Sexualität und Gewalt oder: Natur und Kunst

by Camille Paglia

"Erkekler biraraya gelerek kadın doğasına karşı bir savunma olan kültürü icat ettiler."
Camille Paglia(1947) ; Çok daha önceden tamamlamış olmasına karşın ancak 1990 yılında günyüzüne çıkan devasa çalışması "Cinsel Kimlikler: Nefertiti'den Emily Dickinson'a Sant ve Dekadans"ile birlikte '90'lı yılların en tartışma yaratan düşünürlerinden bir olarak kabul edilen Camille Paglia, tüm yapıtlarında, bizi gerek toplum ve cinsellik, gerekse, kültür ve sanatla, üzerlerinde oluşturduğumuz "iki yüzlülük maskelerini" yırtarak, barındırdıkları tüm "iyicil" ve "kötücül" yönleriyle yeniden- hesaplaşmaya çağırıyor.
İşte; bu devasa çalışmanın ilk bölümünü ve bir anlamda manifestosunu oluşturan elinizdeki küçük kitapta da Paglia, zaman zaman sözünün büyüsüne de kapılarak kalemi ve kalamıyla ele aldığı konular kadar fırtınalı ve dalgalı bir rota tutturuyor.
İyi Şeyler, tüm eserleriyle Paglia'yı izlemeyi sürdürüyor...

Genres: Nonfiction, Philosophy, Feminism, Essays, Cultural, Art, Society

128 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1995

About the author

Camille Anna Paglia is an American social critic, author and teacher. Her book, Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson, published in 1990, became a bestseller. She is a professor of humanities and media studies at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

She has been variously called the "feminist that other feminists love to hate," a "post-feminist feminist," one of the world's top 100 intellectuals by the UK's Prospect Magazine, and by her own description "a feminist bisexual egomaniac."

Reviews

[Coenraad]

My excitement about this book surely marks me as a johnny-come-lately. It contains the first chapter of Paglia's Sexual personae: art and decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickenson, originally published in 1992. At the end of the first page I am out of breath already, swept away by Paglia's analysis of a variety of topics: nature vs culture, the difference between the genders, the role of sex and sexuality in art, etc. She states many things that I have sensed to be true before, but she develops the ideas so much further and links aspects of our ordinary lives in unexpected ways. I will definitely study her writings in greater depth - and try to discover her critics, to see how they counter and evaluate her ideas. Heady, exciting stuff - reading it once is not nearly enough.

Camille Paglia se idees blaas my om soos 'n strooihuisie. 'n Hele paar stellings klink bekend, maar sy verweef soveel uiteenlopende onderwerpe op verfrissende en onthutsende wyse dat dit my totaal meevoer. Veel dieper en meer uitgebreide studie van hierdie vaardige denker is nodig.

[Abhidev H M]

Sounds something like "anti-feminist feminism".

[Alexandra Owens]

3.5. I don’t agree with practically anything Paglia says but I’ve never been more entertained by a work of philosophy. I eventually stopped trying to rationalize her arguments and instead let her words run over me like poetry. I especially have an aversion to her incessant need for a naturalist rationalism, for I am generally against an argument from nature of any sort. However, Paglia’s specific brand of naturalism is paired with a complete rejection of materialism (which she makes explicit in her comments about Marx being nature-rejecting). However, materialism is necessary for her “nature über Alles” assertions. Naturalism is necessitated by the idea that the world emanates from nature (as opposed to spirit). Paglia, though, understands everything in the abstract. She creates and worships a fictional God. Her assertions are based on analogy, semiotics, and pure anti-empiricism; a complete rejection of materialism. Because her philosophy of naturalism is missing the foundation of materialism, it comes across as presuming itself as axiomatic with no apparent reason as to why.

