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The provocative style in which Sexual Personae is written tempts one to abandon scholarly etiquette and reply in kind (and, indeed, should this essay occasionally succumb to temptation, I hope the essayist will be forgiven). Yet what inflames some, electrifies others. So, although this book, and its author, Camille Paglia, have outraged most feminists (e.g., Pochoda, 1992; Wolf, 1992), they have excited others (e.g., Bright, 1991; Rich, 1991). Even the mainstream response swings between disdain (e.g., Kakutani's, 1992, review of Paglia's latest book) and admiration (in book-tour interviews, e.g., Rose, 1992). What is this contradiction all about? Just as it is the phenomenon of Camille Paglia, rather than what she has to say, that generates all the excitement, so it is more the sensation than the content of Sexual Personae that is worth reviewing (which was, indeed, her provocative intent, p. 12). This sensationalism does, however, make a certain sense; as we will see, language and style, tone and affect, have a lot to do with what one can and cannot express, may and may not think.
The subject of Sexual Personae is art in all its forms, and its provocative thesis is antifeminist:
Out with stereotypes, feminism proclaims. But stereotypes are the west's stunning sexual personae, the vehicles of art's assault against nature…. From remotest antiquity, western art has been a parade of sexual personae…. Art is form struggling to wake from the nightmare of nature. (p. 39)
A sexual persona is “a projected personality” (p. 76). Like a humor, it floats through, informs, and constitutes mind and culture; society and art; and art,