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On reading Camille Paglia's Sexual Personae one doesn't know whether to laugh or cry. It is a monstrous work, not only in size (718 pages), but in its simplistic Freudianism, its repugnant politics, and its ferocious reductionism about the “nature” of women and men. It is also witty, bombastic, and at times a terrifically fun read, vaunting retrograde notions as revolutionary and dishing
up some hilarious aphoristic wit. It is tempting to read Sexual Personae as psychological theory, social commentary, or as a recipe for living, when actually it is intended chiefly as literary criticism. As a work of criticism, its greatest value may be that it provides a fresh look at the age-old question of the relationship between art and life.
The controversial first chapter lays out the book's argument. In the west, there has been a mortal struggle throughout history between nature and culture. Nature, far from being the benign force that Rousseau and Wordsworth would have us believe, is hostile, cruel, or, at the very least, indifferent. Because of her closer kinship to natural processes (e.g., childbearing, menstruation), woman not only represents but actually embodies the forces of nature—decay, ooze, and nature's implacable miasmic power. Woman is nature because, like nature, she is murky, chthonic (“of the earth”), and “seething excess” (p. 28).
Men appropriately fear and feel disgust at nature and its representatives (women), and by dint of these feelings are propelled into construction, creation, culture, art. Their flight from the primal ooze is both motivated and facilitated by their anatomic advantages. Having penises, they possess genitals that “have a rational mathematical design, a syntax” (p. 17) and provide the necessary model for effective action in the world. Women's relationship with the primal ooze is likewise manifested by their genitals, which are “lurid in color, vagrant in contour, and architecturally incoherent” (p. 17). Culture is unequivocally a creatio