothing left, just that bony, earnest horse face moving its lips. Imagine, on the other hand, lesser technicians like Hedy Lammarr, Rita Hayworth, Lana Turner: these women have an international and universal appeal, crossing the centuries. They would have been beautiful in Egypt, Greece, Rome, medieval Burgundy, or eighteenth-century Paris. Susan Hayward played Bathsheba. Try to picture Streep in a Bible epic! Streep is incapable of playing the great legendary or mythological roles. She has no elemental power, no smouldering sensuality.”

Camille Paglia

Source: Sex, Art and American Culture : New Essays (1992), p. 16

“An erection is a thought and the orgasm an act of the imagination. The male has to will his sexual authority before the woman who is a shadow of his mother and of all women. Failure and humiliation constantly wait in the wings. No woman has to prove herself a woman in the grim way a man has to prove himself a man. He must perform, or the show does not go on. Social convention is irrelevant. A flop is a flop.”

Camille Paglia

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

“Great women scholars like Jane Harrison and Gisela Richter were produced by the intellectual discipline of the masculine classical tradition, not the wishy-washy sentimentalism of clingy, all-forgiving sisterhood, from which no first-rate book has yet emerged. Every year, feminists provide more and more evidence for the old charge that women can neither think nor write.”

Camille Paglia

Source: Sex, Art and American Culture : New Essays (1992), Junk Bonds and Corporate Raiders : Academe in the Hour of the Wolf, p. 244

“Shocked disbelief greets suggestions that many women may take pleasure in rape fantasies, established long ago by Nancy Friday in her pioneering 1973 study, My Secret Garden, and dramatized today by the staggering mass-market popularity of Harlequin Romances, where heroines are overwhelmed by passionate, impetuous men.”

Camille Paglia

Source: Vamps and Tramps (1994), "No Law in the Arena: A Pagan Theory of Sexuality", p. 37

“Rape is an outrage that cannot be tolerated in a civilized society. Yet feminism, which has waged a crusade for rape to be taken more seriously, has put young women in danger by hiding the truth about sex from them.”

Camille Paglia

Source: Sex, Art and American Culture : New Essays (1992), Rape and Modern Sex War, p. 49