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Men
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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.
-Camille Anna Paglia
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Men & Women
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Today, the ideal male is the gay man and the ideal female is the worker female, the woman who can work in a coal mine just like all the other men.
-Camille Anna Paglia, From a commentary track for the DVD of the film Basic Instinct
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In the theory of gender I began from zero. There is no masculine power or privilege I did not covet. But slowly, step by step, decade by decade, I was forced to acknowledge that even a woman of abnormal will cannot escape her hormonal identity.
-Camille Anna Paglia
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Mother
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Every man must define his identity against his mother. If he does not, he just falls back into her and is swallowed up.
-Camille Anna Paglia
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Order
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Despite crime's omnipresence, things work in society, because biology compels it. Order eventually restores itself, by psychic equilibrium.
-Camille Anna Paglia
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Pornography
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Pornography is human imagination in tense theatrical action; its violations are a protest against the violations of our freedom by nature.
-Camille Anna Paglia
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Prostitution
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Prostitution is not just a service industry, mopping up the overflow of male demand, which always exceeds female supply. Prostitution testifies to the amoral power struggle of sex, which religion has never been able to stop. Prostitutes, pornographers, and their patrons are marauders in the forest of archaic night.
-Camille Anna Paglia
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The prostitute is not, as feminists claim, the victim of men but rather their conqueror, an outlaw who controls the sexual channel between nature and culture.
-Camille Anna Paglia
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Seduction
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Pursuit and seduction are the essence of sexuality. It's part of the sizzle.
-Camille Anna Paglia
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Sex
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We should teach general ethics to both men and women, but sexual relationships themselves must not be policed. Sex, like the city streets, would be risk-free only in totalitarian regimes.
-Camille Anna Paglia
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You have to accept the fact that part of the sizzle of sex comes from the danger of sex. You can be overpowered.
-Camille Anna Paglia
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Sex is metaphysical for men, as it is not for women. Women have no problem to solve through sex. Physically and psychologically, they are serenely self-contained. They may choose to achieve, but they do not need it. They are not thrust into the beyond by their own fractious bodies. But men are out of balance; they must quest, pursue, court, or seize.... How often one spots a male pigeon making desperate, self-inflating sallies toward the female, as again and again she turns her back on him and nonchalantly marches away. But by concentration and insistence he may carry the day. Nature has blessed him with an obliviousness to his own absurdity.
-Camille Anna Paglia, Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson, ch. 1, Yale University Press (1990)
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Society
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Popular culture is the new Babylon, into which so much art and intellect now flow. It is our imperial sex theater, supreme temple of the western eye. We live in the age of idols. The pagan past, never dead, flames again in our mystic hierarchies of stardom.
-Camille Anna Paglia
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Television
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Television is actually closer to reality than anything in books. The madness of TV is the madness of human life.
-Camille Anna Paglia
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Twentieth Century
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My generation of the Sixties, with all our great ideals, destroyed liberalism, because of our excesses.
-Camille Anna Paglia
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The 1990s, after the reign of terror of academic vandalism, will be a decade of restoration: restoration of meaning, value, beauty, pleasure, and emotion to art and restoration of art to its audience.
-Camille Anna Paglia
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War
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There are no accidents, only nature throwing her weight around. Even the bomb merely releases energy that nature has put there. Nuclear war would be just a spark in the grandeur of space. Nor can radiation alter nature: she will absorb it all. After the bomb, nature will pick up the cards we have spilled, shuffle them, and begin her game again.
-Camille Anna Paglia
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Women
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We need a new kind of feminism, one that stresses personal responsibility and is open to art and sex in all their dark, unconsoling mysteries. The feminist of the fin de si?cle will be bawdy, streetwise, and on-the-spot confrontational, in the prankish Sixties way.
-Camille Anna Paglia
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If civilization had been left in female hands we would still be living in grass huts.
-Camille Anna Paglia
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Woman is the dominant sex. Men have to do all sorts of stuff to prove that they are worthy of woman's attention.
-Camille Anna Paglia
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Youth
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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.
-Camille Anna Paglia
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Books by and about Camille Anna Paglia