# Quote — Camille Paglia, Sex, Art, and American Culture

> Feminists have no idea that some women like to flirt with danger because there is a sizzle in it. You know what gets me sick and tired? The battered-woman motif. It’s so misrepresented, the way we have to constantly look at it in terms of male oppression and tyranny, and female victimization. When, in fact, everyone knows throughout the history of the world that many of these working-class relationships where women get beat up have hot sex. They ask why won’t she leave him? Maybe she won’t leave him because the sex is very hot. I say we should start looking at the battered-wife motif in terms of sex. If gay men go down to bars and like to get tied up, beaten up, and have their asses whipped, how come we can’t allow that a lot of wives like the kind of sex they are getting in these battered wife relationships? We can’t consider that women have kinky tastes, can we? No, because women are naturally benevolent and nurturing, aren’t they? Everything is so damn Mary Poppins and sanitized.

- Author: [Camille Paglia](https://www.leafyquotes.com/camille-paglia.md)
- Book: [Sex, Art, and American Culture](https://www.leafyquotes.com/camille-paglia/sex-art-and-american-culture.md)
- Page: 65
- Source: [Wikiquote](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Camille_Paglia#The_Rape_Debate,_Continued) ([CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/))
- Quote page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/camille-paglia/sex-art-and-american-culture/feminists-have-no-idea

## More from this book

> The born-yesterday French-besotted faddists, addicted sniffers of wet printer’s ink, think they’re starting on the ground floor; so they’re condemned to another hundred years of trial and error. The rest of us can safely ignore them.

p. 202 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/camille-paglia/sex-art-and-american-culture/the-born-yesterday-french-besotted.md)

> I realize now how lucky I was, in the total absence of role models, to have only men to rebel against. Today's women students are meeting their oppressors in dangerously seductive new form, as successful congenial female professors who view themselves as victims of a rigid foreign ideology.

p. 213 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/camille-paglia/sex-art-and-american-culture/i-realize-now.md)

> Great women scholars like Jane Harrison and Gisela Richter were produced by the intellectual discipline of the masculine classical tradition, not the wishy-washy sentimentalism of clingy, all-forgiving sisterhood, from which no first-rate book has yet emerged. Every year, feminists provide more and more evidence for the old charge that women can neither think nor write.

p. 244 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/camille-paglia/sex-art-and-american-culture/great-women-scholars.md)