Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson
By Camille Paglia
Yale University Press, 1990. 718 pages
Sex, Art and American Culture
By Camille Paglia
Viking, 1993. 337 pages
Reviewed by Margarita Windisch
Mainstream media, neo- and old conservatives alike hail Camille Paglia as the new "refreshing feminist theoretician of the nineties who dares to bring a bit of controversy into the feminist debate".
So much for the hype. Having wasted too many hours reading Paglia's infuriating and frustrating books, I came to the conclusion that their only purpose is to dress up pure and unadulterated misogyny.
Camille Paglia is on a mission to settle some old scores. Her books are a vendetta against anyone — preferably female — who has dared to ignore her bottomless pit of wisdom.
Sexual Personae supposedly analyses sexuality in Western society and the influence of art and culture in constructing a so-called sexual identity. This potentially progressive and exciting project is derailed by Paglia's conservative and populist agenda into a ferocious assault on the entire feminist movement.
The reader is compelled to plough through heaps of fancy and largely meaningless academic jargon to arrive at nothing but insults and abuse.
Claims such as, "If civilisation was left to women, we would all still live in grass huts", or, "society protects women from rape not perpetrates it" are to be found on just about every second page, floating in a sea of literary trivia.
Sexual Personae is full of sweeping generalisations — Paglia evidently believes that they can substitute for a coherent analysis of sexuality in Western culture. Myths and cultural norms are presented as universal truths, without the slightest attempt to question the role various myths and norms have played in the oppression of women.
For Paglia, the "unavoidable and necessary" supremacy of men is manifested in biological and psychological differences between the sexes; western society, its accumulated historical traditions, political structures and cultural practices have nothing to do with it.
In Sexual Personae female sexuality is a "dark deep continent" and men are under constant threat of being engulfed and swallowed up by their mothers whenever they have sex. The only way for men to escape their mothers' selective cannibalism is to transform themselves into testosterone-charged raving beasts.
Paglia's latest book, Sex, Art and American Culture, is a collection of essays that read like badly researched press releases. The book praises the monumental achievements of capitalism, especially its "magnificent economic mechanism that brings joy, happiness and the highest quality of life to the greatest number of people".
Camille's love affair with capitalism comes as no surprise since her leap to fame and fortune was carefully orchestrated by the conservative establishment and American mass media alike.
In Sex, Art and American Culture, the self-styled exponent of cultural literacy joins the camp of well-funded right-wing theorists in their vitriolic campaign against the post-modernists who threaten Western culture. An objective analysis of possible merits or shortcomings of the "French disease" or various feminist theories would, of course, be beneath a scholar "conservatively trained in high level intellectual history".
Paglia can't touch anything without insulting her readers with homophobic and misogynist assumptions. While AIDS is "nature's revenge on the promiscuous gay community", date rape "only exists in the minds of spoiled female college brats". Snuff movies and child pornography are necessary expressions of humankind's evil nature, while prostitution represents women's inherent sexual power over men.
No wonder Paglia has no patience with all the feminists who, despite being "imploding bean bags, damp sob sisters and dough faced, fascist party liners" (some of her sophisticated, scholarly terminology), have produced valued and important contributions to our understanding of women's position in society. Paglia has nothing to offer.