Camille Paglia Quotes
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My stress on the truth in sexual stereotypes and on the biologic basis of sex differences is sure to cause controversy.
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I think intellectuals should be fascinated by my rise, what it reveals about the time. My critics are irrelevant, though. It tells how much I'm getting to them by how vitriolic they are. They refuse to deal with the ideas. But reviews don't reflect anything; the books are selling. A friend told me, 'The attacks make you.'
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When feminism and gay activism set themselves against organized religion, they have the obligation to put something better in its place.
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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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No one is 'born gay.' The idea is ridiculous, but it is symptomatic of our overpoliticized climate that such assertions are given instant credence by gay activists and their media partisans. I think what gay men are remembering is that they were born different.
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I am reverential to great stars. I don't want sexual congress with them. The writer in me reveres the artist in them.
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It’s these guys in the Ivy League schools who get used to obeying women. They’re sedentary guys. It’s ironic that you’re getting the biggest bitching about men from the schools where the men are just eunuchs and bookworms.
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One of the most startling discoveries of my career was when I realized that the strongest women in the world are not lesbians but heterosexual women, who know how to handle men.
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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.
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Mind is a captive of the body.
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The only antidote to the magic of images is the magic of words.
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For a decade, feminists have drilled their disciples to say, 'Rape is a crime of violence but not of sex.' This sugar-coated Shirley Temple nonsense has exposed young women to disaster. Misled by feminism, they do not expect rape from the nice boys from good homes who sit next to them in class.
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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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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.
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Far from poisoning the mind, pornography shows the deepest truth about sexuality, stripped of romantic veneer.
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In every premenstrual woman struggling to govern her temper, sky-cult wars again with earth-cult.
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Feminism has tried to dismiss the femme fatale as a misogynist libel, a hoary cliche. But the femme fatale expresses woman's ancient and eternal control of the sexual realm. The specter of the femme fatale stalks all of men's relationships with women.
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Hollywood movies of the Fifties, like The Ten Commandments and Ben-Hur, with their epic clash of pagan and Judeo-Christian cultures, tell more about art and society than the French-infatuated ideologues who have made a travesty of the 'best' American higher criticism.
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Simply follow nature, Rousseau declares. Sade, laughing grimly, agrees.
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The real butches are straight … dealing with and controlling men makes you stronger.
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Wearisome as it may seem, women must realize that, in making a commitment to a man, they have merged in his unconscious with his mother and have therefore inherited the ambivalence of that relationship.
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The Fairie Queene makes cinema out of the west's primary principle: to see is to know; to know is to control. The Spenserian eye cuts, wounds, rapes.
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Despite hundreds of studies, cause-and-effect relationship between pornography and violence has never been satisfactorily proved.
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The Sixties attempted a return to nature that ended in disaster.