Camille Paglia Quotes
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Over the past 20 years, I have noticed that the most flexible, dynamic, inquisitive minds among my students have been industrial design majors. Industrial designers are bracingly free of ideology and cant. The industrial designer is trained to be a clear-eyed observer of the commercial world - which, like it or not, is modern reality.
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What troubles me about the 'hostile workplace' category of sexual harassment policy is that women are being returned to their old status of delicate flowers who must be protected from assault by male lechers. It is anti-feminist to ask for special treatment for women.
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In insisting, for political purposes, on a sharp division between gay and straight, gay activism, like much of feminism, has become as rigid and repressive as the old order it sought to replace.
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Feminism, in all fields, has yet to produce a single scholar of the intellectual rank of scores of these learned men e.g., Bruno Snell, Albin Lesky, Denys Page in the German and British academic tradition.
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The Bible has come under fire for making woman the fall guy in man's cosmic drama. But in casting a male conspirator, the serpent, as God's enemy, Genesis hedges and does not take its misogyny far enough. The Bible defensively swerves from God's true opponent, chthonian nature. The serpent is not outside Eve but in her. She is the garden and the serpent.
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With their propagandistic frame of mind, feminist leaders never admitted that their opponents could be equally motivated by ethics.
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Men have sacrificed and crippled themselves physically and emotionally to feed, house, and protect women and children. None of their pain or achievement is registered in feminist rhetoric, which portrays men as oppressive and callous exploiters.
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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.
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Except for naval and air exercises, our military should be stationed on American soil, where service men and women can lead normal lives in close proximity to family and friends.
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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.
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The reason I was angry all the time was that Gloria Steinem and all those people, without reading my work, were saying all these horrible things against me.
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Minerva save us from the cloying syrup of coercive compassion! What feminism does not need, it seems to me, is an endless recycling of Doris Day Fifties clichés about noble womanhood.
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I realize now how lucky I was, in the total absence of role models, to have only men to rebel against. Today's women students are meeting their oppressors in dangerously seductive new form, as successful congenial female professors who view themselves as victims of a rigid foreign ideology.
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Tranvestism is far more common among men, I noted, because it originates in the primary relation of mother and son.
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If feminism has receded in visibility and prestige, it is precisely because its vision of life's goals and rewards has become too narrow and elitist.
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Let's get rid of Infirmary Feminism, with its bedlam of bellyachers, anorexics, bulimics, depressives, rape victims, and incest survivors. Feminism has become a catch-all vegetable drawer where bunches of clingy sob sisters can store their moldy neuroses.
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Only utopian liberals could be surprised that the Nazis were art connoisseurs.
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Homeric mind is ingenuity, practical intelligence. There is no Rodin-like deep thinking, no mathematical or philosophical speculation. Odysseus thinks with his hands.
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Judaism’s campaign to make divinity invisible has never fully succeeded. Images are always eluding moral control, creating the brilliant western art tradition. Idolatry is fascism of the eye. The western eye will be served, with or without the consent of conscience.
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All men - even, I have written, Jesus Christ - began as flecks of tissue inside a woman's womb. Every boy must stagger out of the shadow of a mother goddess, whom he never fully escapes.
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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.
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I feel that the moment a date happens that it’s a social encounter that is potentially a sexual encounter. And the question of sex needs to be negotiated from the first moment on.
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Metaphorically, every vagina has secret teeth, for the male exits as less than when he entered. The basic mechanics of conception require action in the male but nothing more than passive receptivity in the female.
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The idea that emotion can be separated from sex is a Christian illusion, one of the most ingenious but finally unworkable strategies in Christianity’s ancient campaign against pagan nature.