Thread by @oldbooksguy

The most canceled woman in the world: Camille Paglia

In Sexual Personae, she attacks liberalism, feminism, and Nature-worship like no other writer before or since

On her 76th birthday today, discover her insights on why science is cope, how civilization is masculine, and more👇🏻

1/ Liberalism's great paradox

Paglia: "Liberalism defines government as tyrant father but demands it behave as nurturant mother"

Feminism wants the tyrant father to solve all grievances (mean words on twitter) while being an all-permissive mother otherwise

A big contradiction

2/ For Paglia, art, religion, and civilization are man's half-solutions to the eternally chaotic nature: "Religion, ritual, and art began as one." Man chants a hymn, sketches a painting, & erects a city wall for the same reason: to buffer against, AND impose his vision, on nature

3/ Religions go from "Earth-cults" to “Sky-cults”

When powerless against Mother Earth, humans worship the chaotic but fertile feminine

Example: The Venus of Willendorf

As human control expands, religions become Sky-Cults

We worship a Male God that designs, instructs, orders

4/ Science is cope

Science is a male attempt to use labels, data and the "cold light of intellect" to beat back the "archaic night" of nature

Science is our "quest for form"

Paglia: "To know is to control"

But nature, writes Paglia, "breaks its own rules whenever it wants"

5/ East v/s West

The West invented the gun even though China invented gunpowder centuries ago

Western mind is more interested in "phallic projection"

The western psyche wants to pin reality down

But the Eastern psyche, Paglia writes, goes for "compliance, not confrontation"

6/ Art is about creating order out of chaos, not promoting morality:

Paglia: "It is the order in morality rather than the morality in order that attracts the artist"

An artist's greatest motivation is to turn nature's madness into a coherent story using the alchemy of his work

7/ Art rises from the "deranged egotism and orderliness" of the male mind

Most criminals and geniuses are men because both crime and art involve imposing one's personal masculine will on the world

Paglia: "There is no female Mozart because there is no female Jack the ripper"

8/ Paglia on beauty:

"Beauty is our weapon against nature; by it we make objects, giving them limit, symmetry, proportion. Beauty halts and freezes the melting flux of nature."

Beauty is one of humanity's great tools

It makes the world holier and worth sacrificing for

9/ The worldview in your pants

Paglia: "Sexual physiology (sets) the pattern for our experience of the world"

The penis underlines "linearity, focus, aim, directedness"

But females must make peace with hidden genitals - which makes them at ease with "greater subjectivity"

10/ How to become nature's favorite

Paglia on the aggressive underbelly of life:

"Sperm are miniature assault troops, and the ovum is a solitary citadel that must be breached. Weak or passive sperm just sit there like dead ducks. Nature rewards energy and aggression."

Paglia's Sexual Personae is a dense, provocative, and deeply rewarding read

50+ insights from the book here: memod.com/jashdholani/bo…

Find inside:

• Why Ancient Egypt worshipped cats
• Feminism's blindspots
• Why men and women need each other

Dig in: memod.com/jashdholani/bo…

Thank you for your time fren!

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