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Sex, Art, and American Culture: Essays Paperback – September 8, 1992

by Camille Paglia (Author)

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A collection of twenty of Paglia's out-spoken essays on contemporary issues in America's ongoing cultural debate such as Anita Hill, Robert Mapplethorpe, the beauty myth, and the decline of education in America.

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Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Provocative cultural critic Paglia (Sexual Personas) here offers 21 previously published essays and interviews that celebrate pop culture while trashing feminism and academic theory. Her paeans to Madonna, tributes to Elizabeth Taylor and Marlon Brando, and discussions of rock music and bodybuilding include attacks on the prudery of old guard establishment feminists, while her reviews of scholarly works on cross-dressing and gay history trumpet Paglia's contention that today's intellectuals refuse to acknowledge the dark, immutable powers of sexual drive. Reverence for these powers led Paglia to take her controversial stand, fully documented here, against sympathy for victims of date rape. Paglia lacks the subtlety and decorum of the very scholars--from Freud and Jung to Leslie Fiedier--whom she claims as her forerunners; she instead resembles the rock stars whom she so venerates, stripped of their capacity for self-mockery. Yet for all their faults, her essays engage with an ambitious range of art and ideas, her invocation of primal sexuality adding a missing element to critical debates. While she should be taken with a truckful of road salt, Paglia should not be ignored. Author tour.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

Paglia (humanities, Univ. of the Arts), the controversial author of Sexual Personae (Yale Univ. Pr., 1990), here offers 12 recent essays on popular culture, sexuality, feminism, and educational reform. All but three of these impassioned diatribes were previously published, including her brazen attack on humanities education ("Junk Bonds and Corporate Raiders"), the Newsweek article in which she dismisses the phenomenon of date rape, and her New York Times essay on Madonna as a feminist. Paglia's vehemence and fearless expression of unpopular opinions are refreshing yet often maddening, as when she lapses into unsupported generalizations (battered women stay with their husbands "because the sex is very hot"), absurd enthusiasms (she "worships" television), or self-aggrandizing egotism ("before feminism was, Paglia was!"). Furthermore, the new material is repetitive ("The MIT Lecture") or disappointing ("East and West," a choppy set of Paglia's course notes). Paglia is never boring, however, and cannot fail to challenge and ignite readers. Recommended for informed readers.
- Ellen Finnie Duranceau, MIT Lib.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product details

Paperback: 337 pages
Publisher: Vintage; 1 edition (September 8, 1992)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 9780679741015
ISBN-13: 978-0679741015
ASIN: 0679741011
Product Dimensions: 5.2 x 0.8 x 8 inches
Shipping Weight: 8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
Average Customer Review: 29 customer reviews
Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #347,765 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #1618 in Books > Literature & Fiction > Essays & Correspondence > Essays
- #1906 in Books > Humor & Entertainment > Pop Culture > General
- #2135 in Books > Politics & Social Sciences > Anthropology > Cultural

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Murray J Siskind

Very timely

November 1, 2014

Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

This collection hasn’t aged a day—perhaps because the social and intellectual problems Paglia diagnosed 20 years ago are still with us: the exhaustion of the Left-Right paradigm, which is no longer capable of interpreting anything in this age of mass media and globalization; the tunnel vision of academic feminists on sexual assault; the tunnel vision of mainstream feminists on abortion; the fuzzy utopianism of social welfare planners; the corruption of American universities, which are larded up with more money than a New York hedge fund but hide that fact with hollow gestures of chic leftism; the sterility of contemporary cultural criticism; the totalitarian tactics of gay rights activists; and the massive ignorance of science and world religions. ALL STILL WITH US.

In 20 essays (and one hilarious transcript of an extemporaneous lecture at MIT), Paglia writes against all of these debilities. Several essays are standouts. In “Rape and Modern Sex War,” she critiques the assumption that sex is merely socially constructed and therefore thoroughly controllable by language. In a review of a Suzanne Gordon book, Paglia implicitly argues that common sense progressive reforms (such as increased vacation time for workers) can be achieved without “sentimental, unlearned effusion” and the “cloying syrup of coercive compassion.” And in “East and West,” Paglia compares Judeo-Christianity with Hinduism and Buddhism to unlock alternate visions of time, space, God, and the body.

But the centerpiece of the collection is “Junk Bonds and Corporate Raiders,” her 80 page essay on the state of humanities scholarship. The first half is a take-down of two books on gay studies. To be fair, I think she goes overboard. It’s “nitpicking”: i.e., the critic is so busy finding flaws that she loses her larger argument.

The second half, however, when Paglia critiques the humanities departments of the early 1990s, is fabulous. It is worth the full price of admission. It is not the same critique of English departments made by neoconservatives in the early 1990s. Like neocons, Paglia detested the over-politicization of art. However, her model of cultural criticism embraced much more than a typical neocon was willing to embrace. She sees sex, nature, popular culture, all world religions (and not just Christianity), and mass media as central to understanding the high art and literary traditions. Setting her sights on the theoretical trinity of Lacan, Derrida, and Foucault, she persuasively argues that they were parochial figures whose insights did not translate to the American cultural and political scene. As she writes, “anyone culturally awake in the American Sixties was already deeply immersed in all the issues that entered the academy, in grotesquely distorted programmatic form, through the French keyhole in the Seventies” (218).

