# Sexual Personae



## teflon (Dec 18, 2005)

Whenever Camille Paglia's turns out another study of the Western Culture, she succeeds in aggravating a wide spectrum of intellectuals. That impresses me.
Paglia's discovery that women’s reproductive powers naturally bind them to men unnerves feminist intellectuals. 

She says that Ayn Rand-like capitalism has freed women from bondage to men, and she makes Leftists boil with indignation. 

When she associates homosexual aestheticism with some of the most despotic systems and shows that gay men's love of all things masculine is idolatry, she is sure to ruin their day. 

She crumples the most sacred institutions of Church and State — because it is a male attempt to smother natural female forces, the conservatives will grumble.

Paglia's claims that the great world we call Western Culture is nothing more than social manifestations - through literature, art, political and religious institutions - of men's phobia of mysteries that lurk within women’s vaginas and, consequently, of women’s emotional attempts to conquer their penises. By conquering nature, men try to counter-conquer women, sex, and everything that resists being bottled up by intellect. 
Paglia points out that the penis, unlike the vagina, is external, hence visual; it is linear, it can be measured, compared, formulated. The vagina, on the other hand, is ambiguous, striking in color, impossible to quantify or architecturally simulate. 
Paglia holds that nature does not conform to the laws of man, of culture. Man sees uncontainable nature in woman, in the liquids that flow from her genitalia during sex and menstruation, from her breasts after childbirth, and he is threatened, even while deeply drawn to that very object which he lacks and finds fascinating. Man turns toward the sky, toward Greek gods, and invests his faith in transcendental logic. 


The male ego is a sexual persona that replicates itself in phallic monuments and skyscrapers, stairways to the sky, to the sun, to heaven, in religious doctrines that designate women as the servants of men, as shrews are to be tamed. By controlling women, men are attempting to control nature, the ultimate representation of power. Deep down they know that, like their own penises that shrivel into a flaccid strands of flesh once orgasm has been achieved, their own power is fleeting. Therefore, they fight the futile war and wreck Western Culture further into spectacular carnage.


Paglia’s language is intellectually powerful and colorful, and together with her uncanny, honest grasp of art history proudly saturates the book with all things that are Paglia. This is both an art book and a politically incorrect manifesto.


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## strangedaze (Dec 18, 2005)

fantastic book that has fueled more than one undergrad essay of mine this year.


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## Anarkos (Dec 18, 2005)

Sounds shit.


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## teflon (Dec 20, 2005)

Anarkos, you are going to read it now? After you are done, you'd wish you'd write like that, or wish she'd write fiction.


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## Anarkos (Dec 20, 2005)

Nah.  People who think literary studies mean jack tend to piss me off.


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## teflon (Dec 20, 2005)

Camille dudn't write no literary studies. Check her out. You'd want to marry her.


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## strangedaze (Dec 20, 2005)

i can imagine what shed be like in bed........


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## teflon (Dec 20, 2005)

Most of publicity shots show her very pretty with that short hair, the Italian look of subdued feistiness. Maybe she'd let us watch her with her girlfriends.


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## strangedaze (Dec 20, 2005)

a boy can dream...


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## teflon (Dec 20, 2005)

re. Elvis song, "to dream an impossbile dream", or better yet, MLK: "I have a dream, that Camille Paglia made a pass on my on my wife..."


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## Anarkos (Dec 20, 2005)

strangedaze said:
			
		

> i can imagine what shed be like in bed........



A chainsaw?

One thing I would like to see...fisticuffs between her and Ann Coulter.


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## teflon (Dec 21, 2005)

She'd look too Brunhilda-Viking-like in comparison to the esthetically Italian Paglia. In an argument, she is limited by her strength concentrated in a two dimensional space, a line that is the political science sepctrum. Paglia's worldview apparently incorporates hyper-dimensional spectra whose residents are too biased or too slow to comrpehend.


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