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

> The idea that feminism is the first group that has ever denounced rape is a gross libel to men. Throughout history, rape has been condemned by honorable men. Honorable men do not murder; honorable men do not steal; honorable men do not rape. It goes all the way back through history. Tarquin’s rape of Lucretia caused the fall of the tyrants and the beginning of the Roman Republic. The idea that somehow suddenly feminism miraculously found out that women were being exploited and raped throughout history is ridiculous.

- 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: 273
- 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/the-idea-that

## 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)