# Sexual Personae

- Author: [Camille Paglia](https://www.leafyquotes.com/camille-paglia.md)
- Quotes: 105
- Book page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/camille-paglia/sexual-personae

## Quotes

> Sappho is a great poet because she is a lesbian, which gives her erotic access to the Muse. Sappho and the homosexual-tending Emily Dickinson stand alone above women poets, because poetry's mystical energies are ruled by a hierach requiring the sexual subordination of her petitioners. Women have achieved more as novelists than as poets because the social novel operates outside the ancient marriage of myth and eroticism.

p. 672 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/camille-paglia/sexual-personae/sappho-is-a-great.md)

> In 'A Room of One's Own', Virginia Woolf satirically describes her perplexity at the bulging card catalog of the British Museum: why, she asks, are there so many books written by men about women but none by women about men? The answer to her question is that from the beginning of time men have been struggling with the threat of woman's dominance.

p. 295 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/camille-paglia/sexual-personae/in-a-room.md)

> The reason Wilde did his best work after turning homosexual is that women simply reinforced his own feminine sentimentality. … Heterosexuality inhibited his imagination because woman is physically and psychologically internal.

p. 571 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/camille-paglia/sexual-personae/the-reason-wilde.md)

> Emily Dickinson is the female Sade, and her poems are the prison dreams of a self-incarcerated, sadomasochistic imaginist. When she is rescued from American Studies departments and juxtaposed with Dante and Baudelaire, her barbarities and diabolical acts of will become glaringly apparent. Dickinson inherits through Blake the rape cycle of The Faerie Queene. Blake and Spenser are her allies in helping pagan Coleridge defeat Protestant Wordsworth.

p. 624 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/camille-paglia/sexual-personae/emily-dickinson-is-the.md)

> Charisma is the radiance produced by the interaction of male and female elements in a gifted personality. The charismatic woman has a masculine force and severity. The charismatic man has an entrancing female beauty. Both are hot and cold, glowing with presexual self-love.

p. 521 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/camille-paglia/sexual-personae/charisma-is-the.md)

> It is no coincidence that while some major female artists have married, very few have borne children. The issue is not conservation of energy but imaginative integrity. Art is its own self-swelling, proof that the mind is greater than the body.

p. 660 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/camille-paglia/sexual-personae/it-is-no-coincidence.md)

> Gautier says, “Baudelaire abhorred philanthropy, progressivists, utilitarians, humanitarians and utopianists.” In other words, Baudelaire condemned Rousseausism in all its forms. Today, Rousseausism has so triumphed that the arts and the avant-garde are synonymous with liberalism, an error enforced by literature teachers, with their humanist bias. I follow the Decadents in trying to drive Rousseauist benevolence out of the discourse in art and literature. The Decadents satirized the liberal faith in progress with sizzling prophecies of catastrophe and cultural collapse.

p. 429 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/camille-paglia/sexual-personae/gautier-says-baudelaire.md)

> Even the best critical writing on Emily Dickinson underestimates her. She is frightening. To come to her directly from Dante, Spenser, Blake, and Baudelaire is to find her sadomasochism obvious and flagrant. Birds, bees, and amputated hands are the dizzy stuff of this poetry. Dickinson is like the homosexual cultist draping himself in black leather and chains to bring the idea of masculinity into aggressive visibility.

p. 624 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/camille-paglia/sexual-personae/even-the-best.md)

> Women have been discouraged from genres such as sculpture that require studio training or expensive materials. But in philosophy, mathematics, and poetry, the only materials are pen and paper. Male conspiracy cannot explain all female failures. I am convinced that, 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. [...] Even now, with all vocations open, I marvel at the rarity of the woman driven by artistic or intellectual obsession, that self-mutilating derangement of social relationship which, in its alternate forms of crime and ideation, is the disgrace and glory of the human species.

p. 653 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/camille-paglia/sexual-personae/women-have-been.md)

> [Henry] James’s repressions and evasions are many, varied and exhausting. Why more people are not seen rushing shrieking from libraries, shredding James novels in their hands, I cannot say. I used to wonder whether enthusiasm for him was based on identification, since his passive, tentative heroes resemble many academics. Perhaps what is intolerable is his enshrinement in a soporific criticism. So much must be overlooked to crown him with laurel.

p. 622 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/camille-paglia/sexual-personae/henry-jamess-repressions.md)

