Camille Paglia
American author, scholar and critic, most notable for writing Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson, a monumental survey of Western art and literature from earliest recorded history to the 20th Century.
I think it is one of the greatest pictures ever taken of a woman.
Every fetus becomes female unless it is steeped in male hormone, produced by a signal from the testes. Before birth, therefore, a male is already beyond the female. But to be beyond is to be exiled from the center of life. Men know they are sexual exiles. They wander the earth seeking satisfaction, craving and despising, never content. There is nothing in that anguished motion for women to envy.
Lacan, Derrida and Foucault are the perfect prophets for the weak, anxious academic personality, trapped in verbal formulas and perennially defeated by circumstances. They offer a self-exculpating cosmic explanation for the normal professorial state of resentment, alienation, dithering passivity and inaction.
I admire hard-bitten, wisecracking realism of Ida Lupino and the film noir heroines. I’m sick of simpering white girls with their princess fantasies.
The Bobbit case, which brought to life the ancient mythic archetype of woman as castrator, demonstrated that women are as aggressive as men and that sex is a dark, dangerous force of nature. But of course the feminist establishment, stuck in its battered-woman blinders, learned nothing as usual from this lurid refutation of its normal views. Classic art works like Bizet’s Carmen tell us more about the irrationality of love, jealousy and revenge than do all the pat formulas of the counseling industry.
I am saying that many of the problems between the sexes are coming from something prior to socialization, a turbulence that has to do with every boy’s origin in a woman’s body, and the way he is overwhelmed by this huge, matriarchal shadow of a goddess figure from his childhood. And I feel, after so many decades of studying this, that men are suffering from a sense of dependence on women, their sense that at any moment they could be returned to that slavery and servitude they experienced under a woman’s thumb, when they were a boy in the shadow of the mother. I got this from studying all world culture, and comparing and noticing how often there were these similar patterns in many different cultures. Many things that erupt in rape or violence, or battery and so on, are happening when a woman is pushing that button of fear and dependency.
In the past fifteen years, Marxist approaches towards literature have enjoyed increasing vogue. To be conscious of the social context of art seems to automatically entail a leftist orientation. But a theory is possible that is both avant-garde and capitalist. Marxism was one of Rousseau’s nineteenth-century progeny, energized by faith in the perfectabilty of man. Its believed that economic forces are the primary dynamic force in history is Romantic naturism in disguise. … Marxism is the bleakest of anxiety-formations against the power of cthonian mothers.
Is there intellectual life in America? At present, the answer is no.
The real butches are straight ... dealing with and controlling men makes you stronger.
Freud says, “Man fears that his strength will be taken from him by woman, dreads becoming infected with her femininity and then proving himself a weakling.” Masculinity must fight off effeminacy day by day. Woman and nature stand ever ready to reduce the male to boy and infant.
The only antidote to the magic of images is the magic of words.
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.
Human life began in flight and fear. Religion rose from rituals of propitiation, spells to lull the punishing elements.
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.
The more you know, the less you are impressed by Foucault.
Feminists had an astoundingly naive view of the mutual exclusiveness of sex and aggression, which, Freud demonstrates, are fused in the amoral unconscious, as revealed to us through dreams. That rape is simply what used to be called “unbridled lust,” like gluttony a sin of insufficient self-restraint, seems to be beyond the feminist ken.
Personality maintains its discreetness by an act of will. Otherwise one person will flow helplessly into another.
Our feminist culture at the present moment is completely dependent on capitalism. My grandmother was sill scrubbing clothes on the back porch on a washboard!
My point is that you cannot force social change at a speed that it cannot go. Social change is evolutionary, not revolutionary. Deep social change takes time. And slowly the culture is changing. The MTV generation is far more tolerant, and that tolerance is growing.
The toothed vagina is no sexist hallucination: every penis is made less by every vagina, just as mankind, male and female, is devoured by mother nature. The vagina dentata is part of the Romantic revival of pagan myth. It subliminally present in Poe’s voracious maelstrom and dank, scythe-swept pit. It overtly appears in the bible of French Decadence, Huysmans’s A Rebours (1884), where a dreamer is magnetically drawn towards mother nature’s open thighs, the “bloody depths” of a carnivorous flower rimmed by “swordblades.”