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

> Gay and straight men have much more in common than do gay men with lesbians or straight men with straight women. Every man must define his identity against his mother. If he does not, he he just falls back into her and is swallowed up. This is the agonizing myth-pattern in the comic, matricidal Psycho (1960), one of the hauntingly emblematic films of our time.

- 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: 23
- Source: [Wikiquote](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Camille_Paglia#Sex,_Art_and_American_Culture_:_New_Essays_(1992)) ([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/gay-and-straight

## 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)