Rating: 
Summary: oh, boo hoo
Review: After reading through this collection of essays I had to throw it against the wall out of utter frustration. Although Ms. Paglia's neo-feminist approach can be quite refreshing and, yes, amusing at times, it ain't happening here. I don't want to dismiss the points that she attempts to make, but, could she keep her huge ego out of everything? Do I need to be constantly reminded that she is an Italian-American and a scholar? Well, I figured that if she is a professor and has a book of her essays published she must be. So what? The topics are approached with pure subjectivity and lack of depth. It's like suffering through an awful debate where the antagonist uses circular reasoning to prove a point and then pounces with a, "So there!" as you reel in amazement at the actual personification of a closed-minded putz. Here, we have it on paper. Camille, babe, the gay community could care less about your acceptance, and frankly I doubt if Madonna feels any differently. This only pertains to this book. I have seen Paglia and read other essays and think that she has a lot of really good points. So maybe it's the editor's fault. END
Rating: 
Summary: Camille Paglia is the coolest lady alive
Review: Art history is boring. Postmodernism is dense and defeatist. Feminists are unglamorous. Camille Paglia's M.I.T. lecture, transcribed in this FABULOUS book, is the most exciting several pages I or anyone else has ever read. Never before has any academic been so honest. Oscar Wilde once said that in being concise, one sacrifices accuracy. This sort of rough, concise prose is what Paglia takes straight from Pater and throws in your face. This book, like "Sexual Personae," draws vast conclusions from little more than Paglia's own erudition, and is often, well....WRONG, but it is nonetheless the best piece of academic work you'll ever read. She'll put everything into perspective for you, and so much more...
Rating:
Summary: Paglia should be expelled from society
Review: Camille Paglia is a woman with a disturbed, sick, and twisted view on rape. With her excessive Right-wing conservative Reverend Jerry Fallwell take on rape, Paglia attempts to oversimplify rape as male-wanted sex and woman-initiated provocation in her book Sex, Art, and American Culture: Essays. Using her own baseless opinions and hasty generalizations with no real evidential proof, she says over and over again that women who are raped are asking for it by the way the dress and the way they act. Claiming that men are no more than testosterone-filled pathetic losers whose agenda rests solely on sex and getting some, she minimizes the male guilt factor and places on the victim's shoulders. Despite her psychotic ideas on non-verbal submission and demeaning viewpoints on battered-wives, she, remarkably, doesn't even skirt the issue of how rape obliterates women's fundamental human rights. That alone should cause her reader to dismiss her essay as complete fallacy.
Rating:
Summary: Paglia should be expelled from society
Review: Camille Paglia is a woman with a disturbed, sick, and twisted view on rape. With her excessive Right-wing conservative Reverend Jerry Fallwell take on rape, Paglia attempts to oversimplify rape as male-wanted sex and woman-initiated provocation in her book Sex, Art, and American Culture: Essays. Using her own baseless opinions and hasty generalizations with no real evidential proof, she says over and over again that women who are raped are asking for it by the way the dress and the way they act. Claiming that men are no more than testosterone-filled pathetic losers whose agenda rests solely on sex and getting some, she minimizes the male guilt factor and places on the victim's shoulders. Despite her psychotic ideas on non-verbal submission and demeaning viewpoints on battered-wives, she, remarkably, doesn't even skirt the issue of how rape obliterates women's fundamental human rights. That alone should cause her reader to dismiss her essay as complete fallacy.
Rating:
Summary: Smart ideas smothered by hyperbolic ranting
Review: Camille Paglia writes: "If rape is a totally devastating psychological experience for a woman then she doesn't have a proper attitude towards sex." This is offensive rubbish. She claims to be an Amazonian academic - too much is over the top polemics for cheap publicity.
Rating:
Summary: Rare rhetoric.
Review: For those of us who see "rhetoric" as a good and not a bad word, Paglia is perhaps as worthy a practitioner of the art of language as any of her contemporaries. This collection of her essays does her more justice than the less even "Vamps and Tramps." In fact, the essay "Junk Bonds and Corporate Raiders" is at the same time the strongest critique of the current academic scene and the most persuasive and powerful prose launched by any writer in recent memory. Granted, sensation and effect often take priority over dialectic and reason, but since when are emotions, including righteous indignation, forbidden notes for the prose musicians gifted enough to play them? And since when have academic critics been forbidden to delve outside their "specialty" or to ignore the often phony, arbitrary distinctions between "high" and "low" culture? If Paglia doesn't always "get it right," shame on her. The point is that she comes closer than most academic and cultural critics, and even when she gets it wrong, she can evoke admiration if not joy.
Rating:
Summary: Rare rhetoric.
Review: For those of us who see "rhetoric" as a good and not a bad word, Paglia is perhaps as worthy a practitioner of the art of language as any of her contemporaries. This collection of her essays does her more justice than the less even "Vamps and Tramps." In fact, the essay "Junk Bonds and Corporate Raiders" is at the same time the strongest critique of the current academic scene and the most persuasive and powerful prose launched by any writer in recent memory. Granted, sensation and effect often take priority over dialectic and reason, but since when are emotions, including righteous indignation, forbidden notes for the prose musicians gifted enough to play them? And since when have academic critics been forbidden to delve outside their "specialty" or to ignore the often phony, arbitrary distinctions between "high" and "low" culture? If Paglia doesn't always "get it right," shame on her. The point is that she comes closer than most academic and cultural critics, and even when she gets it wrong, she can evoke admiration if not joy.
