Sex, the Sixties & Camille Paglia | The New Criterion (original) (raw)

The Arion piece is Paglia at her best. Confronted with a half-baked and smugly dehumanizing ideology (here, the notion that sexual differences, and indeed sexuality, have no grounding in nature), she marshals formidable learning in art history and anthropology to expose its inaccuracies and absurdities. She is eager to show, for example, the fraudulence of John Winkler’s claim to have, in his Constraints of Desire, treated Sappho frankly at last. Victorian prudery or Wilhelmine stuffiness (I am thinking of the great Wilamowitz’s presentation of Sappho as a