> Richard Chase declares, "No great poet has written so much bad verse as Emily Dickinson." He blames the Victorian cult of little women for the fact that "two thirds of her work" is seriously flawed: "Her coy and oddly childish poems of nature and female friendship are products of a time when one of the careers open to women was perpetual childhood." Dickinson's sentimental feminine poems remain neglected by embarrassed scholars. I would maintain, however, that her poetry is a closed system of sexual reference and that the mawkish poems are designed to dovetail with those of violence and suffering.

p. 637 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/camille-paglia/sexual-personae/richard-chase-declares.md)

> Tranvestism is far more common among men, I noted, because it originates in the primary relation of mother and son.

p. 508 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/camille-paglia/sexual-personae/tranvestism-is-far.md)

> In Romanticism, unlike the Renaissance, Amazons retain their power. Rousseau wants it both ways. Idolizing women is natural and right, a cosmic law. On the other hand, male recessiveness is blamed on female coercion. Either way, sadomasochistic dominance and submission are inherent in Rousseausism from the start.

p. 232 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/camille-paglia/sexual-personae/in-romanticism-unlike.md)

> Women played no part in Athenian high culture. They could not vote, attend the theatre, or walk in the stoa talking philosophy. But the male orientation of Greek culture was inseparable of its genius. Athens became great not despite but because of its misogyny.

p. 100 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/camille-paglia/sexual-personae/women-played-no-part.md)

> The idea that emotion can be separated from sex is a Christian illusion, one of the most ingenious but finally unworkable strategies in Christianity’s ancient campaign against pagan nature.

p. 35 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/camille-paglia/sexual-personae/the-idea-that.md)

> The idea that the stars literally influence men (by a falling fluid, an influenza) is plainly untenable. But that the movements of the constellations are a clock by which earthly changes can be measured is less easy to dismiss.

p. 222 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/camille-paglia/sexual-personae/the-idea-that-the.md)

> At the opening of the Odyssey, Telemachus, inspired by the male-born Athena, searches for his father by turning against his mother. Jesus too publicly spurns his mother to be about his father’s business. Male adulthood begins with the breaking of female chains.

p. 89 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/camille-paglia/sexual-personae/at-the-opening.md)

> Butchery is not the point of vampirism. Sex - domination and submission - is.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/camille-paglia/sexual-personae/butchery-is-not.md)

> The capitalist distribution network, a complex chain of factory, transport, warehouse and retail outlet, is one of the greatest male accomplishments in the history of culture.

p. 37 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/camille-paglia/sexual-personae/the-capitalist-distribution.md)

> Art advances by self-mutilation of the artist.

p. 54 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/camille-paglia/sexual-personae/art-advances-by-self-mutilation.md)

> The Apollonian and Dionysian, two great western principles, govern sexual personae in life and art. My theory is this: Dionysus is identification, Apollo objectification. Dionysus is the empathic, the sympathetic, emotion transporting us into other people, other palaces, other times. Apollo is the hard, cold separation of western personality and categorical thought. Dionysus is energy, ecstasy, hysteria, promiscuity, emotionalism -- heedless indiscriminateness of idea or practice. Apollo is obsessiveness, voyeurism, idolatry, fascism -- frigidity and aggression of the eye, petrification of objects. … The quarrel between Apollo and Dionysus is the quarrel between the higher cortex and the older limbic and reptilian brains.

p. 96 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/camille-paglia/sexual-personae/the-apollonian-and.md)

> The reform of a college English department cuts no ice down at the corner garage.

p. 22 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/camille-paglia/sexual-personae/the-reform-of-a-college.md)

> The Nefertiti bust is one of the most popular art works in the world. It is printed on scarves and molded in necklace pendants and coffee-table miniatures. But never in my experience is the bust exactly reproduced. The copyist softens it, feminizes it and humanizes it. The actual bust is intolerably severe. It is too uncanny an object for domestic display. Even art books lie. The bust is usually posed in profile or at an angle, so that the missing left pupil is hidden or shadowed. What happened to the eye?

p. 67 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/camille-paglia/sexual-personae/the-nefertiti-bust.md)

> Visionary idealism is a male art form. The lesbian aesthete does not exist. But if there were one, she would have learned from the perverse male mind.

p. 117 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/camille-paglia/sexual-personae/visionary-idealism-is-a-male.md)

> The thrill of terror is passive, masochistic, and implicitly feminine. It is imaginative submission to overwhelming superior force.

