The Eccentric Brilliance of Camille Paglia

[Dear Substack Reader, I wrote this piece several years ago for The American Conservative, and I even heard, indirectly, that Paglia actually liked it! I thought it was worth revisiting. Here’s hoping you agree, Brad]

Though Camille Paglia would not feel comfortable in the least writing or speaking for The American Conservative (she is, after all, a Nietzschean libertarian) or being written about at TAC, every person even marginally libertarian and/or conservative should appreciate the personality of this bizarre iconoclast. 

I first encountered her writings around 1990, shortly after she released her Sexual Personae, an intensive study of gender roles.  Looking back over my journals from the time (I’d just graduated from the U. of Notre Dame, 1990), she appears all over the place.  I was absolutely fascinated by her writings, her way of thinking, and her unique take—so counter to the then emerging political correctness movement—on any number of issues.  And, let me be clear from the outset, I found her conclusions more repulsive than not.  Twenty-five years and seven children later, I find her conclusions even more disturbing.  And, yet, just as I know I should turn away from a car accident on the interstate, I find it hard to have custody of the eyes and not gawk when Paglia speaks and writers.  As anyone not living under a rock this summer knows, she’s back in the limelight, commenting on everything from Bill Cosby to Bill Clinton to Planned Parenthood to the recent Republican debate.

Why would any person associated with TAC appreciate this intellectual libertine?  For many reasons, actually.

First, she speaks her mind, and her mind is as far from politically correct as imaginable.  Second, she can write with the best of them. 

But, third, we should love her for the enemies she has made.  She makes all conformists—whether of the leftist variety or the variety of the modern-day Puritan and fundamentalist rightists— uncomfortable in a way that no one has done since H.L. Mencken’s word reigned supreme in the 1920s.

Trained in the classics and greats of the western tradition, Paglia embraces libertarianism to the fullest extent possible in issues dealing with her most controversial subject, sexuality.  She calls for a complete decriminalization of all sexual acts with the exception of rape.  Liberalism, foolishly, “expects government to provide materially for all, a feat manageable only by an expansion of authority and a swollen bureaucracy.”  Consequently, she continues, liberals see government as a “tyrant father,” but hope it will act as a “nurturant mother.”^[1]  This, she correctly notes, is an impossible combination of desires which can only result in societal tragedy.

Even more importantly, a woman, she argues, is naturally very different from a man and must be recognized as such.

I have found the words masculine and feminine indispensable for my notations of appearance and behavior, but I apply them freely to both sexes, according to mood and situation. Here are my conclusions, after a lifetime of observation and reflection. Maleness at its hormonal extreme is an angry, ruthless density of self, motivated by a principle of "attack".  Femaleness at its hormonal extreme is first an acute sensitivity of response, literally thin-skinned (a hormonal effect in women), and secondly a stability, composure, and self containment, a slowness approaching the sultry. Biologically, the male is impelled toward restless movement; his moral danger is brutishness. Biologically, the female is impelled toward waiting, expectancy; her moral danger is stasis. Androgen agitates; estrogen tranquilizes— hence the drowsiness and "glow" of pregnancy. Most of us inhabit not polar extremes but a constantly shifting great middle. However, a preponderance of gray does not disprove the existence of black and white. Sexual geography, our body image, alters our perception of the world. Man is contoured for invasion, while woman remains the hidden, a cave of archaic darkness. No legislation or grievance committee can change these eternal facts.^[2]

Many critics have decried Paglia as an anti-feminist feminist.  Certainly, her own take on feminism is at best eccentric.  A feminism that calls for equality between the sexes is merely wishful thinking, she claims, and, ultimately, is just another form of western Puritanism. 

Modern feminism is also downright dangerous for society and, especially, for males.  Like all systems of equality, a feminism of this sort only makes all of us weaker. 

A devoted Nietzschean, Paglia wants a society of excellence and competition.  Her heroes are Elizabeth Taylor—endowed by nature with a goddess’s body and charisma—and Madonna.  Each has taken the pagan and exploded it to a form of divine madness, Paglia reflects, sounding more than a bit like Plato. 

To Paglia’s mind, art should be edgy, creative, unrestricted by the market or the norms.  Art should be a form of constant melodrama, a liturgy that demands full immersion by artist, witness, and critic.  “The greatest honor that can be paid to the artwork, on its pedestal of ritual display, is to describe it with sensory completeness,” she writes, thus advocating the tangibility of art itself, a thing to be absorbed not merely gazed upon.^[3]

In Sexual Personae, a work in painstaking scholarship and a myriad of opinions, Paglia argues that “society is an artificial construction, a defense against nature’s power.”^[4]  Nature thinks poorly of humanity, it seems, and humans developed the rituals of religion as a way to placate and attenuate the wrath of the elements.  In particular, Christianity is little more than a re-packaged “sky cult.”^[5]  In homage to such a view, Paglia lists Sade, Nietzsche, and Freud as the greatest thinkers of the modern era.  These three, she believes, are the true men of the West.^[6]

Let me be absolutely clear.  I, Brad, reject nearly everything Paglia believes.  I find her ideas nothing short of repulsive.  But, in a world that inches ever closer toward a bland conformity of life and opinion, Paglia’s spirit inspires me, even as her views disgust me.  The western world would be so much healthier with a number of Paglias, all eccentric, than merely the one. 

Long may she rage.

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^[1] Paglia, Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990), 2-3.

^[2] Paglia, Sex, Art, and American Culture, 108.

^[3] Paglia, Sex, Art, and American Culture, 117. 

^[4] Paglia, Sexual Personae, 1.

^[5] Paglia, Sexual Personae, 8.

^[6] Paglia, Sexual Personae, 14.