Oresteia - Blog Posts
"go read King Lear to see the anarchy and wolfishness, the primitive regression that result from a sentimental deconstruction of social institutions. Stormy nature, in our hearts and beyond the gates, is ready to consume us all. Next read the Oresteia to reflect on the evolution of law and order out of barbarism and vengeful privatism. The egalitarian fantasy is an Arcadian myth revived and propagated in the past twenty years by feminist politicos. This is the kind of nonsense you get when you spend more time reading fifth-rate contemporary women writers than you do dead white males like Aeschylus and Shakespeare. […] I am saying that many of the problems between the sexes are coming from something prior to socialization, a turbulence that has to do with every boy’s origin in a woman’s body, a mother’s body, and the way he is overwhelmed by this huge, matriarchal shadow of a goddess figure in his childhood. And I feel, after so many decades of studying this, that men are suffering from their sense of dependency on women, their sense that at any moment they could be returned to that slavery and servitude they experienced under a woman’s thumb, when they were a boy in the shadow of the mother. I got this from studying all world culture, and comparing and noticing how often there were these patterns in many different cultures. Many things that erupt in rape or violence, battery and so on, are happening when a woman is pushing that button of fear and dependency."
— Camille Paglia, The Joy of Presbyterian Sex (1991) & Interview with Emily Culbertson (1992) in Sex, Art, and American Culture