Camille Paglia

Who is Camille Paglia?

Camille Anna Paglia is an American teacher and social critic. Paglia, a self-described dissident feminist, has been a professor at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, since 1984. She is the author of Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson, a best-selling work of literary criticism, among other books and essays. She also wrote an analysis of Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds, and Break, Blow, Burn on poetry. She writes articles on art, popular culture, feminism, and politics. Paglia has celebrated Madonna and taken radical libertarian positions on controversial social issues such as abortion, homosexuality, and drug use. She is a critic of American feminism and of post-structuralist theory.

Famous Quotes:

• Capitalism is an art form, an Apollonian fabrication to rival nature. It is hypocritical for feminists and intellectuals to enjoy the pleasures and conveniences of capitalism while sneering at it. Everyone born into capitalism has incurred a debt to it. Give Caesar his due.
• 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.
• Despite crime's omnipresence, things work in society, because biology compels it. Order eventually restores itself, by psychic equilibrium.
• 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.
• The trauma of the Sixties persuaded me that my generation's egalitarianism was a sentimental error. I now see the hierarchical as both beautiful and necessary. Efficiency liberates; egalitarianism tangles, delays, blocks, deadens.
• A serious problem in America is the gap between academe and the mass media, which is our culture. Professors of humanities, with all their leftist fantasies, have little direct knowledge of American life and no impact whatever on public policy.
• You have to accept the fact that part of the sizzle of sex comes from the danger of sex. You can be overpowered.
• 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.
• Cats are autocrats of naked self-interest. They are both amoral and immoral, consciously breaking rules. Their evil look at such times is no human projection: the cat may be the only animal who savors the perverse or reflects upon it.
• When anything goes, it's women who lose.