p. 267 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/camille-paglia/sexual-personae/the-thrill-of-terror.md)

> Everything great in western culture has come from the quarrel with nature.

p. 28 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/camille-paglia/sexual-personae/everything-great-in-western.md)

> The toothed vagina is no sexist hallucination: every penis is made less by every vagina, just as mankind, male and female, is devoured by mother nature. The vagina dentata is part of the Romantic revival of pagan myth. It is subliminally present in Poe’s voracious maelstrom and dank, scythe-swept pit. It overtly appears in the bible of French Decadence, Huysmans’s A Rebours (1884), where a dreamer is magnetically drawn towards mother nature’s open thighs, the “bloody depths” of a carnivorous flower rimmed by “swordblades.”

p. 47 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/camille-paglia/sexual-personae/the-toothed-vagina.md)

> Personality maintains its discreetness by an act of will. Otherwise one person will flow helplessly into another.

p. 293 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/camille-paglia/sexual-personae/personality-maintains-its.md)

> The Gothic tradition was begun by Ann Radcliffe, a rare example of a woman creating an artistic style.

p. 265 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/camille-paglia/sexual-personae/the-gothic-tradition.md)

> Homeric mind is ingenuity, practical intelligence. There is no Rodin-like deep thinking, no mathematical or philosophical speculation. Odysseus thinks with his hands.

p. 85 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/camille-paglia/sexual-personae/homeric-mind-is-ingenuity.md)

> Male mastery in marriage is a social illusion, nurtured by women exhorting their creations to play and walk. At the emotional heart of every marriage is a pietà of mother and son.

p. 53 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/camille-paglia/sexual-personae/male-mastery-in-marriage.md)

> That nature acts differently upon the sexes is proved by the test case of modern male and female homosexuality, illustrating how the sexes function separately outside social conventions. The results, according to statistics of sexual frequency: male satyriasis and female nesting. The male homosexual has more sex than his heterosexual counterpart; the female homosexual less often than hers, a radical polarization of the sexes along a single continuum of shared sexual nonconformity. Male aggression and lust are the energizing factors in culture. They are men’s tools of survival in the pagan vastness of female nature.

p. 26 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/camille-paglia/sexual-personae/that-nature-acts.md)

> Simply follow nature, Rousseau declares. Sade, laughing grimly, agrees.

p. 235 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/camille-paglia/sexual-personae/simply-follow-nature.md)

> The book of Genesis is a male declaration of independence from the ancient mother-cults. Its challenge to nature, so sexist to modern ears, marks one of the crucial moments in western history. Mind can never be free of matter. Only by mind imagining itself free can culture advance. The mother-cults, by reconciling man to nature, entrapped him in matter. Everything great in western civilization has come from struggling against our origins. Genesis is rigid and unjust, but it gave man hope as a man. It remade the world by male dynasty, canceling the power of mothers.

p. 40 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/camille-paglia/sexual-personae/the-book-of-genesis.md)

> The English language was created by poets, a five-hundred year enterprise of emotion and metaphor, the richest dialogue in world literature. French rhetorical models are too narrow for the English tradition. Most pernicious of French imports is the notion that there is no person behind a text. Is there anything more affected, aggressive, and relentlessly concrete than a Parisian intellectual behind his/her turgid text? The Parisian is a provincial when he pretends to speak for the universe.

p. 34 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/camille-paglia/sexual-personae/the-english-language.md)

> The sixteenth century transformed Middle English into modern English. Grammar was up for grabs. People made up vocabulary and syntax as they went along. Not until the eighteenth century would rules of English usage appear. Shakespearean language is a bizarre super-tongue, alien and plastic, twisting, turning, and forever escaping. It is untranslatable, since it knocks Anglo-Saxon root words against Norman and Greco-Roman importations sweetly or harshly, kicking us up and down rhetorical levels with witty abruptness. No one in real life ever spoke like Shakespeare’s characters. His language does not “make sense,” especially in the greatest plays. Anywhere from a third to a half of every Shakespearean play, I conservatively estimate, will always remain under an interpretive cloud. Unfortunately, this fact is obscured by the encrustations of footnotes in modern texts, which imply to the poor cowed student that if only he knew what the savants do, all would be as clear as day. Every time I open Hamlet, I am stunned by its hostile virtuosity, its elusiveness and impenetrability. Shakespeare uses language to darken. He suspends the traditional compass points of rhetoric, still quite firm in Marlowe, normally regarded as Shakespeare’s main influence. Shakespeare’s words have “aura.” This he got from Spenser, not Marlowe.

