By Paglia's own account, the ancestor of Sexual Personae was a book on aviator Amelia Earhart that she began to write in high school. Paglia's discovery of Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex in 1963 inspired her to write a book larger in scope. Sexual Personae began to take shape in essays Paglia wrote in college between 1964 and 1968. The title was inspired by Ingmar Bergman's film Persona, which Paglia saw on its American release in 1968. The book was finished in 1981, but was rejected by seven major New York publishers before being released by Yale University Press in 1990. Paglia credits editor Ellen Graham with securing Yale's decision to publish the book. Sexual Personae's original preface was removed at the Yale editors' suggestion because of the book's extreme length, but was later published in Paglia's essay collection Sex, Art, and American Culture (1992).[4]
Paglia said of the book, "It was intended to please no one and to offend everyone. The entire process of the book was to discover the repressed elements of contemporary culture, whatever they are, and palpate them. One of the main premises was to demonstrate that pornography is everywhere in major art. Art history as written is completely sex free, repressive and puritanical. I want precision and historical knowledge, but at the same time, I try to zap it with pornographic intensity."[5]
Summary
The Triumph of Christianity over Paganism (1868) by Gustave Doré. In Sexual Personae, Paglia argues that Christianity never did defeat paganism.
Paglia seeks to demonstrate "the unity and continuity of western culture". Accepting the canonical Western tradition, she "rejects the modernist idea that culture has collapsed into meaningless fragments." Paglia argues that Christianity did not destroy paganism, which flourishes in art, eroticism, astrology, and popular culture. She examines antiquity, the Renaissance, and Romanticism from the late eighteenth century to 1900, contending that "Romanticism turns almost immediately into Decadence." She believes that the "amorality, aggression, sadism, voyeurism, and pornography in great art have been ignored or glossed over by most academic critics" and that sex and nature are "brutal pagan forces." She also stresses the truth in sexual stereotypes and the biological basis of sexual difference, noting that her stance is "sure to cause controversy." Paglia sees the mother as an overwhelming force who condemns men to lifelong sexual anxiety, from which they fleetingly escape through rationalism and physical achievement.[7]
Portraying Western culture as a struggle between phallicsky-religion ("Sky Cult") on the one hand and chthonicearth-religion ("Earth Cult") on the other, Paglia draws on the Greco-Roman polarity between the Apollonian and Dionysian. She associates Apollo with order, structure, and symmetry, and Dionysus with chaos, disorder, and nature. She analyzes literature and art on the premise that the primary conflict in Western culture has always been between these forces. In her view, the major patterns of continuity in Western culture originate in paganism. Other sources of continuity include androgyny, sadism, and the aggressive "western eye," which seeks to refine and dominate nature's ceaseless hostility and has created our art and cinema. Paglia criticizes feminists for sentimentality or wishful thinking about the causes of rape, violence, and poor relations between the sexes.[8]
She prominently argues for the vital role that patriarchy has played in civilizational development, even noting that "Athens became great not despite but because of its misogyny."[9] In one of her most infamous passages, she grounds this claim in what effectively amounts to the variability hypothesis in evolutionary psychology:
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.[10]
But already more conflicted in tone, another one of her main explanations for this asymmetry instead runs:
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. [emphasis added] [...] 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.[11]
Works of art to which Paglia applies her analysis of the Western canon include the Venus of Willendorf, the Nefertiti Bust, Ancient Greek sculpture, Donatello's David, Botticelli's Birth of Venus and Primavera, da Vinci's Mona Lisa and The Virgin and Child with St. Anne.[12] Paglia questions the sociologist Max Weber's definition of charisma, according to which it must be manifested in heroic deeds or miracles, writing that she sees charisma as "the numinous aura around a narcissistic personality" and "the radiance produced by the interaction of male and female elements in a gifted personality", rather than something dependent upon "acts or external effects."[14]
Reception
Feminist responses
Sexual Personae received critical reviews from numerous feminist scholars. Robin Ann Sheets wrote that Paglia "takes a profoundly anti-feminist stance."[15]Molly Ivins wrote a critical review of Sexual Personae, accusing Paglia of historical inaccuracy, egocentrism, and writing in sweeping generalizations.[16] Teresa Ebert denounced the book as "deeply misogynist and rancorous" in the Women's Review of Books, writing that Paglia uses a biological basis to "justify male domination, violence, and superiority in Western culture."[17] English professor Sandra Gilbert described Sexual Personae as "markedly monomaniacal ... bloated, repetitious" and "awkwardly written," adding that it is "so 'essentialist' as to outbiologize even Freud." Gilbert accused Paglia of "vulgar homophobia" and said she deserved "moral contempt" and "loathes liberalism, egalitarianism, feminism, and Mother Nature."[18] Martha Duffy wrote that the book had a "neoconservative cultural message" that was well-received, but rejected by many feminists.[19] Beth Loffreda censured Paglia, writing, "She garners most of her publicity by loudly and nastily proclaiming everyone wrong on the sensitive issues of gender, sexuality and rape." She concluded, "Hers is a seductiveness of simple answers, of clear narratives, of motivations and actions traced solely to a biological origin—a place stripped of the complex ambiguities, the complex interactions of self, skin, group, and institutions that make up daily life."[20] The critic Mary Rose Kasraie wrote, "Paglia gives no indication she has read any studies related to women, or recent studies about imagination, nature and culture" and had "terrible gaps in her coverage." Kasraie called the work "distractingly antischolarly" and "an unacademic wallow in Sadean sadomasochistic chthonian nature."[21]
