A review by harroddd
Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson by Camille Paglia

1.0

800 pages of absurd, over-complicated rubbish. “If creating society was left up to women, we’d still be living in grass huts”. Paglia’s book is an utterly confusing tome which follows her ideas about gender and sex throughout periods of art and literature, including the Apollonian/Dionysian divide, artistic ‘vampires’ and ‘hermaphrodites’. She uses these terms to essentially point out where male authors and artists don’t live up to everything we see as ‘masculine’, and female authors as ‘feminine’. Paglia also believes that it’s not the millennia of social persecution which has prevented women from becoming artists and authors to the same level of fame as women - it’s just their lack of extreme emotion or their lack of genius. I truly can’t understand why this book has high ratings. Its only saving grace is fairly interesting dissections of authors I didn’t know much about before, but given her outrageous beliefs as shown by the above, I find it hard to trust any of her comments on the authors.