p. 195 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/camille-paglia/sexual-personae/the-sixteenth-century.md)

> Freud says, “Man fears that his strength will be taken from him by woman, dreads becoming infected with her femininity and then proving himself a weakling.” Masculinity must fight off effeminacy day by day. Woman and nature stand ever ready to reduce the male to boy and infant.

p. 27 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/camille-paglia/sexual-personae/freud-says-man.md)

> Serial or sex murder, like fetishism, is a perversion of male intelligence. It is a criminal abstraction, masculine in its deranged egoism and orderliness. It is the asocial equivalent of philosophy, mathematics and music. There is no female Mozart because there is no female Jack the Ripper.

p. 247 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/camille-paglia/sexual-personae/serial-or-sex.md)

> Every male copulating with a woman returns to his origins in the womb. Goethe postponed intercourse until he was forty. This must be related to his self-imposed distance from his forceful mother. To refuse phallic penetration is to refuse surrender to the female matrix.

p. 257 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/camille-paglia/sexual-personae/every-male-copulating.md)

> Only utopian liberals could be surprised that the Nazis were art connoisseurs.

p. 29 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/camille-paglia/sexual-personae/only-utopian-liberals.md)

> Women have ironically enjoyed a greater symbolic, if not practical freedom. Thus it is that male and not female homosexuality has been harshly punished by law. A debater in Lucian declares, “Far better that a women, in the madness of her lust, should usurp the nature of man, than that man’s noble nature should be so degraded as to play the woman.” Similarly today, lesbian interludes are a staple of heterosexual pornography. Ever since man emerged from the dominance of nature, masculinity has been the most fragile and problematic of psychic states.

p. 125 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/camille-paglia/sexual-personae/women-have-ironically.md)

> Effeminate men have suffered a bad press the world over.

p. 125 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/camille-paglia/sexual-personae/effeminate-men-have.md)

> Oil painting and color, said Michelangelo, are for “women and the lazy.” His sharp-edged Apollonian style is the only way to beat back mother nature.

p. 158 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/camille-paglia/sexual-personae/oil-painting-and.md)

> Male tumescence is an assertion of the separateness of objects. An erection is architectural, sky-pointing. Female tumescence, through blood or water, is slow, gravitational, amorphous. In the war for human identity, male tumescence is an instrument, female tumescence an obstruction. The fatty female body is a sponge. At peak menstrual and natal moments, it is locked passively in place, suffering wave after wave of Dionysian power.

p. 91 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/camille-paglia/sexual-personae/male-tumescence-is-an-assertion.md)

> Romanticism, like the Rousseauist Swinging Sixties, misunderstands the Dionysian as the pleasure principle, when it is in fact the gross continuum of pleasure-pain. Worshiping nature and seeking political and sexual freedom, Romanticism ends in imaginative entrammelment of every kind. Perfect freedom is intolerable and therefore impossible.

p. 231 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/camille-paglia/sexual-personae/romanticism-like-the.md)

> I subscribe to Jung's theory of synchronicity.

p. 222 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/camille-paglia/sexual-personae/i-subscribe-to-jungs.md)

> If civilization had been left in female hands, we would still be living in grass huts.

p. 38 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/camille-paglia/sexual-personae/if-civilization-had.md)

> Greek pederasty honored the erotic magnetism of male adolescence in a way that today brings police to the door. Children are more conscious and perverse than parents like to think.

p. 115 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/camille-paglia/sexual-personae/greek-pederasty-honored.md)

> What is Mona Lisa thinking? Nothing, of course. Her blankness is her menace and our fear. [...] Walter Pater is to call her a 'vampire,' coasting through history on her secret tasks.

p. 154 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/camille-paglia/sexual-personae/what-is-mona.md)

> The Orestia shows that society is a defense against nature. Everything intelligible -- institutions, objects, persons, ideas -- is the result of Apollonian clarification, adjudication, and action. Western politics, science, psychology and art are creations of arrogant Apollo. Through every century, winning or losing, western mind has struggled to keep nature at bay. The Orestia’s sexist transition from matriarchy to patriarchy records the rebellion every imagination must make against nature. Without that rebellion, we as a species are condemned to regression or stasis. Even rebelling, we cannot get far. But vying with fate is godlike.

