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Camille Paglia infuriated feminists when she observed in Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990) that males – as biological beings – are responsible for the development of civilized life and most of the world’s cultural creativity. What no one has wanted to say is that the implicit argument throughout Sexual Personae is that only white males have possessed the Apollonian rationality that “has taken us to the stars.”
3,888 words
Camille Paglia
Provocations: Collected Essays on Art, Feminism, Politics, Sex, and Education
New York: Pantheon, 2018
“I don’t bake. My specialty is large hunks of highly spiced meat.” — Camille Paglia[1]
“We will walk on our own feet; we will work with our own hands; we will speak our own minds.” — Emerson, “The American Scholar”
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1. Camille Paglia, Provocations: Collected Essays on Art, Feminism, Politics, Sex, and Education (New York: Pantheon, 2018).
Paglia is self-recommending, of course. I was a bit let down, as the subtitle seemed to promise a career-wide retrospective, while this is more like a reunion tour, with emphasis on more recent works. The key essays are a vast survey, “Cults and Cosmic Consciousness: Religious Vision in the American 1960s,” a liberal education in itself; (more…)
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Camille Paglia identifies as a liberal Democrat, but as soon as her masterpiece Sexual Personae appeared in 1990, she began to win ardent admirers on the Right. Indeed, I first heard of Sexual Personae from Roger Kimball’s review in the neocon culture magazine The New Criterion.
Paglia’s appeal to the Right is easy to understand. (more…)
5,370 words
Camille Paglia
Free Men, Free Women: Sex, Gender, Feminism
New York: Pantheon, 2017
“A very few have thought the problems through to the end and proposed constructive solutions . . . Such men are never popular with their ‘intellectual peers,’ since their very existence is an implied reproach.” – Colin Wilson[1] (more…)
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Every time you turn around, someone’s hanging another Hakenkreuz on our Tay Tay. Latest and most famous culprit is Camille Paglia, that shooting star of the 1990s critical firmament. On Thursday this acerbic counter-feminist had a piece in the Hollywood Reporter in which she denounced Taylor Swift as a “Nazi Barbie” for swanning around with equally gorgeous female celebs. Almost immediately the story was picked up by The New Republic and New York magazine, as well as the NY Post, the Daily Mail, US magazine, and lord knows where else.
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When Camille Paglia’s speech “It’s a Man’s World, and It Always Will Be” was published in Time magazine, my feeds and inboxes overflowed with approving links and comments.
“Finally, someone in the mainstream media is speaking some truth about men.” (more…)
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On Wednesday, October 24, 2012, some friends and I met at Jupiter Pizza in Berkeley and then went to see Camille Paglia speaking on her latest book Glittering Images at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive.
The auditorium was almost packed. Paglia spoke for about 90 minutes, answered one question for about 10 minutes more, then signed books for an hour or so. (more…)
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Camille Paglia
Glittering Images: A Journey Through Art from Egypt to Star Wars
New York: Pantheon, 2012
Camille Paglia’s Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson
time: 18:53
