Techniques of Pleasure; Staci Newmahr, Playing on the Edge; and Danielle J. Lindemann, Dominatrix
25 Gender Roles: Nature or Nurture
28 It’s Time to Let Teenagers Drink Again
30 Southern Women: Old Myths and New Frontiers
31 The Modern Campus Cannot Comprehend Evil
32 Why I Love The Real Housewives
33 What a Woman President Should Be Like
34 Feminist Trouble: Interview with Ella Whelan, Spiked Review
36 What’s in a Picture: Robert Mapplethorpe’s Portrait of Patti Smith for Horses
Previous Publication Information
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
“Woman Warrior” by Francesca Stanfill, New York magazine, March 4, 1991. Photograph by Harry Benson of Paglia on guard with her antique ivory-handled, silver-trimmed Knights Templar Masonic sword (purchased during adolescence at an upstate New York country store) on the Rocky steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The persona is defender of the arts. (Courtesy of Harry Benson)
“Controversy: Street Fighting Woman. Academic brawler Camille Paglia takes on the campus establishment,” People, April 20, 1992. Asked by People for “one shocking picture,” Paglia struck a West Side Story pose with her Italian switchblade knife in the train tunnel at Swarthmore College. (Mario Ruiz/Getty Images)
A rack of varied clothing was provided for a photo shoot with Steve Poole for the Daily Mail in London in January 1994. Paglia zeroed right in on a plush purple-velvet Moschino jacket adorned with gold buttons and cut in a piratical eighteenth-century style. It took a ship’s crew to get her in and out of those black thigh-high cavalier boots. (© Steven Poole)
Another photograph from the shoot with Steve Poole for the Daily Mail in London in January 1994. The clever crew turned a black shawl into a seaweed-streaming rock. (© Steven Poole)
Drawings by John Callahan, published in 1993 in Willamette Week, an alternative newspaper in Portland, Oregon. Gift of the artist. (© by John Callahan. Reprinted by permission.)
“America’s Most Influential Women: 200 Legends, Leaders, and Trailblazers,” Vanity Fair, November 1998. Vanity Fair invited Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem, and Paglia to pose together for Annie Leibovitz. Friedan and Paglia agreed, but Steinem refused, so the magazine asked the great Robert Risko to do a group caricature. Headline: “REVOLUTIONARY.” Caption: “Friedan, Steinem, and Paglia are an influential triumvirate—just don’t put them in the same room.” (Robert Risko)
“Attack of the 50-Foot Lesbian: Camille Paglia reigns as America’s most controversial, intellectual, and intimidating gay woman,” cover story, The Advocate, October 18, 1994. (© 1994 Here Publishing. All rights reserved.)
“Paglia 101: Confessions of a Campus Radical,” cover story, Girlfriends, September 2000. Tagline: “Nobody is going to tell me I’m homophobic, okay? I will kick their ass!” Previously published in Girlfriends magazine. Reproduced with the permission of Diane Anderson-Minshall and Heather Findlay.
INTRODUCTION
History moves in cycles. The plague of political correctness and assaults on free speech that erupted in the 1980s and were beaten back in the 1990s have returned with a vengeance. In the United States, the universities as well as the mainstream media are currently patrolled by well-meaning but ruthless thought police, as dogmatic in their views as agents of the Spanish Inquisition. We are plunged once again into an ethical chaos where intolerance masquerades as tolerance and where individual liberty is crushed by the tyranny of the group.
The premier principles of this book are free thought and free speech—open, mobile, and unconstrained by either liberal or conservative ideology. The liberal versus conservative dichotomy, dating from the split between left and right following the French Revolution, is hopelessly outmoded for our far more complex era of expansive technology and global politics. A bitter polarization of liberal and conservative has become so extreme and strident in both the Americas and Europe that it sometimes resembles mental illness, severed from the common sense realities of everyday life.
Our understanding of sexuality, a paradigmatic theme and indeed obsession of modern culture, has been clouded by its current politicization. Sex and gender have been redefined by ill-informed academic theorists as superficial, fictive phenomena produced by oppressive social forces, disconnected from biology. This hallucination has sowed confusion among young people and seriously damaged feminism. A gender theory without reference to biology is absurd on its face. But as a proponent of dynamic free will, I certainly do not subscribe to a wholesale biological determinism. As I wrote on the very first page of Sexual Personae,