p. 101 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/camille-paglia/sexual-personae/the-orestia-shows.md)

> The old “double standard” gave men a sexual liberty denied to women. Marxist feminists reduced the historical cult of woman’s virginity to her property value, her worth on the male marriage market. I would argue instead that there was and is a biological basis to the double standard. The first medical reports on the disease killing male homosexuals [i.e., AIDS] indicated men most at risk were those with a thousand partners over their lifetime. Incredulity. Who could such people be? Why, it turns out, everyone one knew. Serious, kind, literate men, not bums or thugs.

p. 27 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/camille-paglia/sexual-personae/the-old-double.md)

> We remain in the Romantic cycle initiated by Rousseau: liberal idealism canceled by violence, barbarism, disillusionment and cynicism.

p. 232 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/camille-paglia/sexual-personae/we-remain-in-the.md)

> Not a shred of evidence supports the existence of matriarchy anywhere in the world at any time. [...] The matriarchy hypothesis, revived by American feminism, continues to flourish outside the university

p. 42 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/camille-paglia/sexual-personae/not-a-shred.md)

> I cannot be convinced that great artists are moralists. Art is first appearances, then meaning.

p. 166 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/camille-paglia/sexual-personae/i-cannot-be-convinced.md)

> One of feminism’s irritating reflexes is its fashionable disdain for “patriarchal society,” to which nothing good is ever attributed. But it is patriarchal society that has freed me as a woman. It is capitalism that 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.

p. 37 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/camille-paglia/sexual-personae/one-of-feminisms.md)

> The Fairie Queene makes cinema out of the west's primary principle: to see is to know; to know is to control. The Spenserian eye cuts, wounds, rapes.

p. 173 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/camille-paglia/sexual-personae/the-fairie-queene.md)

> The Faerie Queene is the most extended and extensive meditation on sex in the history of poetry. It charts the entire erotic spectrum, a great chain of being rising from matter to spirit, from the coarsest lust to chastity and romantic idealism. The poem’s themes of sex and politics are parallel: the psyche, like society, must be disciplined by good government. Spenser agrees with the classical and Christian philosophers on the primacy of reason over animal appetites. He looks forward to the Romantic poets, however, in the way that he shows the sex impulse as ultimately daemonic and barbaric, breeding witches and sorcerers of evil allure. Like the Odyssey, The Faerie Queene is a heroic epic in which the masculine must evade female traps or delays.

p. 188 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/camille-paglia/sexual-personae/the-faerie-queene.md)

> Judaism’s campaign to make divinity invisible has never fully succeeded. Images are always eluding moral control, creating the brilliant western art tradition. Idolatry is fascism of the eye. The western eye will be served, with or without the consent of conscience.

p. 139 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/camille-paglia/sexual-personae/judaisms-campaign-to-make.md)

> The artist makes art not to save mankind but to save himself. Every benevolent comment by an artist is a fog to cover his tracks, the bloody trail of his assault against reality and others.

p. 29 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/camille-paglia/sexual-personae/the-artist-makes.md)

> Capitalism, gaudy and greedy, has been inherent in western aesthetics from ancient Egypt on. It is the mysticism and glamour of things, which take on a personality of their own. As an economic system, it is in the Darwinian line of Sade, not Rousseau.

p. 37 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/camille-paglia/sexual-personae/capitalism-gaudy-and.md)

> Woman's flirtatious arts of self-concealment mean man's approach must take the form of rape.

p. 276 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/camille-paglia/sexual-personae/womans-flirtatious-arts.md)

> Nefertiti is like Athena born from the brow of Zeus, a head-heavy armored goddess. She is beautiful but desexed.

p. 71 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/camille-paglia/sexual-personae/nefertiti-is-like.md)

> Pornography’s male-born explicitness renders visible what is invisible, woman’s chthonic internality. It tries to shed Apollonian light on woman’s anxiety-provoking darkness. The vulgar contortionism of pornography is the serpentine tangle of Medusan nature. Pornography is human imagination in tense theatrical action; its violations are a protest against the violations of our freedom by nature. The banning of pornography, rightly sought by Judeo-Christianity, would be a victory over the west’s stubborn paganism. But pornography cannot be banned, only driven underground, where its illicit charge will be enhanced.

p. 35 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/camille-paglia/sexual-personae/pornographys-male-born-explicitness.md)

