The literary critic Camille Paglia argues that sexuality is by nature aggressive. “My theory,” she says [on page 3 of Sexual Personae] “is that whenever sexual freedom is sought or achieved, sadomasochism will not be far behind.” She attacks feminists who believe that sex is all sugar and spice and that it is patriarchal society that makes sex violent. Sex, for Paglia, is about power; society is not the source of sexual violence; sex, the irrepressible natural force, is. If anything, society is the force that inhibits the natural violence of sex. Paglia is certainly more accurate than those who deny that perversion is rife with aggression. But in assuming that sex is fundamentally aggressive, and sadomasochistic, she doesn’t allow for the plasticity of human sexuality. Just because sex and aggression can unite in a plastic brain, and appear “natural,” doesn’t mean that that is their only possible expression.
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Norman Doidge (2007) The Brain that Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science. NY:Viking, p. 350Camille Paglia
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The 1990s brought a widespread backlash against this rigid feminist orthodoxy [in American academia]. For many, it was personified by Camille Paglia, a professor at an obscure university in Philadelphia, who, in her 1990 book Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson, as well as in scores of essays and interviews, dismissed women’s contributions to Western culture (“There are no female Mozarts”) and mocked the “weepy, whiny, white middle-class ideology” of the “Stalinist” feminist movement under Gloria Steinem, which Paglia reviled for its intellectual vacuity, sexual puritanism, and hostility to men -- not to mention its obsessive victim mentality, which, in her view, only served to reinforce Victorian stereotypes. For Paglia, women, far from being the weaker sex, were gifted by nature with an innate power over men -- the power of sex. […] The feminist establishment, however, chose not to learn from but to vilify Paglia and company. And Women’s Studies, unable to answer them, all but ignored them.
Camille Paglia
The person that made this newfound pursuit of intellectual engagement invigorating and sexy was Camille Paglia. Her book, Sexual Personae, made me realize how little I really had learned in college. Her articles and assorted writings began to open my mind to the fraud that is higher education in America.
Camille Paglia
Our legislators are not sufficiently apprized of the rightful limits of their power; that their true office is to declare and enforce only our natural rights and duties, and to take none of them from us. No man has a natural right to commit aggression on the equal rights of another; and this is all from which the laws ought to restrain him; every man is under the natural duty of contributing to the necessities of the society; and this is all the laws should enforce on him; and, no man having a natural right to be the judge between himself and another, it is his natural duty to submit to the umpirage of an impartial third. When the laws have declared and enforced all this, they have fulfilled their functions, and the idea is quite unfounded, that on entering into society we give up any natural right.
Thomas Jefferson
Nature and culture, instinct and morality, sexuality and achievement become incompatible as a result of the split in the human structure. The unity and congruity of culture and nature, work and love, morality and sexuality, longed for from time immemorial, will remain a dream as long as man continues to condemn the biological demand for natural (orgastic) sexual gratification.
Wilhelm Reich
The suppression of natural sexual gratification leads to various kinds of substitute gratifications. Natural aggression, for example, becomes brutal sadism which then is an essential mass-psychological factor in imperialistic wars.
Wilhelm Reich
Paglia, Camille
Pahlavi, Muhammad Reza
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