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Camille Paglia
324 quotes
“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.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Patriarchy, routinely blamed for everything, produced the birth control pill, which did more to free contemporary women than feminism itself.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“With their propagandistic frame of mind, feminist leaders never admitted that their opponents could be equally motivated by ethics.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We must philosophically strengthen feminist theory so that it can admit that abortion is an aggressive act, that it is a form of extermination. Modern woman has become an agent of Darwinian triage. It is or should be ethically troubling: abortion pits the stronger against the weaker, and only one survives. The feminist coat-hanger symbol, prophesying the return of back-alley butchery if abortion is regulated or banned, is dishonest. A small number of women may die in botched procedures, but in successful abortions, the fetus death rate is 100 percent.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In the Seventies, women runners, developing amenorrhea and calcium-related shin splints, were the first to realize that nature is hovering over us, ready to shut down our systems if our fetus-feeding fat reserve drops below a certain percentage of body weight. In other words, in nature's eyes we are nothing but milk sacs and fat deposits.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The Bobbit case, which brought to life the ancient mythic archetype of woman as castrator, demonstrated that women are as aggressive as men and that sex is a dark, dangerous force of nature. But of course the feminist establishment, stuck in its battered-woman blinders, learned nothing as usual from this lurid refutation of its normal views. Classic art works like Bizet’s Carmen tell us more about the irrationality of love, jealousy and revenge than do all the pat formulas of the counseling industry.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The polemical tactic of exhibiting garish mugshot photos of women’s bruised faces evades the real issue. What led up to that moment in the emergency room? A video camera recording episode before and after the assault would upset the received black-and-white view of male ogres and female martyrs. This is not to excuse men for their scurrilous behavior; it is to awaken women their equal responsibility in dispute and confrontation.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Any woman who stays with her abuser beyond the first incident is complicitous with him.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In pondering why a battered woman does not leave, we must remember that gay men with a taste for violent “rough trade” have always paid for this kind of sex. Are women so perfect and angelic that we cannot imagine them having sadomasochistic impulses? When they are genuinely victimized, women deserve our pity. But victimization alone cannot explain everything in the tragicomedy of love.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[W]earisome 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.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“What I see is not a world of male oppression and female victimization but an international conspiracy by women to keep from men the knowledge of men's own frailty. A strange maternal protectiveness is at work.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In negotiating with rejected lovers or husbands, women must stop thinking they can make everyone happy. In many cases of harassment and stalking, it is clear that the woman never learned how to terminate the fantasy — which requires resolution and decisiveness on their part. Wavering, dithering, or passive hysterical fear will only intensify or prolong pursuit.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The [sexual harassment] 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.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“My prescription for women entering the war zone of the professions: study football. . . . Women who want to remake the future should look for guidance not to substitute parent figures but to the brash assertions of pagan sport.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Men, gay or straight, can get beauty and lewdness into one image. Women are forever softening, censoring, politicizing.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Idiotic statements like “porn degrades women” or “pornography is the subordination of women” are only credible if you never look at pornography. Preachers, senators and feminist zealots carry on about material they have no direct contact with. They usually rely on a few selectively culled inflammatory examples that bear little resemblance to the porn market as a whole. Most pornography shows women in as many dominant as subordinate positions, with the latter usually steamily consensual.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Despite hundreds of studies, cause-and-effect relationship between pornography and violence has never been satisfactorily proved.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Feminist anti-porn discourse virtually always ignores the gigantic gay male porn industry, since any mention of the latter would bring crashing to the ground the absurd argument that pornography is by definition the subordination of women.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Far from poisoning the mind, pornography shows the deepest truth about sexuality, stripped of romantic veneer.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The gargantuan promiscuity of the Seventies gay male world was a pagan phenomenon, unequaled in scale since the Roman empire.