In spite of the high seriousness of the subject matter, the essay is also hilarious. Like a stand-up comic, Paglia has a rapid-fire delivery. Working herself up into a full lather, she seems to enter a visionary space, “a Renaissance cosmology, a divine network of correspondences, where everything is in analogy to everything else” (118), which allows her to make riotous statements like these: “We didn’t need Derrida; we had Jimi Hendrix”; “Foucault, like David Letterman, made smirky glibness an art form”; “Lacan is a Freud T-shirt shrunk down to the teeny-weeny Saussure torso.”

But at the same time—and this is why I love this book—there is a real spine of common sense and intellectual insight in the midst of the rhetorical flourishes. She makes brilliant points in every paragraph: critical theory is actually extreme rationalism “masquerading as distrust of reason”; world religions such as Hinduism and Buddhism dissolve European concepts better than deconstruction; Foucault “was struck down by the elemental force he repressed and edited out of his system”; women’s studies should be abolished and replaced with “sex studies,” in which all people with an interest in sex would be welcome.

Sex, Art, and American Culture is the best introduction to Paglia’s thinking. It is not a substitute for her first book, Sexual Personae (which I need to get around to reviewing), though it shares common themes. A protest against narrowness and professionalism, it dramatizes how the life of the mind is not only compatible with humor and pleasure but is definitely enriched by them.

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Ben

Punchy

June 12, 2017

Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

Thus seems to be Camelia Paglia all summarized in a single book. It's punchy, and the punches hit at the right places. Paglia has a knack for seeing the important things that the rest of us miss. Then she explains them with utmost clarity.

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Professor Joseph L. McCauley

An effective attack on PC

February 24, 1999

Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

Paglia writes from a standpoint of anti-PC/anti-postmodernist philosophy. The weakness of her book is that it is dedicated to what John Berger has called 'the instant culture', the culture where postmodernism has cut us off from the past while the media cuts us off daily from the future. For a study of the interaction of the media with the outcast elements of the instant culture from the standpoint of PC/postmodernism see Joshua Gamson's "Freaks Talk Back". Both Paglia and Gamson are TV addicts. Both praise the role of the media in the instant culture. One is Foucauldian, the other is not.
Paglia's intellectual contribution comes from her anti-postpodernism. PC is an instant-practice in postmodernist society that creates/spreads the pseudo-disease called victimization. America has, through PC, become a nation of victims. See also "Dumbing Down our Kids", by Charles J. Sykes, for the role played by schools in creating 'victims'. Paglia's anti-postmodernist essay 'Junk bonds and Corporate Raiders' is worth reading because it's a very effective attack on postmodernism/PC, and predates the Sokal hoax by about five years. Her MIT lecture is also worth reading. The rest of the book, in praise of the instant-culture created by modern capitalism, which has largely destroyed the chance of nontrivial culture within America, includes a lot of horn-tooting for Paglia by Paglia and does not shed light on anything worth knowing. Paglia likes to emphasize her Italian roots, but the stark contrast with John Berger's writing, where peasants do not behave as victims and capitalism is not praised for what it has done, is worth noting.

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Prisoner Fan

Great book

May 1, 2017

Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

Great book

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Orlando

Opinion

June 17, 2016

Format: Kindle EditionVerified Purchase

Excellent conglomerate of essays. Wonderful review of historical facts. Really enjoy her view on today's issues on social problems, education, gender issues.

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Five Stars

December 7, 2016

Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

learn it and tell the SWJ goofs to eff off and get common sense. thank you Camille

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Rutheliz

Love you, Camille

February 6, 2015

Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

Life changing. Love you, Camille!!

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ilprofessore

Below and Above the Belt

November 9, 2012

Format: Kindle EditionVerified Purchase

Camille Paglia is a wild woman. Daughter of poor but educated Italian immigrants from the Lazio region south of Rome, American citizen, educated first in parochial schools in New York State, and eventually mentored by Harold Bloom at Yale, she calls herself an Italian pagan. Readers who have been put to sleep by academic obscurantism will delight in the no-holds barred tone of her in-your-face voice as she takes on all that is smug, soft-spoken,and self-serving in the deadly boring Halls of Ivy. If its inhabitants are tenured corpses, Camille is the live wire, out to electrocute the foolish, hypocritical, and dangerous in modern American life. Above all, Camille speaks for Freedom, Dionysian Freedom, wherever and however it can be found--sex, thought and politics. The gentle reader should be warned that she rarely plays by the Marquis of Queensbury rules. Loud and ill-mannered, she'll take a swing at everyone and anything, fairly or unfairly, hitting below and above the belt as she goes in for the kill. Camille's grandmother once said that if any man ever chose to marry her--which no man ever has--he'd be forced either to beat her or murder her. But she is unbeatable, and it is doubtful that even a silver bullet or spike will do the job. Camille Paglia is wise, funny and indestructible. And, above all, a good read!

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