Camille Paglia Quotes

Bisexuality is our best hope of escape from the animosities and false polarities of the current sex wars.

Mind is a captive of the body.

I believe that everybody has the right to view his or her own body as a palette. However, I think intellectuals should at least try to be role models.

Children are monsters of unbridled egotism and will, for they spring directly from nature, hostile intimations of immorality.

Male aggression and lust are the energizing factors in culture. They are men’s tools of survival in the pagan vastness of female nature.

Elizabeth Taylor is pre-feminist woman. This is the source of her continuing greatness and relevance. She wields the sexual power that feminism cannot explain and has tried to destroy. Through stars like Taylor, we sense the world-disordering impact of legendary women like Delilah, Salome, and Helen of Troy. Feminism has tried to dismiss the femme fatale as a misogynist libel, a hoary clich?. But the femme fatale expresses women’s ancient and eternal control of the sexual realm. The specter of the femme fatale stalks all men’s relations with women.

I view the prostitute as one of the few women who is totally in control of her fate, totally in control of the realm of sex. The lesbian feminists tried to take control of female sexuality away from men – but the prostitute was doing that all along.

The mystique of the femme fatale cannot be perfectly translated into male terms.

The prostitute is not, as feminists claim, the victim of men, but rather their conqueror, an outlaw, who controls the sexual channels between nature and culture

Eroticism is mystique; that is, the aura of emotion and imagination around sex. It cannot be ‘fixed’ by codes of social or moral convenience, whether from the political left or right. For nature’s fascism is greater than that of any society. There is a daemonic instability in sexual relations that we may have to accept.

Men who shrink from penetration of the female body are paralyzed by justifiable apprehension, since they are returning to our uncanny site of origin.

Women are in league with each other, a secret conspiracy of hearts and pheromones