This is my problem with psychology and psychological understandings of human behavior in general. Psychology thinks of itself as axiomatic, yet bases its understanding of human behavior completely on the abstract. Psychology takes the abstract, justifying its practice with itself, and subsequently understands it as immutable truth. In reality, psychology is in bad faith with itself; like philosophy, it is in fact pure speculation, pure abstraction. The difference is that philosophy does not understand itself as a science- it does not understand itself as immutable truth. Or… it shouldn’t at least. Camille Paglia takes a psychological approach to philosophy. She takes the abstract and understands it as a science.

[Fnaught]

Energetically disturbing -it frightens me that a woman can pinpoint so many real male anxieties without even principally sleeping with men.

This section especially is paralysing in the same way that watching too many DBDR or HoeMath videos can be, whilst of course being of a higher kind (also it's much less of a discreet yonic ego massage than Esther Villar presents):

'Mythology's identification of woman with nature is correct. The male contribution to procreation is momentary and transient. Conception is a pinpoint of time, another of our phallic peaks of action, from which the male slides back uselessly. The pregnant woman is daemonically, devilishly complete. As an ontological entity, she needs nothing and no one. I shall maintain that the pregnant woman, brooding for nine months upon her own creation, is the pattern of all solipsism, that the historical attribution of narcissism to women is another true myth. Male bonding and patriarchy were the recourse to which man was forced by his terrible sense of woman's power, her imperviousness, her archetypal confederacy with chthonian nature. Woman's body is a labyrinth in which man is lost. It is a walled garden, the medieval hortus conclusus, in which nature works its daemonic sorcery. Woman is the primeval fabricator, the real First Mover. She turns a gob of refuse into a spreading web of sentient being, floating on the snaky umbilical by which she leashes every man.'

[Tom]

There's a certain amount to admire in Paglia's thinking: her insistence on the abject as central to desire and, well, sex; her description of bodies as "flesh-envelopes"; her rejection of "Rousseauist psychologies" in favour of Freud, Nietzchse and Sade; her willingness to prod at the uncomfortable, bland truisms of mainstreamed modern feminism. In place of these dismissed bromides, however, she argues for a model of sex (the act and the biological traits) that is essentialist to the extreme, and one wherein there is precious little space for societal influence and an outsized importance placed on the symbolic (part of her beef with the post-structuralists), with particular attention given to the Biblical and the Ancient Greek mythologies which I didn't find particularly convincing or interesting tbh.

[Jonathan Downing]

Unironically good. She's a powerful writer and she comes close to expressing profound truth on several occasions. But, like all second-wave feminists, she falls short because she is unable to comprehend that power might possibly be used for the good of those without it. Authority is not inherently oppressive.

That said, I loved her graphic depictions of the differences between men and women and her conclusions drawn from examining sex were thought-provoking.

[McKenzie Dowson Chamberlain]

Well-written, and quite a fun ride to read through, despite the insane conclusions and dreary allusions to Ancient Greece.

Something I really admired about Paglia's writing is her use of wide-spanning examples for effect - "from sex counselling to cereal commercials". It gives her arguments a vivid, blah-de-blah-de-blah effect; such examples are emblematic, but also feel very random and birds-eye. It's gap-filling, but it's fun to read - kind of her thing, I suppose. She leaves much unsaid in the spaces between each example. That's effective, if a little dishonest.

There are some seriously poetic framings in this essay. I particularly loved "everyone has killed in order to live" as it pertains to relationship power dynamics, even if it does tip the scales into light Andre Dworkin horseshoe theory.

It irks me when people see feminism as a static force, the sum of it's headlines. It's uncharitable. There are as many arguments within feminism as there are outside of it. Furthermore I think it's just a bad faith argument to posit that feminism expects a "tyrant father to act the nurturant mother". She's trying to say that's a ridiculous thing to ask of a movement, because it is; but for God's sake, feminism is not a parent. There's no tangible parallel there at all. And this is not a "How would you feel if you didn't have breakfast this morning" thing, because this is just a classic "what if the world was made of pudding" thing instead.