Judy Simons criticized Paglia's "potentially sinister political agenda" and decried her "intellectual sleight of hand."[22]Germaine Greer wrote that Paglia's insights into Sappho are "vivid and extremely perceptive", but also "unfortunately inconsistent and largely incompatible with each other".[23] Professor Alison Booth called Sexual Personae an "anti-feminist cosmogony."[24] Literary scholar Marianne Noble wrote that Paglia misread sadomasochism in Dickinson's poetry, that "Paglia's absolute belief in biological determinism leads her to pronouncements about female nature that are not only detestable but dangerous, because they routinely receive serious widespread attention in the contemporary culture at large", and that Paglia "derives appalling social conclusions."[25]
Maya Oppenheim of The Independent called Sexual Personae a "seminal feminist work."[26] Paglia wrote in Free Women, Free Men (2017) that "academic and establishment feminists" made "vicious attacks" on the book, in most cases without reading it, and that these attacks will stand as "an indictment of the sorry process by which important political movements can undermine themselves through the blind insularity of their ruling coteries."[27]
General response
The critic Helen Vendler gave Sexual Personae a negative review in The New York Review of Books, writing that while Paglia could be "enlightening and entertaining" when dealing with a subject congenial to her, she failed in her discussions of subjects that demanded more than appreciation of images and stories.[28] In response to a letter of protest from Paglia, Vendler denied that Sexual Personae contained poetry criticism.[29] The critic Terry Teachout, in The New York Times, called Sexual Personae flawed but "every bit as intellectually stimulating as it is exasperating".[30] The novelist Anthony Burgess called Sexual Personae a "fine, disturbing book. It seeks to attack the reader's emotions as well as his/her prejudices. It is very learned. Each sentence jabs like a needle."[31] Harold Bloom wrote, "Sexual Personae will be an enormous sensation of a book, in all of the better senses of ’sensation.’ There is no book comparable in scope, stance, design, or insight. It compels us to rethink the question of the literary representation of human sexuality."[31] In The American Religion (1992), Bloom called it a "masterwork" and credited Paglia with a "shrewd and alarming sexual definition of charisma", though he also wrote that its "powerful sexual reductiveness ... necessarily produces distortions when applied to the personality of any prophet whosoever."[32]
David Bowie listed Sexual Personae among his favourite books.
Valerie Steele wrote, "Paglia has been attacked as an academic conservative, in league with Allan Bloom and other defenders of the 'Western canon,' but no conservative would be so explicitly approving of pornography, homosexuality, and rock-and-roll."[34] The literature professor Robert Alter wrote in Arion, "[O]n purely stylistic grounds, this is one of the few thoroughly enjoyable works of criticism written in the American language in the last couple of decades." He called the book "immensely ambitious, vastly erudite, feisty, often outrageous, and sometimes dazzlingly brilliant."[35] Pat Righelato concluded, "Camille Paglia's syncretic theoretical enterprise invoking Frazer, Freud, Nietzsche, and Bloom, from anthropology to influence theory and psychobiography, is an immense tour de force."[36]
Gerald Gillespie called Sexual Personae "vigorous and capacious," and wrote of Paglia, "Her passion for her subject matter [...] radiates as a beacon of hope for the survival of the Western heritage beyond the current Babylonian captivity of the American academy."[37]Christina Hoff Sommers wrote in Who Stole Feminism? (1994) that Sexual Personae should have led to Paglia being "acknowledged as an outstanding woman scholar even by those who take strong exception to her unfashionable views", and criticized the Women's Review of Books for calling the book "crackpot extremism" and feminist professors at Connecticut College for comparing it to Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf.[38] The classical scholar Bruce Thornton called it "wild and brilliant", adding, "Even when she's wrong, Paglia is more interesting than any dozen poststructuralist clerks."[39]
The novelist John Updike wrote that Sexual Personae "feels less a survey than a curiously ornate harangue. Her percussive style—one short declarative sentence after another—eventually wearies the reader; her diction functions not so much to elicit the secrets of books as to hammer them into submission... The weary reader longs for the mercy of a qualification, a doubt, a hesitation; there is little sense, in her uncompanionable prose, of exploration occurring before our eyes, of tentative motions of thought reflected in a complex syntax."[40] The jurist Richard Posner called Sexual Personae "an insightful book, written in a lively manner, though opinionated, uneven, and often difficult to follow", and compared it to Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind (1987), writing that they are both examples of "difficult academic works that mysteriously strike a chord with a broad public."[41] The anthropologist Melvin Konner wrote that Sexual Personae is "a powerful account of gender as depicted in Western art and literature."[42] In 2013, the singer David Bowie listed Sexual Personae among his 100 favorite books.[43]
Naomi Rebekah Wolf is an American feminist author, journalist, and conspiracy theorist.
