Camille Paglia Quotes

It's a man's world, and you men can have it.

Sexism is not the fault of women - kill your fathers, not your mothers.

I have a problem with people saying feminine means anti-feminist, and I think it's counter-productive to immediately associate anything 'girly' with vanity or stupidity.

I'm concerned that boys have become politically incorrect, that we are a society in the process of turning against its male children.

We can't destroy the inequities between men and women until we destroy marriage.

There's an unconscious bias in our society: girls are wonderful; boys are terrible. And to be a boy, or young man, growing up, having to listen to all this, it must be painful.

Like many traditional feminists, I became one of the boys, only better. For a while it gave me a buzz to win at their game, but ultimately, that kind of power just goes nowhere. Traditional feminism excludes men and so perpetuates conflict. I am not interested in warring about power.

Men are born privileged in the scale of things - I'm generalizing, but it's true. Women have to define themselves in the eyes of men. They have to fight for their rights, especially in a society that will pretend that there is no fight or no battle, that it's a cliche, that feminists are reactionary, all these things.

Almost all the ideas we have about being a man or being a woman are so burdened with pain, anxiety, fear and self-doubt. For many of us, the confusion around this question is excruciating.

Men are actually the weaker sex.

One thing standing in the way of further progress for many men is the same obstacle that held women back for so long: overinvestment in their gender identity instead of their individual personhood.

It's easy for guys to listen to another guy for support, but if it's a female, they seem to shy away from it, like they don't want to be a sucker, you know what I'm saying? So we kind of got to go harder.

Just by existing as men, we are automatically guilty of everything in some people's minds. And, on top of that, we've created a situation in the media where men are only allowed to talk about politics and sport.

There is no doubt that women and children on this planet are the people who suffer the most on many levels… Lots of boys around this planet are being taught right now that girls are lesser than them. This is toxic to everybody, and boys deserve better.

I think male authors who want to try to tackle these issues of representation of women can generally do a better job if they try to question traditional notions of masculinity and the sort of toxic nature of traditional ways of presenting masculinity.

I was frustrated in general with the way women are always portrayed. And it's always through a man's eyes.

Men, through no fault of theirs, get born into cultures that tell them that if a woman can do it, it's not worth doing, or if they're not superior to women in one way or another, they're not really masculine.

So much of the trouble is because I am a woman. To me it seems a very terrible thing to be a woman. There is one crown which perhaps is worth it all--a great love, a quiet home, and children. We all know that is all that is worthwhile, and yet we must peg away, showing off our wares on the market if we have money, or manufacturing careers for ourselves if we haven't.

People always ask us women about how we balance our lives. Rarely do they ever ask men this but we are asked this and it makes a lot of sense - balance, right? It sounds right. And of course you do have to balance because otherwise you'd go crazy. And you do have to find ways of doing things in a sensible manner, raising children and all those choices. But then there's a part of creativity which is irrational and which is obsessive and then that's also part of what we do. So, I don't think that's a bad thing. I think that's part of what makes someone good.

I suppose the most important thing, the heaviest single factor in one's life, is whether one's born male or female. In most societies it determines one's expectations, activities, outlook, ethics, manners - almost everything. Vocabulary. Semiotic usages. Clothing. Even food. Women... women tend to eat less... It's extremely hard to separate the innate differences from the learned ones. Even where women participate equally with men in the society, they still after all do all the childbearing, and so most of the child-rearing.

We have a double standard, which is to say, a man can show how much he cares by being violent-see, he's jealous, he cares-a woman shows how much she cares by how much she's willing to be hurt; by how much she will take; how much she will endure; how suicidal she's prepared to be.

Men aren't asked about age. Men aren't asked about their children. Not that these things aren't important, but I do feel like it becomes reductive when a woman's life becomes, 'Talk to me about your kids and how you feel about plastic surgery.'

With men, we blame the victim. We blame men because we have camouflaged men's victimization by teaching men to also be the victimizer. Men's victimizer status camouflages men's victim status.

Men think women, they don't think men. They don't think toxic masculinity.

The power of patriarchy has been to make maleness feared and to make men feel that it is better to be feared that to be loved. Whether they can confess this or not, men know that just is not true.