Building on that, when Paglia says that "the very language and logic that feminists use to assail patriarchy comes from men", I can't help but think, yeah, no shit, girl. You're doing the "yet you participate in society. Curious! I am very smart!" meme. I've heard this a hundred times from anti-greenies incensed at Greta Thunberg's iPhone.

If I may keep complaining, too, I am getting pretty over the constant affirmation of the female as pagan and earthly, vs. the male as celestial, pure, and theoretical. Where does this conclusion actually lead us? Why do we need to dichotomise everything? Does every state need an inverse? Does every part need a counterpart? We are using red string here, a little too liberally.

Paglia also asks if Medusa's wild grinning evokes the male fear of being laughed at by men. Well? Cry me a river - did you read the beginning of that myth at all, perhaps? And all this in a paragraph about female egoism, no less. Sure, kiddo.

Honestly, I am not afraid to confront hard truths. I do not spend my time in an echo chamber - to the point where I have to hide a lot of my media consumption from the people around me - but so much of this is downright cruel. The homophobia, the pure and proud philoso-misogyny. It's so off-putting and greasy.

I have to give Paglia credit for some truly original thought, though, and some very entertaining wordsmithing. I think her (and David Foster Wallace) were dead right about how many of us find true freedom intolerable and seek new ways to enslave ourselves - and of course it's true that society functions as a frail barrier against nature to some degree. I couldn't help but secretly laugh at the idea that the vagina makes no sense and is "architecturally incoherent", too - honestly, I kind of agree with that, lol.

This was really, really, really fun to read - even if it was also really grubby in parts. I could practically hear a boxing match ding-ding in my head with every new page turned. That will not make everyone's day, but it made mine.

[Daren]

A complex little book (the first chapter of the book Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson, published as a Penguin 60 edition), which touches on all manner of sexual equality; inequality; nature/nurture; sexuality/eroticism; feminism; sexual attitudes in religion; sexual roles in Greek literary works; equivalences of the sexes in Eastern symbolism, the bible, Indian myths, paganism, etc; the femme fatale as a sexual persona; sexual necessity in males / females; male domination of arts; male & female genital metaphors; pornography in popular culture; and many other topics - all of this in the first chapter of the book!

Not my usual reading genre, and far from a relaxing read, it was very full on, and I could never have faced more that the 50-odd pages. Way too unstructured and rambling for a book I could consider academic - which is why I never did well at school with analysis of essays in this style!

[Stefan]

At the time that I read it, I really liked that book. Maybe because it's heavy philosophical flavor was such a nice antidote to my physics text books. The main thesis is a bit over the top, but all in all quite enjoyable.

[Kaplumbağa Felsefecisi]

Kitap kadın bir yazarın elinden çıkmış olmasına rağmen çok da kadın bakış açısına hakim bir kadın tarafından yazılmamıştı. Pek sevemedim..

[Finnegan McBride]

Nietzsche once said: “the worst readers are those who behave like plundering troops: they take away a few things they can use, dirty and confound the remainder, and revile the whole.” In this respect, Paglia has made a bad reader of me. In making my way through Sex and Violence, or Nature and Art, which I had to read three times to fully grok, I was reminded again and again of something Daniel Dennett said about Julian Jaynes: his writing has one great idea per page and one hundred bad ones. Paglia’s clear brilliance makes it all the more disappointing when she so often misses the mark.

The core of her argument, so far as I understand it, is this: western culture’s primary goal is the denial of nature. Nature, for her, is horrific, a chthonic bloodbath Wordsworth taught us to call pretty. “An apple tree, laden with fruit: how peaceful,” she writes. “But… look again. See nature spuming and frothing, its mad spermatic bubbles endlessly spilling out and smashing in that inhuman round of waste, rot, and carnage… nature is a festering hornet’s nest of aggression and overkill.” Science, religion, and art, in her view, are Apollonian flight from our putrid condition.

