I hate to imagine a world without Camille Paglia!

[ValueChaser]

The following quotes have been selected from this link: http://www.theabsolute.net/misogyny/paglia.html

Quotes that I have found important and/or intriguing have been formatted in bold by myself.--John (a.k.a ValueChaser)

"The last western society to worship female powers was Minoan Crete. And significantly, that fell and did not rise again." - SP, p8

"Metaphorically, every vagina has secret teeth, for the male exits as less than when he entered." - SP, p13

"Man is sexually compartmentalized." - SP, p19

"Dionysus was identified with liquids - blood, sap, milk, wine. The Dionysian is nature's chthonian fluidity." - SP, p30

"If civilization had been left in female hands, we would still be living in grass huts." - SP, p38

"The male orientation of classical Athens was inseparable from its genius. Athens became great not despite but because of its misogyny." - SP, p100

"Apollo is the western eye victorious." - SP, p104

"Visionary idealism is a male art form. The lesbian aesthete does not exist. But if there were one, she would have learned from the perverse male mind." - SP, p117

"The beautiful boy is without motive force or deed; hence he is not a hero. Because of his emotional detachment, he is not a heroine. He occupies an ideal space between male and female, effect and affect. . . . He is, I suggested, a secular saint." - SP, p121

"With the Hellenistic tilt towards women, prefigured by Euripides, the beautiful boy slides toward the feminine, a symptom of decadence." - SP, p123

"What is Mona Lisa thinking? Nothing, of course." . . . "Walter Pater is to call her a 'vampire' . . ." - SP, p154

"Western greatness is unwise, mad, inhuman." - SP, p172

"Serial or sex murder, like fetishism, is a perversion of male intelligence. It is a criminal abstraction, masculine in its deranged egotism and orderliness. It is the asocial equivalent of philosophy, mathematics, and music. There is no female Mozart because there is no female Jack the Ripper." - SP, p247

"Woman's flirtatious arts of self-concealment mean man's approach must take the form of rape." - SP, p276

"Reviewing the sexual personae of his collected works, we discover Wordsworth's radical exclusion of one human type: the adult man of active virility. His poems are filled with children, women, old men, and animals. But a stone in the road arouses more fellow-feeling in Wordsworth than does a masculine man. . . . Wordsworth's emotion is never invested in figures of active virility, unless that virility is qualified by suffering or feminine feeling or unless it is seen through the distancing perspective of memory. Since femaleness suffuses the created world, the pure male is cast out. He has no right to life." - SP, p304/306

"Charisma is the radiance produced by the interaction of male and female elements in a gifted personality. The charismatic woman has a masculine force and severity. The charismatic man has an entrancing female beauty. Both are hot and cold, glowing with presexual self-love." - SP, p521

"Wilde's epigrams, which so obstruct the quickness of Restoration repartee, acquire their substantiveness from Enlightenment generalization. It is his intellectual power of generalization that gives Wilde's writing its permanent distinction. A modern play in the Wildean manner, Noel Cowards 'Private Lives' (1930), has only one true Wildean line: 'Certain women should be struck regularly, like gongs.' And even this generalization vulgarizes Wilde, in whom contemplativeness is never distorted by action." - SP, p545

"In The Importance of Being Earnest, the failed poet created a magnificent new poetry, one that even he did not recognize. Wilde's play, after Spenser's 'Faerie Queene' and Shelley's 'Epipsychidion', is the most dazzling burst of Apollonian poetry in English literature. It was made possible by a hermaphroditic transformation, the strangest I have ever studied. The desirable male body was efficacious for Wilde by its fixing of visible limits. Ordinarily, the epicene is synonymous with effeminacy. But the epicene made Wilde more masculine by giving him the aggressive power of Apollonian delimitation, which I found everywhere in the language, manners, and the aristocratic social order of 'The Importance of Being Earnest'. The epicene gave Wilde the discipline of conceptual form that he most lacked as a sentimental lyricist. When, through his own self-thwartings, he was forced by tomblike imprisonment to abandon the amoral Greek worship of the visible world, his sentimentality returned, flooding back into the empathic 'De Profundis' and bringing woman with it." - SP, p571

"Emily Dickinson is the female Sade, and her poems are the prison dreams of a self-incarcerated, sadmomasochistic imaginist. When she is rescued from American Studies departments and juxtaposed with Dante and Baudelaire, her barbarities and diabolical acts of will become glaringly apparent. Dickinson inherits through Blake the rape cycle of 'The Faerie Queene'. Blake and Spenser are her allies in helping pagan Coleridge defeat Protestant Wordsworth." - SP, p624