> We could make an epic catalog of male achievements, from paved roads, indoor plumbing, and washing machine to eyeglasses, antibiotics and disposable diapers. We enjoy safe, fresh milk and meat, and vegetables and tropical fruits heaped in snowbound cities. When I cross the George Washington Bridge or any of America’s great bridges, I think: men have done this. Construction is a sublime male poetry. When I see a giant crane passing on a flatbed truck, I pause in awe and reverence as would for a church processions.

p. 37 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/camille-paglia/sexual-personae/we-could-make.md)

> In the past fifteen years, Marxist approaches towards literature have enjoyed increasing vogue. To be conscious of the social context of art seems to automatically entail a leftist orientation. But a theory is possible that is both avant-garde and capitalist. Marxism was one of Rousseau’s nineteenth-century progeny, energized by faith in the perfectabilty of man. Its belief that economic forces are the primary dynamic force in history is Romantic naturism in disguise. … Marxism is the bleakest of anxiety-formations against the power of cthonian mothers.

p. 36 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/camille-paglia/sexual-personae/in-the-past.md)

> Sade has barely made a dent on American academic consciousness. It is his violence far more than his sex which is so hard for liberals to accept. For Sade, sex is violence. Violence is the authentic spirit of mother nature.

p. 235 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/camille-paglia/sexual-personae/sade-has-barely.md)

> Marxism is a flight from the magic of the person and the mystique of hierarchy. It distorts the character of western culture, which is based on the charismatic power of person. Marxism can work only in pre-industrial societies of homogeneous populations. Raise the standard of living, and the rainbow riot of individualism will break out. Personality and art, which Marxism fears and censors, rebound from every effort to oppress them.

p. 36 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/camille-paglia/sexual-personae/marxism-is-a-flight.md)

> Capitalism is an art form.

p. 38 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/camille-paglia/sexual-personae/capitalism-is-an-art.md)

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

p. 15 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/camille-paglia/sexual-personae/the-mystique-of-the.md)

> Human life began in flight and fear. Religion rose from rituals of propitiation, spells to lull the punishing elements.

p. 1 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/camille-paglia/sexual-personae/human-life-began.md)

> Women have conceptualized less in history not because men have kept them from doing so but because women do not need to conceptualize in order to exist. […] Fetishism, for instance, a practice which like most of the sex perversions is confined to men, is clearly a conceptualizing or symbol-making activity. Man’s vastly greater commercial patronage of pornography is analogous.

p. 20 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/camille-paglia/sexual-personae/women-have-conceptualized.md)

> Sex cannot be understood because nature cannot be understood. Science is a method of logical analysis of nature’s operations. It has lessened human anxiety about the cosmos by demonstrating the materiality of nature’s forces, and their frequent predictability. But science is always playing catch-up ball. Nature breaks its own rules whenever it wants. Science cannot avert a single thunderbolt. Western science is a product of the Apollonian mind: its hope is that by naming and classification, by the cold light of intellect, archaic night can be pushed back and defeated.

p. 5 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/camille-paglia/sexual-personae/sex-cannot-be-understood.md)

> Society is not the criminal but the force which keeps crime in check. When social controls weaken, man’s innate cruelty bursts forth. The rapist is created not by bad social conditioning influences but by a failure of social conditioning. Feminists, seeking to drive power relations out of sex, have set themselves against nature. In western culture, there are no nonexploitative relationships. Everyone has killed in order to live. Nature’s universal law of creation from destruction operates in mind as in matter. As Freud, Nietzsche’s heir, asserts, identity is conflict. Each generation drives its plow over the bones of the dead.

p. 2 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/camille-paglia/sexual-personae/society-is-not.md)

> The Devil is a woman.

p. 11 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/camille-paglia/sexual-personae/the-devil-is-a-woman.md)

> Most of western culture is a distortion of reality. But reality should be distorted; that is, imaginatively amended. The Buddhist acquiescence to nature is neither accurate about nature nor just to human potential.

p. 13 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/camille-paglia/sexual-personae/most-of-western.md)

> We have an evolutionary revulsion from slime, the site of our biologic origins. Every month, it is woman's fate to face the abyss of time and being, the abyss which is herself.

p. 11 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/camille-paglia/sexual-personae/we-have-an-evolutionary.md)

> The evolution of earth-cult to sky-cult shifts woman into the nether realm. Her mysterious procreative powers and the resemblance of her rounded breasts, belly, and hips to earth’s contours put her at the center of early symbolism. She was the model for the Great Mother figures who crowded the birth of religion worldwide. But the mother cults did not mean freedom for women. On the contrary […] cult objects are prisoners of their own symbolic inflation. Every totem lives in taboo.

