Camille Paglia: Sex, Art and Society

Camille Paglia is openly gay and atheistic, but is a closet conservative. In her book, “Sexual Personae” Ms. Paglia reviewed the conflict that is Western culture. Ms. Paglia in an interview observed, “Western culture is a very complex combination of two traditions, the Judeo-Christian and the Greco-Roman….the tension and conflict between those two traditions account for the enormity and grandeur and staggering variety of Western art.” Sexual Personae is a story of that struggle between paganism and Christianity, and notes that paganism was never defeated by Christianity but merely pushed underground- only to emerge at specific moments such as the Renaissance and today’s popular culture.

At the heart of art of the struggle in the war between the sexes, and as Paglia writes, “The sexes are eternally at war. There is an element of attack, of search- and-destroy in the male sex, in which there will always be a potential for rape. There is an element of entrapment in the female sex, a subliminal manipulation leading to physical and emotional infantilization of the male.” Sex is part of the battle that leads to civilization. In Paglia’s world, “Male sex is quest romance, exploration, and speculation. Promiscuity in men may cheapen love but sharpen thought.” Paglia continues that a promiscuious woman loses identity and it is through this machismo that man is at his creative best.

Paglia states that most unfeminist thought, “One of feminism’s irritating reflexes is its fashionable disdain for ‘patriarchal society’ to which nothing good is ever attributed. It is the patriarchal society that has freed me as a woman…..If civilization had been left in female hands, we would be still be living in grass huts.” Ouch. Paglia, a card-carrying member of the Democratic left who voted for Ralph Nader in the last election, challenges the very foundation of modern feminism. Paglia is not interested in war with the male sex, but has a healthy respect for the role that both men and women play in our civilization. The modern day war between the sexes and between paganism and Christianity begins with Genesis, which Paglia describes as a “male declaration of independence.”

In Paglia’s mind, males are the sexual exiles, drifting aimlessly and looking for fulfillment. The male sex is always seeking and never contented, and as Paglia notes, “There is nothing in that anguished motion for women to envy.” The woman is the superior sex, and as Freud observed, “Man fears that his strength will be taken from him by woman, dreads becoming infected with her feminity and then proving himself a weakling.” Man is at eternal battle against effeminacy on a daily basis, and it is this struggle that creates Mozart but also Jack the Ripper. Paglia declares that it is through culture that men become whole and it is the efforts of mens own aggressive nature that creates the commerce that generates the wealth that underpins Civilization. Paglia asserts, “Capitalism has given me the leisure to sit at this desk writing this book. Let us stop being small-minded about men and freely acknowledge what treasures their obsessiveness has poured into culture.” Paglia concedes, “even without restrictions, there still would have been no female Pascal, Milton or Kant. Genius is not checked by social obstacles: it will overcome. Men’s egotism, so disgusting in the talentless, is the source of their greatness as a sex.” The female advantage is that they have “a more accurate sense of reality; they are physically and spiritually more complete.” In some ways, Camille Pagila is drifting toward conservative George Gilder’s own ideas that women are a civilizing force upon the male sex.

Article Author: Tom Donelson

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