# Quote — Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae

> 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.

- Author: [Camille Paglia](https://www.leafyquotes.com/camille-paglia.md)
- Book: [Sexual Personae](https://www.leafyquotes.com/camille-paglia/sexual-personae.md)
- Page: 16
- Source: [Wikiquote](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Camille_Paglia#Sexual_Personae:_Art_and_Decadence_from_Nefertiti_to_Emily_Dickinson_(1990)) ([CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/))
- Quote page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/camille-paglia/sexual-personae/nature-is-a-darwinian

## More from this book

> 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)