#paglia

“The comedy of Sexual Personae separates it from Bloom’s work, for whatever riches may be harvested from my distinguished mentor, it cannot be said that reading him is a barrel of laughs! My double view, taking in the primal with the artificial, is a rite of intellectual reconciliation. My appreciation of glamour and aristocratic style (anti-bourgeois and anti-liberal, as in Baudelaire and Wilde) is another point of divergence from Bloom. We belong to different Western traditions. Bloom, who prefers the Bible to Homer, is Judeo-Christian. His consciousness is completely literary, an orchestral dynasty of the [w]ord. I am Greco-Roman, ruled by visual images and formal theatrics, in art, sports, politics, and war.”

The western eye makes things, idols of Apollonian objectification. Pornography makes many well-meaning people uncomfortable because it isolates the voyeuristic element present in all art, and especially cinema. All the personae of art are sex objects. The emotional response of spectator or reader is inseparable from erotic response.