So far, she is a veritable Ernest Becker, possessor of an existential Madonna-whore complex wherein nature, having debased itself, loses all right to saintly attributions. Perhaps she is even the female Sade she claims Emily Dickinson to be. With her discussion of gender, things become stranger. Ironically, a lesbian dominatrix, who authored a book titled Sexual Personae, is a gender essentialist. Men, she says, especially homosexual men, are destined to be the ones who do great science and create great art, because it is in their nature to deny, well, nature. Women, by contrast, faced daily with the reality and horror of their bodies and cycles, their “uterine shreds, placental jellyfish of the female sea,” know themselves to be slaves to nature and do not try to fight it. As a result, they “probably have a greater realism and wisdom than men,” but are not predisposed to cultural achievement.

One of her more interesting observations is the fact that in most of the animal kingdom it is the males who are the beautiful ones. Why in humans is it women who are subjected to foot binding and relentless physical scrutinization? Paglia’s answer: because women are gross, and human beings, the only animals sentient enough to be bothered by this, need women to be beautiful to counteract their grossness. In Paglia’s words, “The historical repugnance to woman has a rational basis: disgust is reason’s proper response to the grossneess of procreative nature.”

Claims like these induce strong emotion in the reader. I consider her view of nature a half-truth, and her view of gender a falsehood, yet I find all of her ideas intriguing. She writes well and thinks original thoughts. It is hard to find works this engaging. She may be everything else, but she is not boring.

[Lucy De Geyseleer]

Alhoewel ik het met zo'n 80% van dit werk helemaal niet eens ben. Ben ik toch blij dat ik het heb gelezen want andere meningen zijn belangrijk.
Maar Paglia schrijft op een manier om emoties op te wekken bij iedereen. Dit doet ze door onder andere een anti-feministische "feminist" te zijn.
In het algemeen waren haar argumenten logisch en duidelijk te volgen. Het grote probleem is dat ze van premissen kwamen die echt het bloed vanonder mijn nagels haalde.

Hier zijn enkele voorbeelden van zinnen die mij echt woedend maken:
- "The male contribution to procreation is momentary and trancient whilst the pregnant woman, brooding for 9 months upon her own creation, is the pattern of all of solipsism, that the historical attribution of narcissism to women is another true myth."

- (Context ze praat hier enkel over mannelijke homoseksualiteit) But of course nature has won, as she always does, by making disease the price of promiscuous sex.

- By making woman a sex-object, man has struggled to fix and stabilize nature's dreadful flux. Objectification is conceptualization, the highest human faculty.

Ook is er nog de meerdere paragrafen die stelt dat het normaal is dat vrouwen worden verkracht aangezien ze zich vrouwelijk kleden. En dat men moet stoppen met de schuld te zoeken bij mannen. Maar dat was zo degoutant dat ik het niet terug wil vinden.

[Stephen Theaker]

Reads like a series of clever aphorisms, and it can be hard to piece them together to figure out the overall point, especially given the exceptionally small print. Lots to disagree with, but the idea that male violence is a failure of socialisation (rather than simply a product of it) was quite convincing.

[roxy punk]

A glossy magazine article for anti-feminists feminists!

[Mikhela]

Quotable and questionable at the same time lol

[Sungu Köksalözkan]

Goodreads :)

[F. McGill]

The richness of the ideas presented herein and the breadth of Paglia's knowledge are endlessly fascinating. I often find it difficult to take these ideas seriously - I am very much a product of this materialism and gender-nihilism which characterises most people of my generation - but as a work of imaginative literature and art anthropology it is truly riveting. The snappiness and energy of her prose makes every paragraph engaging and helped pull me through the sprawling and admittedly unstructured nature of the essay. I believe I have to read Sexual Personae, of which this serves as the first chapter.

[Lucia]

I disagree with the authors concluding position, deterministic view on gender and generalisations of feminism. However it is beautifully written with prose that at times transposes you to another wordly realm & some statements, though uncomfortable show biting insight.

[Matt]

I remember Penguin 60's!!!!!