p. 8 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/camille-paglia/sexual-personae/the-evolution-of-earth-cult.md)

> Western culture from the start has swerved from femaleness. The last western society to worship female powers was Minoan Crete. And significantly, that fell and did not rise again.

p. 8 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/camille-paglia/sexual-personae/western-culture-from.md)

> Mind is a captive of the body.

p. 17 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/camille-paglia/sexual-personae/mind-is-a-captive.md)

> Woman was an idol of belly-magic. She seemed to swell and give birth by her own law. From the beginning of time, woman has seemed an uncanny being. Man honored but feared her. She was the black maw that had spat him forth and would devour him anew. Men, bonding together, invented culture as a defense against female nature. Sky-cult was the most sophisticated step in this process, for its switch of the creative locus from earth to sky is a shift from belly-magic to head-magic. And from this defensive head-magic has come the spectacular glory of male civilization, which has lifted woman with it. The very language and logic modern woman uses to assail patriarchal culture were the invention of men.

p. 9 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/camille-paglia/sexual-personae/woman-was-an-idol.md)

> Metaphorically, every vagina has secret teeth, for the male exits as less than when he entered. The basic mechanics of conception require action in the male but nothing more than passive receptivity in the female.

p. 13 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/camille-paglia/sexual-personae/metaphorically-every-vagina.md)

> Not until all babies are born from glass jars will the combat cease between mother and son.

p. 19 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/camille-paglia/sexual-personae/not-until-all.md)

> The female body is a chthonian machine, indifferent to the spirit who inhabits it.

p. 10 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/camille-paglia/sexual-personae/the-female-body.md)

> An erection is a thought and the orgasm an act of the imagination. The male has to will his sexual authority before the woman who is a shadow of his mother and of all women. Failure and humiliation constantly wait in the wings. No woman has to prove herself a woman in the grim way a man has to prove himself a man. He must perform, or the show does not go on. Social convention is irrelevant. A flop is a flop.

p. 20 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/camille-paglia/sexual-personae/an-erection-is-a-thought.md)

> The search for freedom through sex is doomed to failure.

p. 4 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/camille-paglia/sexual-personae/the-search-for.md)

> Society is a system of inherited forms reducing our humiliating passivity to nature. We may alter these forms, slowly or suddenly, but no change in society will change nature.

p. 1 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/camille-paglia/sexual-personae/society-is-a-system.md)

> Sexual freedom, sexual liberation. A modern delusion. We are hierarchical animals. Sweep one hierarchy away, and another will take its place, perhaps less palatable than the first.

p. 3 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/camille-paglia/sexual-personae/sexual-freedom-sexual.md)

> Nature is a Darwinian spectacle of the eaters and the eaten. All phases of procreation are ruled by appetite: sexual intercourse, from kissing to penetration, consists of movements of barely controlled cruelty and consumption. The long pregnancy of the human female and the protracted childhood of her infant, who is not self-sustaining for seven years or more, have produced the agon of psychological dependency that burdens the male for a lifetime. Man justifiably fears being devoured by woman, who is nature’s proxy.

p. 16 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/camille-paglia/sexual-personae/nature-is-a-darwinian.md)

> In the beginning was nature. The background from which and against our ideas of God were formed, nature remains the supreme moral problem. We cannot hope to understand sex and gender until we clarify our attitude toward nature. Sex is a subset to nature. Sex is the natural in man.

p. 1 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/camille-paglia/sexual-personae/in-the-beginning.md)

> The female body’s unbearable hiddenness applies to all aspects men’s dealings with women. What does it look like in there? Did she have an orgasm? Is it really my child? Who was my real father? Mystery surrounds women’s sexuality. This mystery is the main reason for the imprisonment man has imposed on women. Only by confining his wife in a locked harem guarded by eunuchs could he be certain that her son was also his.

p. 22 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/camille-paglia/sexual-personae/the-female-bodys.md)

> Sexual Personae seeks to demonstrate the unity and continuity of western culture — something that has inspired little belief since the period before World War I.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/camille-paglia/sexual-personae/sexual-personae-seeks.md)

> My stress on the truth in sexual stereotypes and on the biologic basis of sex differences is sure to cause controversy.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/camille-paglia/sexual-personae/my-stress-on-the.md)

