As a polemicist Camille Paglia is hard to beat. Consider this remark from her in America, the magazine of American Jesuits:
After the great victory won by my insurgent, pro-sex, pro-fashion wing of feminism in the 1990s, American and British feminism has amazingly collapsed backward again into whining, narcissistic victimology. As in the hoary old days of Gloria Steinem and her Stalinist cohorts, we are endlessly subjected to the hackneyed scenario of history as a toxic wasteland of vicious male oppression and gruesome female suffering. College campuses are hysterically portrayed as rape extravaganzas where women are helpless fluffs with no control over their own choices and behavior. I am an equal opportunity feminist: that is, I call for the removal of all barriers to women’s advance in the professional and political realms. However, I oppose special protections for women, which I reject as demeaning and infantilizing. My principal demand (as I have been repeating for nearly 25 years) is for colleges to confine themselves to education and to cease their tyrannical surveillance of students’ social lives. If a real crime is committed, it must be reported to the police. College officials and committees have neither the expertise nor the legal right to be conducting investigations into he said/she said campus dating fiascos. Too many of today’s young feminists seem to want hovering, paternalistic authority figures to protect and soothe them, an attitude I regard as servile, reactionary and glaringly bourgeois. The world can never be made totally safe for anyone, male or female: there will always be sociopaths and psychotics impervious to social controls. I call my system “street-smart feminism”: there is no substitute for wary vigilance and personal responsibility.
Like her or loathe her, she’s unfailingly entertaining.
She is part of the pantheon of writers, thinkers, intellectuals I admire. She is in the wing with Hunter S. Thompson, Henry Miller, Mark Twain, and Truman Capote is allowed to visit.
Her mind is fascinating, and I would love to see her move to the physics department. She does not think in a linear fashion. She is able to make connections between disparate material and mediums. To my knowledge, she touches all the branches of philosophy except formal logic.
I suspect she would/does intuitively understand string theory.
“Street-smart feminism” — I love the sound of that!
If I recall correctly, she brings up knife fighting in one of her books or essays, and she often refers to Italians as hot-blooded and her people. She never uses words haphazardly, and their placement is deliberate.