Camille Paglia : Sexual Personae

Sexuality is a murky realm of contradiction and ambivalence. It cannot always be understood by social models, which feminism, as an heir of nineteenth-century utilitarianism, insists on imposing on it. Mystification will always remain the disorderly companion of love and art.

Eroticism is mystique; that is, the aura of emotion and imagination around sex. It cannot be ‘fixed’ by codes of social or moral convenience, whether from the political left or right. For nature’s fascism is greater than that of any society. There is a daemonic instability in sexual relations that we may have to accept.

As in Freud, the sex instinct is amoral and egotistical. In Juliette (1797), answering Rousseau’s Julie, Sade says of lust, “It demands, it militates, it tyrannizes.” Sex is power.

A modern assumption is that sex and procreation are medically, scientifically, intellectually “manageable”. If we keep tinkering with the social mechanism long enough, every difficulty will disappear. Meanwhile, the divorce rate soars. Conventional marriage, despite its inequities, kept the chaos of libido in check. When the prestige of marriage is low, all the nasty daemonism of sexual instinct pops out. Individualism, the self unconstrained by society, leads to the coarser servitude of constraint by nature.
Every road from Rousseau leads to Sade.

[ Sexual Personae, Camille Paglia 1990 ]