Camille Paglia’s Second Wave

The internet was set abuzz with Camille Paglia’s name when two characters on HBO’s popular recent series The White Lotus appeared poolside reading a copy of her 1990 seminal tome Sexual Personae. It was only one of many recent examples of the dissident feminist writer and provocateur’s resurgence in popularity among millennials and older zoomers, long after her first wave of notoriety in the early ’90s.

Upon finishing the book in 1980, after nearly twenty years of toilsome research and refinement, Camille Paglia has said she didn’t expect it to receive acclaim until after her death. She recalls Emily Dickinson’s writings, and she wasn’t discouraged when seven publishers rejected it consecutively. Paglia likened her dedication to scholarship to medieval monks who abandoned the careerism that academics pursue in order to reach mass readers and climb the university ladder. A true scholar, in her view, is much like an apostle: it will take generations for people to fully understand and appreciate what she has done.

When Sexual Personae went on to be published in 1990 by Yale University Press, Paglia’s career skyrocketed nearly overnight. Although she was criticized by feminist establishments, Paglia’s work and public persona received well by people whose opinions on art, pop culture and gender were considered politically incorrect.

Paglia’s media presence has waned over the last few years to making sparse appearances publicizing her latest collection of essays, Provocations (published in 2018). Some wondered whether her career had reached its end when some of her students at Philadelphia’s University of the Arts attempted to “cancel” her in April of 2019. Change.org demanded that she be fired from her post due to her comments about transgenderism, sexual assault and other “triggering” remarks. But university president David Yager refused to appease the students, citing the way “artists over the centuries have suffered censorship, and even persecution, for the expression of their beliefs through their work.”

Despite being out of the spotlight for many years, Paglia has come back to prominence as a voice for an “unvoiced” generation. Similarly to her first surge of popularity in 1990, her commitment to the importance of metaphysics, aesthetics, a broad view of history, and sexual dimorphism, as well as her criticism of poststructuralist theory and political correctness, are filling a gaping void in academia and the mass media–a void which has only deepened over the last thirty years, thus proving her work even more prophetic than when it first emerged.

A new generation of admirers have found her through several outlets. Some through a nearly two hour long interview with Dr. Jordan Peterson in which the two engage in a spirited discussion on Freudian psychoanalysis, Jungian archetypes, and the hegemony of poststructuralism in universities. Others found her through an adoring profile in City Journal written in 2019 by journalist Emily Esfahani Smith, who highlighted the fact that “the world may be less enchanted than it was when Paglia was a child, but she still stands in awe of it. It has been her life’s mission to spread that message .

She is gaining popularity with millennial gay men due in part to Milo Yiannopoulos who some refer to as the male Paglia. Yiannopoulos praises Paglia’s pre-Stonewall understanding of homosexuality and deems it an effort to challenge the status quo. This calls into question the false claim that homosexuality can be a nonsexual form of sexual expression, as well as the assumption that heterosexuality is neutral.

Paglia also has a lot of fans due to hosts of the Red Scare Podcast. Anna Khachiyan and Dasha Nekrasova, both born in Russia, are well-known for their humorous takes on the “libfem girlbosses”, the “free men” mentality of the social justice warriors and how “wokemism” can be a projection of spiritual, psychological and aesthetic decay. They frequently quote Paglia when lambasting the fragility of WASPish middle-class feminists, pulling popular lines from Free Women, Free Men and Sexual Personae like, “if civilization had been left in female hands, we would still be living in grass huts,” and “there is no female Mozart because there is no female Jack the Ripper.”

She has been a source of inspiration for other millennial podcasters, including Perfume Nationalist, Evil Thespian, and Contra Gentiles, and is the subject of Instagram meme pages like @camillepagliaquotes, which posts short, succinct Paglian hot takes on a daily basis. An anonymous page administrator attributes Paglia’s popularity surge to her ability to “offer an antidote for the stale language and stagnant ideology that is the Social Justice movement.” Paglia is individuality, dissent and passion. She also has humor, humor, wit. The Year Zero, collectivist Mentality of the Social Justice Left, however, is dead.

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The “Madonna of academe”, Helen Andrews, isn’t without her millennial critics. In her recent book Boomers: The men and women who promised freedom and delivered disaster, The American Conservative senior editor Helen Andrews offers a critique of what she sees as Paglia’s self-contradictions. Andrews claims that Paglia is a supporter of “sex-positive” amoral feminist feminism and a decadent, “sex-positive” sex. Andrews recognizes Paglia’s brilliance despite her condemnation of Paglia. She affirms that Paglia is a more acute critic than many of her contemporaries.

A feminist that believes biology should be the foundation for Gender Studies. A self-identified transgender thinker who considers prescribing birth control to babies to be “criminal,” a prolifer Democrat who believes abortion is murder and an atheist Pagan who believes comparative religion should form the basis for a multi-cultural curriculum. Paglia’s bizarre sensibilities didn’t fit into the simple orthodoxies created by culture warriors in her first wave. They don’t fit much better today.

This is her new fan base, who are increasingly feeling suffocated in the absence of intellectual integrity and nuance within today’s mainstream discourse. Although Paglia may not be able to fully understand the issues facing young people, her commitment to truth over ideology is an inspiration for all political and cultural persuasions.