What is Mona Lisa thinking? Nothing, of course. Her blankness is her menace and our fear. [...] Walter Pater is to call her a 'vampire,' coasting thr… - Camille Paglia
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What is Mona Lisa thinking? Nothing, of course. Her blankness is her menace and our fear. [...] Walter Pater is to call her a 'vampire,' coasting through history on her secret tasks.
Camille Paglia (born 2 April 1947) is an American author, scholar, feminist and critic, best known for writing Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson, a survey of Western art and literature from earliest recorded history to the 20th Century.
Portrait adapted from
Wikimedia Commons, Fronteiras do Pensamento (CC BY-SA)
I realize now how lucky I was, in the total absence of role models, to have only men to rebel against. Today's women students are meeting their oppressors in dangerously seductive new form, as successful congenial female professors who view themselves as victims of a rigid foreign ideology.
Woman's sexuality is disruptive of the dully mechanical workaday world, in which efficiency means uniformity. The problems of woman's entrance into the career system spring from more than male chauvinism. She brings nature into the social realm, which may be too small to contain it.