"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." - SP, p653

"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." - SP, p672

The webmaster extracted the following quotes from Paglia's book Vamps and Tramps.--ValueChaser

Patriarchy, routinely blamed for everything, produced the birth control pill, which did more to free comtemporary women than feminism itself. (p38)

Much violence against women originates in emotional territory that they already command. By midlife and early old age, as the hormones of both genders change, women are in total, despotic control of their marriages. (p46)

The situation has gotten so out of hand that, in 1993, in one of the first British cases, a plumber was fired for continuing to use the traditional term "ballcock" for the toilet flotation unit, instead of the new politically correct term, sanitized of sexual suggestiveness. This is insane. We are back to the Victorian era, when table legs had to be draped lest they put the thought of ladies' legs into someone's dirty mind. (p50)

Campus speech codes, that folly of the navel-gazing left, have increased the appeal of the right. Ideas must confront ideas. When hurt feelings and bruised egos are more important than the unfettered life of the mind, the universities have committed suicide. (p51)

Woman's sexuality is disruptive of the dully mechanical workaday world, in which efficiency means uniformity. The problems of woman's entrance into the career system spring from more than male chauvinism. She brings nature into the social realm, which may be too small to contain it. (p52)

The prostitute has come to symbolize for me the ultimate liberated woman, who lives on the edge and whose sexuality belongs to no one. (p58)

Men, gay or straight, can get beauty and lewdness into one image. Women are forever softening, censoring, politicizing. (p65)

Lesbians, said a lesbian friend wearily to me, are "program heads": "They need the structure. They have all the answers." Hence lesbians' omnipresence in the social-welfare industry. Rejecting the father's competitive system, they substitute another that they imagine is based on female "caring" and "compassion" but is, in dismal effect, repressive, totalitarian, and hostile to art and dissent. The same friend memorably said to me long ago that lesbianism is caused by either "too much tit or not enough." (p85)

All of us emerge from the body of a mystical female giant. Boys are swamped in the female realm. Note how mothers take male children into the women's toilets: the boys are officially neuter and still part of the mother's body. To progress to manhood, boys must leave the women's world behind. In tribal cultures, men may kidnap a boy, slash his body with knives, throw him into a pit, or abandon him in the woods, cruel rites of passage still evident in the brutal, sometimes homicidal hazing of modern fraternities, which flourishes despite every effort to ban it. (p85)

Because boys lack a biological marker like menstruation, to be man is to be not female. Contemporary feminism called this "misogyny," but it was wrong. Masculine identity is embattled and fragile. In the absence of opportunity for heroic physical action, as in the modern office world, women's goodwill is crucial for preserving the male ego, which requires, alas, daily maintenance. It is in the best interests of the human race, and of women themselves, for men to be strong. (p85)

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. (p90)

A pagan education would sharpen the mind, steel the will, and seduce the senses. Our philosophy should be both contemplative and pugilistic, admitting aggression (as Christianity does not) as central to our mythology. The beasts of passion must be confronted, and the laws of nature understood. Conflict cannot be avoided, but perhaps it can be confined to a mental theater. (p94)

Is there intellectual life in America? At present, the answer is no. Since the decline of the great era of literary journalism, when Edmund Wilson, the Algonquin wits, and the politically engaged 'Partisan Review' writers were active, America has lacked a general literate culture hospitable to ideas. (p97)

The two deepest thinkers on sex in the twentieth century are Sigmund Freud and D.H. Lawrence. Their reputations as radical liberators were so universally acknowledged that brooding images of Freud and Lawrence in poster form adorned the walls of students in the Sixties. Yet the voluminous and complex works of both men were swept away by the current women's movement, when it burst out in the late Sixties and consolidated its ideology in the Seventies. Whatever their motives, the first feminist theorists acted as vandals and Bolsheviks. The damage they did to culture has in the long run damaged the cause of feminism. (p328)

[Chris Grieb]

I had the pleasure of hearing Camille Paglia at AEI here in DC. She is a national treasure.

[BaalChatzaf]

Those assertions and aphorisms were bright and witty but how many would hold up under careful examination and analysis? How many were truly meaningful. Like the one about women (females) have the nature of the chthonian. What the hell does that mean?

I would give that sample a 9 out of 10 for wit and and 2 out of 10 for cognitive content

Ba'al Chatzaf

[ValueChaser]

Bob:

NOBODY'S PERFECT.

By this I mean:

Nobody in the modern world perfectly manifests the totatility of their aims.

Sincerement,

John