The Golden Bough: A Study in Comparative Religion is a wide-ranging, comparative study of mythology and religion, written by the Scottish anthropologist Sir James George Frazer. The Golden Bough was first published in two volumes in 1890; in three volumes in 1900; and in twelve volumes in the third edition, published 1906–1915. It has also been published in several different one-volume abridgments. The work was for a wide literate audience raised on tales as told in such publications as Thomas Bulfinch's The Age of Fable, or Stories of Gods and Heroes (1855). The influence of The Golden Bough on contemporary European literature and thought was substantial.
Emily Elizabeth Dickinson was an American poet. Little-known during her life, she has since been regarded as one of the most important figures in American poetry. Dickinson was born in Amherst, Massachusetts, into a prominent family with strong ties to its community. After studying at the Amherst Academy for seven years in her youth, she briefly attended the Mount Holyoke Female Seminary before returning to her family's home in Amherst. Evidence suggests that Dickinson lived much of her life in isolation. Considered an eccentric by locals, she developed a penchant for white clothing and was known for her reluctance to greet guests or, later in life, even to leave her bedroom. Dickinson never married, and most of her friendships were based entirely upon correspondence.
Sexual objectification is the act of treating a person solely as an object of sexual desire. Objectification more broadly means treating a person as a commodity or an object without regard to their personality or dignity. Objectification is most commonly examined at the level of a society, but can also refer to the behavior of individuals and is a type of dehumanization.
A femme fatale, sometimes called a maneater or vamp, is a stock character of a mysterious, beautiful, and seductive woman whose charms ensnare her lovers, often leading them into compromising, deadly traps. She is an archetype of literature and art. Her ability to enchant, entice and hypnotize her victim with a spell was in the earliest stories seen as verging on supernatural; hence, the femme fatale today is still often described as having a power akin to an enchantress, seductress, witch, having power over men. Femmes fatales are typically villainous, or at least morally ambiguous, and always associated with a sense of mystification, and unease.
Christina Marie Hoff Sommers is an American author and philosopher. Specializing in ethics, she is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. Sommers is known for her critique of contemporary feminism. Her work includes the books Who Stole Feminism? (1994) and The War Against Boys (2000). She also hosts a video blog called The Factual Feminist.
Katherine Murray Millett was an American feminist writer, educator, artist, and activist. She attended the University of Oxford and was the first American woman to be awarded a degree with first-class honors after studying at St Hilda's College, Oxford. She has been described as "a seminal influence on second-wave feminism", and is best known for her book Sexual Politics (1970), which was based on her doctoral dissertation at Columbia University. Journalist Liza Featherstone attributes the attainment of previously unimaginable "legal abortion, greater professional equality between the sexes, and a sexual freedom" in part to Millett's efforts.
The Second Sex is a 1949 book by the French existentialist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir, in which the author discusses the treatment of women in the present society as well as throughout all of history. Beauvoir researched and wrote the book in about 14 months between 1946 and 1949. She published the work in two volumes: Facts and Myths, and Lived Experience. Some chapters first appeared in the journal Les Temps modernes.
The Hunger is a 1983 British erotic horror film directed by Tony Scott in his directorial debut, starring Catherine Deneuve, David Bowie and Susan Sarandon. The film is a loose adaptation of the 1981 novel of the same name by Whitley Strieber, with a screenplay by Ivan Davis and Michael Thomas. Its plot concerns a love triangle between a doctor who specialises in sleep and ageing research (Sarandon) and a vampire couple. The film's special effects were handled by make-up effects artist Dick Smith.