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I believe that the shocking toll of AIDS on gay men in the West was partly due to their Seventies delusionism that a world without women was possible. All-male energies, unbalanced and ravenous, literally tore the body apart.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Pornography is art, sometimes harmonious, sometimes dissonant. Its glut and glitter are a Babylonian excess. Modern middle-class women cannot bear the thought that their hard-won professional achievements can be outweighed in an instant by a young hussy flashing a little tits and ass. But the gods have given her power, and we must welcome it. Pornography forces a radical reassessment of sexual value, nature’s bequest of our tarnished treasure.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There is no gay leader anywhere near the stature of Martin Luther King, because black activism drew on the profound spiritual tradition of the church, to which gay political rhetoric is childishly hostile.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I have found few lesbians with whom I can discourse for more than five minutes without hitting some tiresome barrier of resentment or ideology. … Again and again over the decades, as I did my time, in frustrated boredom, in lesbian bars, trying with spectacular lack of success to make friends or just converse, I would end up gabbing for hours with some stray gay man. He might have dropped out of school at fourteen, but he had opinions, tastes, energy, wit. Is there something innately different about the gay male brain?”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“When I meet gay men anywhere in the world, there is a spontaneity and a spirit of fun and mischief that lesbians seem incapable of.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Men who shrink from penetration of the female body are paralyzed by justifiable apprehension, since they are returning to our uncanny site of origin.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is not male hatred of women but male fear of women that is the great universal.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Lesbian feminists, for all their ideals of sisterhood and solidarity, can treat each other with a fickleness, a parasitic exploitativeness, and vicious spite that have to be seen to be believed.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The real butches are straight … dealing with and controlling men makes you stronger.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I want to cry out to these young girls: Stop! Think! . . . For heaven's sake, don't fall down the rabbit hole of the lesbian scene. You will never escape, and your talent will wither on the vine. Your energy will be wasted and absorbed in repetition without progression. Women alone are Spenser's Bower of Bliss, enclosed, comfortable, and dangerous.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The unhappy truth is that male homosexuality will never be fully accepted by the heterosexual majority, who are obeying the dictates not of bigoted society or religion but of procreative nature.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It would be ridiculous to claim that gay men are interested only on other gay men and would never ogle straight men in barracks showers. When I heard this one on TV, I burst out laughing. Anyone who belongs to a health club knows better. Sexual tension and appraisal are constants, above all among gay men, who never stop cruising everything in sight. Seduction of straight studs is a highly erotic motif in gay porn.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“My own proposals for reform [in academia] include the abolition of all literary conferences and the replacement of women's studies with sex studies, based on the rigorous study of world history, anthropology, psychology, and science. Today, in politically correct America, questions of quality, learning, and intellectual distinction are out of style.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“MacKinnon is a totalitarian. She wants a risk-free, state controlled world. She believes rules and regulations will solve every human ill and straighten out all those irksome problems between the sexes that have been going on for five thousand years. As a lawyer, MacKinnon is deft and pragmatic. But as a political thinker, cultural historian or commentator on sex, she is incompetent. For a woman of her obvious intelligence, her frame of reference is shockingly small.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Pornography does not cause rape or violence, which predate pornography by thousands of years. Rape and violence occur not because of patriarchal conditioning but because of the opposite, a breakdown of social controls.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The instant myth of Amy Fisher turned feminist dogma on on is head: as in the hit films Fatal Attraction, Basic Instinct, and The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, woman rules and destroys. The femme fatale is for real.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[Feminism] is alienating women from their own bodies … because they don’t understand that they have something that men want, okay? So they’re encouraged to interpret all male lust as oppressive and victimizing and negative, instead of seeing that it is up to them to husband this flame. They have a flame, and it’s enormously powerful…”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Our feminist culture at the present moment is completely dependent on capitalism. My grandmother was still scrubbing clothes on the back porch on a washboard!”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I’m saying that men go from control by their mothers to control by their wives, and this is the horror of men’s lives. And feminism refuses to see this.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source