Professor Pagila makes the case that capitalism is the same side of the coin as art. "Capitalist products are another version of the art works flooding western culture. The portable framed painting appeared at the birth of modern commerce in the early Renaissance. Capitalism and art have challenged and nourished each other ever since." Popular culture, including Rock and Roll, could only exist in a free market society. Capitalism featuring the gaudy and the greedy has been part of Western culture from the very beginning, and as Paglia notes, "It is the mysticism and glamour of things, which take on a personality of their own....Brand names are territorial cells of western identity. Our shiny chrome automobiles, like our armies of grocery boxes and cans, are extrapolations of hard, impermeable western personality."

Capitalism and art both threaten the basis of civilization according to Ms. Paglia. Capitalism, because entrepreneurs are always challenging the status quo, and art, because it challenges the way we look at the world. Art is guerrilla warfare with society and the most effective guerrilla fighter in Camille Paglia's mind is the poet Emily Dickinson, the American Sade. Paglia summarizes Dickinson's first subject is "power, psychological, natural, and divine, to which women freely access only in eras of earth-cult." Dickinson once wrote to a friend whose house burned down, "Dear friend, I congratulate you. Disaster endears beyond fortune." As Ms. Paglia observed about Emily Dickinson, "victimization means canonization in her Sadean cosmos." Paglia is curious about the lack of Christian compassion in many of Dickinson's personal letters to friends or relatives dealing with life crises such as death. Dickinson's stoic attitude is directly related to the paganism of our culture and in direct opposition to Christian compassion.

In modern society, charismatic personalities have art, movies, television and music to unleash their reach to the public and as Paglia notes, "Mass media acts as a barrier protecting politics, which would otherwise be unbalanced by the entrance of men, of epochal narcissistic glamour." Let the serious run our government and business and let the frivolous entertain us. It is here that balance is struck between civilization and the pagan influence. Paglia does not want to see complete victory of the pagan over civilization. Even in the area of pornography, Paglia concurs with some of her conservative critics, "Our knowledge of these fantasies is expanded by pornography, which is why pornography should be tolerated, though its public display may reasonably be restricted." Pornography is one example where art is at its most extreme in challenging the status quo of civilization. It is through pornography that the very essence of sex is challenged. From Sadomasochism to the overtly erotic in which the meaning of love is divorced from sex, pornography is our imagination left unchecked. Paglia recognizes this and asserts, "The banning of pornography, rightly sought by Judeo-Christianity, would be a victory over the West's stubborn paganism. But pornography cannot be banned, only driven underground, where its illicit charge will be enhanced." Pornography is the rebuke to what Paglia calls, "the humanistic cult of the redemptive."