Sex and Feminism

"There is object proof that homosexuality is more interesting than heterosexuality. It's that one knows a considerable number of heterosexuals who would wish to become homosexuals, whereas one knows very few homosexuals who would really like to become heterosexuals."
—Michel Foucault

"Men are run ragged by female sexuality all their lives. From the beginning of his life to the end, no man ever fully commands any woman. It's an illusion. Men are pussy-whipped. And they know it. That's what the strip clubs are about; not woman as victim, not woman as slave, but woman as goddess."
—Camille Paglia

"The feminist line is, strippers and topless dancers are degraded, subordinated, and enslaved; they are victims, turned into objects by the display of their anatomy. But women are far from being victims — women rule; they are in total control ... the feminist analysis of prostitution says that men are using money as power over women. I'd say, yes, that's all that men have. The money is a confession of weakness. They have to buy women's attention. It's not a sign of power; it's a sign of weakness."
—Camille Paglia

"Leaving sex to the feminists is like letting your dog vacation at the taxidermist."
—Camille Puglia

"Every man harbors an inner female territory ruled by his mother, from whom he can never entirely break free."
—Camille Paglia

"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."
—Camille Paglia

"The mystique of the femme fatale cannot be perfectly translated into male terms."
—Camille Paglia

"The Devil is a woman."
—Camille Paglia

"We have an evolutionary revulsion from slime, the site of our biologic origins. Every month, it is woman's fate to face the abyss of time and being, the abyss which is herself."
—Camille Paglia

"Western culture from the start has swerved from femaleness. The last western society to worship female powers was Minoan Crete. And significantly, that fell and did not rise again."
—Camille Paglia

"Modern liberalism suffers unresolved contradictions. It exalts individualism and freedom and, on its radical wing, condemns social orders as oppressive. On the other hand, it expects governments to provide materially for all, a feat manageable only by an expansion of authority and a swollen bureaucracy. In other words, liberalism defines government as tyrant father but demands it behave as nurturant mother. Feminism has inherited these contradictions."
—Camille Paglia

"Sexual freedom, sexual liberation. A modern delusion. We are hierarchical animals. Sweep one hierarchy away, and another will take its place, perhaps less palatable than the first."
—Camille Paglia

"The search for freedom through sex is doomed to failure."
—Camille Paglia

"Freud says: 'Man fears that his strength will be taken from him by woman, dreads becoming infected with her femininity and then proving himself a weakling.' Masculinity must fight off effeminacy day by day. Woman and nature stand ever ready to reduce the male to boy and infant."
—Camille Paglia

"One of feminism’s irritating reflexes is its fashionable disdain for 'patriarchal society', to which nothing good is ever attributed. But it is patriarchal society that has freed me as a woman. It is capitalism that has given me the leisure to sit at this desk writing this book. Let us stop being small-minded about men and freely acknowledge what treasures their obsessiveness has poured into culture."
—Camille Paglia

"Contemporary feminists, who are generally poor or narrowly trained scholars, insist on viewing history as a weepy scenario of male oppression and female victimization. But it is more accurate to see men, driven by sexual anxiety away from their mothers, forming group alliances by male bonding to create complex structures of society, art, science and technology."
—Camille Paglia

"When feminism and gay activism set themselves against organized religion, they have the obligation to put something better in its place."
—Camille Paglia

"[W]omen will never be taken seriously until they accept full responsibility for their sexuality."
—Camille Paglia

"Rape is an outrage that cannot be tolerated in a civilized society. Yet feminism, which has waged a crusade for rape to be taken more seriously, has put young women in danger by hiding the truth about sex from them."
—Camille Paglia

"I do not believe in God, but I believe God is man’s greatest idea. Those incapable of religious feeling or those (like hard-core gay activists) who profane sacred ground do not have the imagination to educate the young. Until the Left comes to its senses about the cultural power of religion, the Right will continue to broaden its appeal."
—Camille Paglia

"What feminism calls patriarchy is simply civilization, an abstract system designed by men but augmented and now co-owned by women."
—Camille Paglia

"Man has traditionally ruled the social sphere; feminism tells him to move over and share his power. But woman rules the sexual and emotional sphere, and there she has no rival. Victim ideology, a caricature of social history, blocks women from recognition of their dominance in the deepest, most important realm."
—Camille Paglia

"Films of the mating behavior of most other species — a staple of public television of America — demonstrate that the female chooses. Males pursue, show off, brawl, scuffle, and make general fools of themselves for love. A major failing of most feminist ideology is its dumb, ungenerous stereotyping of men as tyrants and abusers, when in fact — as I know full well from my own mortifying lesbian experience — men are tormented by women’s flirtatiousness and heming and hawing, their manipulations and changeableness, their humiliating rejections. Cock teasing is a universal reality. It is part of women’s merciless testing and cold-eyed comparison shopping for potential mates. Men will do anything to win the favor of women."
—Camille Paglia

"In pondering why a battered woman does not leave, we must remember that gay men with a taste for violent “rough trade” have always paid for this kind of sex. Are women so perfect and angelic that we cannot imagine them having sadomasochistic impulses? When they are genuinely victimized, women deserve our pity. But victimization alone cannot explain everything in the tragicomedy of love."
—Camille Paglia

"Far from poisoning the mind, pornography shows the deepest truth about sexuality, stripped of romantic veneer."
—Camille Paglia

"The idea that feminism — that liberation from domestic prison — is going to bring happiness is just wrong. Women have advanced a great deal, but they are no happier. The happiest women I know are not those who are balancing their careers and families, like a lot of my friends are. The happiest people I know are the women — like my cousins — who have a high school education, got married immediately graduating and never went to college. They are very religious and they never question their Catholicism. They do not regard the house as a prison. I look at my friends who are on the fast track. They are desperate, frenzied and frazzled, the most unhappy women who have ever existed. They work nights and weekends and have no lives. Some of them have children who are raised by nannies. The entire feminist culture says that the most important woman is the woman with an attache case. I want to empower the woman who wants to say, 'I'm tired of this and I want to go home.' The far right is correct when it says the price of women's liberation is being paid by the children."
—Camille Paglia