Sex, Art, and American Culture: Essays

Whatever you think about Paglia, this book raising important questions and making interseting points. I highly recommend it to anyone.

For those of us who see "rhetoric" as a good and not a bad word, Paglia is certainly a most worthy practitioner of the art of persuasive, compelling language, putting many of her pedantic contemporaries to shame. This anthology does her more justice than the hit and miss collection, "Vamps and Tramps." In fact, the essay "Junk Bonds and Corporate Raiders" strikes this reader as at once the strongest critique of the current academic scene and the most persuasive and powerful prose launched by any writer in recent memory. Granted, sensation and effect often take priority over dialectic and reason, but since when are emotions, including righteous indignation, forbidden notes for the prose musicians gifted enough to play them? And since when have academic critics been forbidden to delve outside their "specialty" or to ignore the often arbitrary, dubious distinctions between "high" and "low" culture? If Paglia doesn't always "get it right," shame on her. The point is that she comes closer than most academic and cultural critics, and even when she gets it wrong, she can evoke admiration if not joy.

Art history is boring. Postmodernism is dense and defeatist. Feminists are unglamorous. Camille Paglia's M.I.T. lecture, transcribed in this FABULOUS book, is the most exciting several pages I or anyone else has ever read. Never before has any academic been so honest. Oscar Wilde once said that in being concise, one sacrifices accuracy. This sort of rough, concise prose is what Paglia takes straight from Pater and throws in your face. This book, like "Sexual Personae," draws vast conclusions from little more than Paglia's own erudition, and is often, well....WRONG, but it is nonetheless the best piece of academic work you'll ever read. She'll put everything into perspective for you, and so much more...

Read Ms. Paglia to get your mind stretched. Whether you are on the left or the right you will find her in equal parts right on and maddening, but that just means that she thinks for herself, a rare commodity in modern academia. She is intellectually honest and grounded in common sense. You will never find her excusing President Clinton's conduct like the rest of the so-called woman's movement does. Viva Paglia!

What I liked about this book is Prof Paglia makes one relalize that a woman can be esoteric. Lover of men as well as self. Lover of intellect as well as hedonistic elements of life. She actually is very "right on" with her observations of the human condition. Any self secure woman who isn't out to bash men, money and other wonderful life elements will embrace this woman. She is also one of the few True feminists who loves the working class, and those not stuck in lofty academic towers. She remembers her roots.