Camile Paglia is still exhausting

Returning to Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence From Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson is a fraught undertaking. As a teenager I feverishly savored every one of Camille Paglia’s 700 incendiary pages, struck by the passion being lit from within. Yet revisiting the text decades later was both illuminating and infuriating. Re-issued this year and approaching its 36th birthday, Sexual Personae remains one of the strangest and most sweeping works of art criticism ever written, providing a dark alternative history of Western aesthetics: one driven by shadowy forces of violent fetishism and gender trouble. When it was first released in 1990, the book was an absolute scandal, not least because Paglia parlayed its unexpected popularity to establish herself as an iconoclastic “anti-feminist’s feminist”,