Victim feminism is a term that has been used by some conservative postfeminist writers such as Katie Roiphe and Naomi Wolf to critique forms of feminist activism which they see as reinforcing the idea that women are weak or lacking in agency.
Feminist sociology is an interdisciplinary exploration of gender and power throughout society. Here, it uses conflict theory and theoretical perspectives to observe gender in its relation to power, both at the level of face-to-face interaction and reflexivity within social structures at large. Focuses include sexual orientation, race, economic status, and nationality.
The Apollonian and the Dionysian are philosophical and literary concepts represented by a duality between the figures of Apollo and Dionysus from Greek mythology. Its popularization is widely attributed to the work The Birth of Tragedy by Friedrich Nietzsche, though the terms had already been in use prior to this, such as in the writings of poet Friedrich Hölderlin, historian Johann Joachim Winckelmann, and others. The word Dionysian occurs as early as 1608 in Edward Topsell's zoological treatise The History of Serpents. The concept has since been widely invoked and discussed within Western philosophy and literature.
Sexual Politics is the debut book by American writer and activist Kate Millett, based on her PhD dissertation at Columbia University. It was published in 1970 by Doubleday. It is regarded as a classic of feminism and one of radical feminism's key texts, a formative piece in shaping the intentions of the second-wave feminist movement. In Sexual Politics, an explicit focus is placed on male dominance throughout prominent 20th century art and literature. According to Millett, western literature reflects patriarchal constructions and the heteronormativity of society. She argues that men have established power over women, but that this power is the result of social constructs rather than innate or biological qualities.
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Vagina dentata describes a folk tale in which a woman's vagina is said to contain teeth, with the associated implication that sexual intercourse might result in injury, emasculation, or castration for the man involved. The topic of "vagina dentata" may also cover a rare medical condition affecting the vagina, in which case it is more accurately termed a vaginal dermoid cyst.
Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake is a 1947 book by Canadian literary critic Northrop Frye whose subject is the work of English poet and visual artist William Blake. The book has been hailed as one of the most important contributions to the study of William Blake and one of the first that embarked on the interpretation of many of Blake's most obscure works. As Frye himself acknowledges, Blake's work is not to be deciphered but interpreted and seen within its specific historical and social contexts.
Camille Anna Paglia is an American academic, social critic and feminist. Paglia has been a professor at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, since 1984. She is critical of many aspects of modern culture and is the author of Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990) and other books. She is also a critic of contemporary American feminism and of post-structuralism, as well as a commentator on multiple aspects of American culture such as its visual art, music, and film history.
Who Stole Feminism? How Women Have Betrayed Women is a 1994 book about American feminism by Christina Hoff Sommers, a writer who was at that time a philosophy professor at Clark University. Sommers argues that there is a split between equity feminism and what she terms "gender feminism". Sommers contends that equity feminists seek equal legal rights for women and men, while gender feminists seek to counteract historical inequalities based on gender. Sommers argues that gender feminists have made false claims about issues such as anorexia and domestic battery and exerted a harmful influence on American college campuses. Who Stole Feminism? received wide attention for its attack on American feminism, and it was given highly polarized reviews divided between conservative and liberal commentators. Some reviewers praised the book, while others found it flawed.
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Autocunnilingus is a form of masturbation involving the oral stimulation of one's own vulva. Performing cunnilingus on oneself requires an unusually high degree of flexibility such as that of contortionists or double-jointed people.
↑ Paglia, Camile (1990). Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson. London: Yale University Press. p.100. ISBN978-0-300-04396-9.
↑ Paglia, Camille (1990). Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson. Yale University Press. p.247. ISBN978-0-300-04396-9.
↑ Paglia, Camile (1990). Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson. Yale University Press. p.653. ISBN978-0-300-04396-9.
↑ Sheets, Robin Ann (October 1991). "Book Reviews: Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson by Camille Paglia". Journal of the History of Sexuality. 2 (2). University of Texas Press: 205–298. JSTOR3704039.
↑ Kasraie, Mary Rose (November 1993). "Book Reviews: Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson by Camille Paglia". South Atlantic Review. 58 (4): 132–135. doi:10.2307/3201015. JSTOR3201015.
↑ Noble, Marianne (2000). "Notes to Chapter 5 (note 1)". In Noble, Marianne (ed.). The masochistic pleasures of sentimental literature. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press. pp.225–226. ISBN9780691009377.
↑ Gillespie, Gerald (Spring 1993). "Book Reviews: Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson by Camille Paglia". Comparative Literature. 45 (2): 180–184. doi:10.2307/1771438. JSTOR1771438.
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