Top 12 Camille Paglia Quotes
Provocations from a feminist iconoclast
This is the latest in my quotes collection series. Check out the full collection here.
Camille Paglia is a cultural critic, academic provocateur, and feminist iconoclast whose sharp tongue and fearless opinions have challenged mainstream views for decades. For those who appreciate bold, unflinching commentary, Paglia offers a treasure trove of quotable wisdom. In this collection, I’ve gathered together my Top 12 favorite Camille Paglia quotes covering everything from capitalism to feminism to men’s issues and the battle of the sexes. Brace yourself!
“Capitalism has its weaknesses. But it is capitalism that ended the stranglehold of the hereditary aristocracies, raised the standard of living for most of the world and enabled the emancipation of women.”
“I am an equity feminist: that is, I demand equal opportunity for women through the removal of all barriers to their advance in the professional and political realms. However, I oppose special protections for women as inherently paternalistic and regressive.”
“Rather than encouraging scholarly inquiry and free thought, women’s studies programs began in an a priori way from an already crystallized agenda. No deviation was permitted from the party line, which was that all gender differences are due to patriarchy, with its monolithic enslavement and abuse of women by men.”
“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.”
“[E]very gender studies curriculum must build biology into its program; without knowledge of biology, gender studies slides into propaganda.”
“In 1974 I nearly got into a fistfight with some early academic feminists in a restaurant when I casually alluded to a hormonal element in sex differences. It was utterly unacceptable at that time to think or say such a thing… If you have any doubts about the effect of hormones on emotion, libido and aggression, have a chat with a transexual, who must take hormones medically. He or she will set you straight.”
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“Teenage boys, goaded by their surging hormones run in packs like the primal horde. They have only a brief season of exhilarating liberty between control by their mothers and control by their wives.”
“Woman is the dominant sex. Men have to do all sorts of stuff to prove that they are worthy of woman’s attention.”
“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.”
“Society is not the criminal but the force which keeps crime in check. When social controls weaken, man’s innate cruelty bursts forth. The rapist is created not by bad social conditioning influences but by a failure of social conditioning.”
“[I]t is our right and even obligation as rational human beings to defy nature’s fascism. Nature herself is a mass murderer, making casual, cruel experiments and condemning 10,000 to die so that one more fit will live and thrive.”
“My advice, as in everything, is to read widely and think for yourself. We need more dissent and less dogma.”
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My favorite "There is no female Mozart because there is no female Jack the Ripper."
The idea that the stars literally influence men (by a falling fluid, an influenza) is plainly untenable. But that the movements of the constellations are a clock by which earthly changes can be measured is less easy to dismiss.
Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson
She hits many ideas on the nose, but some are in outer space; or as the expression goes the broken clock is correct twice a day.
I enjoyed parts of “Sexual Balonae” and she survives along with Gayle Rubin as the few women who maintained that a nude woman in print is not necessarily degrading, and that a nude man in print is virtually impossible to consider degrading by any involved party.
These ideas are adult being challenged today - for instance, any depiction of of a women having sex is by definition prostitution, and by implication is degrading to all woman.
Unfortunately she became a one-note song, reflexively challenging any sensible position to garner controversy.