{
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  "url": "https://www.leafyquotes.com/camille-paglia/sexual-personae/every-fetus-becomes",
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  "slug": "every-fetus-becomes",
  "text": "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.",
  "language": "en",
  "author": {
    "name": "Camille Paglia",
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  "book": {
    "title": "Sexual Personae",
    "slug": "sexual-personae",
    "url": "https://www.leafyquotes.com/camille-paglia/sexual-personae"
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  "character": null,
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  "page": 19,
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  "topics": [
    {
      "name": "men",
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  "added_at": "2026-09-25T22:49:16",
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    {
      "id": "a1af4d02-0e3f-4501-b556-f9a887d8df99",
      "slug": "charisma-is-the",
      "url": "https://www.leafyquotes.com/camille-paglia/sexual-personae/charisma-is-the",
      "text": "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.",
      "language": "en",
      "character": null,
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      "chapter_parent": null,
      "page": 521,
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      "added_at": "2026-09-25T22:49:18"
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    {
      "id": "9bd48fcc-6a2d-4399-99fa-36b2a8f3e923",
      "slug": "it-is-no-coincidence",
      "url": "https://www.leafyquotes.com/camille-paglia/sexual-personae/it-is-no-coincidence",
      "text": "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.",
      "language": "en",
      "character": null,
      "chapter": null,
      "chapter_parent": null,
      "page": 660,
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        "url": "https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Camille_Paglia#Sexual_Personae:_Art_and_Decadence_from_Nefertiti_to_Emily_Dickinson_(1990)",
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      "id": "50aa9207-c2d5-432e-b3e0-63601ebdd473",
      "slug": "women-have-been",
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      "text": "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.",
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