> Every fetus becomes female unless it is steeped in male hormone, produced by a signal from the testes. Before birth, therefore, a male is already beyond the female. But to be beyond is to be exiled from the center of life. Men know they are sexual exiles. They wander the earth seeking satisfaction, craving and despising, never content. There is nothing in that anguished motion for women to envy.

p. 19 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/camille-paglia/sexual-personae/every-fetus-becomes.md)

> Judaism, Christianity’s parent sect, is the most powerful of protests against nature. The Old Testament asserts that a father god made nature and that the differentiation into objects and gender was after the fact of his maleness. Judeo-Christianity, like Greek worship of the Olympian gods, is a sky-cult. It is an advanced stage in the history of religion, which everywhere began as earth-cult, veneration of fruitful nature.

p. 8 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/camille-paglia/sexual-personae/judaism-christianitys-parent.md)

> The Bible has come under fire for making woman the fall guy in man's cosmic drama. But in casting a male conspirator, the serpent, as God's enemy, Genesis hedges and does not take its misogyny far enough. The Bible defensively swerves from God's true opponent, chthonian nature. The serpent is not outside Eve but in her. She is the garden and the serpent.

p. 11 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/camille-paglia/sexual-personae/the-bible-has.md)

> Modern liberalism suffers unresolved contradictions. It exalts individualism and freedom and, on its radical wing, condemns social orders as oppressive. On the other hand, it expects governments to provide materially for all, a feat manageable only by an expansion of authority and a swollen bureaucracy. In other words, liberalism defines government as tyrant father but demands it behave as nurturant mother. Feminism has inherited these contradictions.

p. 3 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/camille-paglia/sexual-personae/modern-liberalism-suffers.md)

> Repression is an evolutionary adaptation permitting us to function under the burden of our expanded consciousness. For what we are conscious of could drive us mad.

p. 16 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/camille-paglia/sexual-personae/repression-is-an-evolutionary.md)

> In every premenstrual woman struggling to govern her temper, sky-cult wars again with earth-cult.

p. 12 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/camille-paglia/sexual-personae/in-every-premenstrual.md)

> Every man harbors an inner female territory ruled by his mother, from whom he can never entirely break free.

p. 18 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/camille-paglia/sexual-personae/every-man-harbors.md)

> Sexuality and eroticism are the intricate intersection of nature and culture. Feminists grossly oversimplify the problem of sex when they reduce it a matter of social convention: readjust society, eliminate sexual inequality, purify sex roles, and happiness and harmony will reign. Here feminism, like all liberal movements of the past two hundred years, is heir to Rousseau.

p. 1 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/camille-paglia/sexual-personae/sexuality-and-eroticism.md)

> The moral ambivalence of the great mother goddesses has been conveniently forgotten by those American feminists who have resurrected them. We cannot grasp nature's bare blade without shedding our own blood.

p. 8 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/camille-paglia/sexual-personae/the-moral-ambivalence.md)

> Love for all means coldness to something or someone. Even Jesus, let us recall, was unnecessarily rude to his mother at Cana.

p. 18 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/camille-paglia/sexual-personae/love-for-all.md)

> All the genres of philosophy, science, high art, athletics and politics were invented by men. But by the Promethean law of conflict and capture, woman has a right to seize what she will and vie with man on her own terms.

p. 9 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/camille-paglia/sexual-personae/all-the-genres.md)

> Feminism has exceeded its proper mission of seeking political equality for women and has ended by rejecting contingency, that is, human limitation by nature or fate.

p. 3 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/camille-paglia/sexual-personae/feminism-has-exceeded.md)

> Our focus on the pretty is an Apollonian strategy. The leaves and flowers, the birds, the hills are a patchwork pattern by which we map the known. What the West represses in its view of nature is the chthonian, which means "of the earth"—but earth's bowels, not its surface. Jane Harrison uses the term for pre-Olympian Greek religion, and I adopt it as a substitute for Dionysian, which has become contaminated with vulgar pleasantries. The Dionysian is no picnic. It is the chthonian realities which Apollo evades, the blind grinding of subterranean force..., the dehumanizing brutality of biology and geology, the Darwinian waste and bloodshed, the squalor and rot we must block from consciousness to retain our Apollonian integrity as persons. Western science and aesthetics are attempts to revise this horror into imaginatively palatable form.

p. 6 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/camille-paglia/sexual-personae/our-focus-on-the.md)