My thanks to Tony for alerting me to the interesting Wikiquote entry on Camille Paglia http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Camille_Paglia. She’s an American author, scholar, and critic, now 66 years old. The Wikiquote entry is well worth reading in full, but my eye was caught by two pieces from just two pages (pp 37, 38) of Sexual Personae (1990). I’ve long been told the second was once uttered by Germaine Greer in a British television interview, but have never been able to verify that, so it’s good to find what appears to be its true source. Enjoy:
One of feminism’s irritating reflexes is its fashionable disdain for ‘patriarchal society’, to which nothing good is ever attributed. But it is patriarchal society that has freed me as a woman. It is capitalism that has given me the leisure to sit at this desk writing this book. Let us stop being small-minded about men and freely acknowledge what treasures their obsessiveness has poured into culture.
If civilization had been left in female hands, we would still be living in grass huts.