Rating:
Summary: "Professor In-Your- Face"....
Review: I don't agree with all she says, but what I really like about her is that she has more chutzpah and speed than a rampaging rhino. To me, that's what academia needs--chutzpah and speed and a kick in the pants or two. The prototypical professor has some kinda "Goodbye Mr. Chips" ivory tower affectation--"airs", they call it--that serves to lose many a bright and promising student. Paglia knows about that, of course, and she speaks about it, but she is a creation beyond mere academia...She kinda reminds me of some of those Professors I had like in Western/Non-Western Civilizations Courses and Comparative Religion Studies when I was a mere embryo in my liberal arts college. These professors made learning interesting because they weren't afraid to go into the trenches, so to speak, to bring home a lesson. I ended up with with professors who did missionary work in apartheid South Africa, who were NASA physical chemists, who were heirs to syrup and condiment dynasties...and they were all very successful in reaching me, a hardheaded, hardboiled kid from the heartlands. Paglia is one of my favorite professor/writers/pop culture experts. She is usually dead-on those topics she explores and describes. Imagine my thrill, if you will, when I found she had an ongoing column in the netmagazine "Salon" and she is deliciously brazen, bold, informative and Italian about topics ranging from the Oscars--who won and what they were wearing and what she really thinks about, say, Gwenneth Paltrow--to the aforementioned ivory tower madness in most esteemed colleges and universities across the nation--to her ongoing calls for reform in many aspects of the feminist movement. I call her the neo-Renaissancer. Her seminal work, "Sexual Personae", put her on the map, but I have a feeling that even without that, she would have been front and center some cause she is so passionate about, and she would be just as famous. About the book--they are actually gleanings from her first coupla 4-5 years after she published "Sexual Personae", including the rejected introduction from it. She is a huge Madonna fan so much so that she compares herself to her (and to Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones and to snappy sassy thirties/forties film actresses like Rosalind Russell and Kate Hepburn), and in the article "Venus of The Airwaves" she unknowingly does a companion piece to Madonna's "Immaculate Collection: Videos". The Collection came out after the piece, but she critiques evvy video from "Lucky Star" to "Justify My Love"--one could only imagine what she thinks of Madonna's recent (art as life?) movie or her pop productions with electronica muse Bill Orbit... Interesting to me in particular is her notes on the lectures she and Lily Yeh did at the Univerisity of the Arts in Philly: "East and West: An Experiment in Multiculturalism". Can you say, "Right down my alley", kiddies? Note: it truly is a ying/yang experience thru Professor P's eyes... She also writes about pagan goddess Liz Taylor, does a sweeping critique of sexuality and the "New Criticism" in "Junk Bonds and Corporate Raiders", and transcribes the infamous M.I.T Lecture. And does each with a plunder and aplomb which is pure Paglia. You go, girl. My opinion--love her, hate her. Utimately, that's up to the individual. To me she is one of the world's greatest teachers and thinkers. To ignore her would be pure heresy.
Rating: 
Summary: Relentlessly Independent and Intellectually Fierce
Review: I find myself disagreeing with Paglia just about as often as I agree with her, but unlike her shrill "feminist" counterparts, I find her reasoning incredibly insightful, fresh, non-ideological, and sometimes dangerous. Somehow, Paglia has avoided the 'group think' herd mentality of your typical academic liberal, and like Tammy Bruce, comes closer to representing REAL liberalism (open-minded discourse and debate, and the courage to think one's own thoughts, as opposed to having one's thoughts dictated by propaganda and political correctness). She has the intellectual muscle to spar with the big boys (I'd love to see her go head-to-head with a William Bennett, perhaps with Bill O'Reilly as the moderator!!!), and certainly doesn't shrink away from unpopular opinions. Her weakness, however, seems to be her very zest for saying shocking things. A shocking thought or pronouncement is not necessarily a useful or true one. She intellectualizes to the point of absurdity sometimes, drawing parallels to obscure figures from Greek mythology, etc. And as in her discussion of rape, she seems to approach the subject from an academic perspective that has little value for those who have actually been victimized by assault. In short, Paglia shows a very masculine tendency to "show-off" with her intellectualizing, sometimes forgetting that she is in fact approaching her subjects from a distinctly academic "ivory tower." But I wish more folks were as gutsy in their views as Paglia. Our media and universities are full of liberal ideologues...and independent thought is out of fashion. Those who rock the boat will be loathed and villified, but they are ESSENTIAL to keeping honest intellectual discourse alive.
Rating: 
Summary: couldn't even finish it
Review: It isn't often that I don't read a book all the way through... unless of course it's utter rubbish. I wouldn't peg Paglia's book of essays as that, but i would approach it with trepidation. It wasn't that I didn't agree with most of her rantings (although I didn't), it was the way they were written. Buried in a heap of reference after reference, it was almost impossible to trudge through most of what she said, without feeling the need to research every other sentence. Her essays on date rape were linguistically digestable, although her ideas were fairly offensive, not to mention, reading this work in 2001 (It came out in the early 90's) makes a lot of her opinions read as outdated. At first I liked it, she made me angry and it was fun to wage an inner debate... but later on... I mean, do we really want to read her lesson plan for a class she once taught... all 50 pages of it? Do you get the idea? A lot of it seemed like her own mental masturbation. Proceed with caution.
|
