Overview
Paglia, who has been characterized variously as a "contrarian academic" and a feminist "bête noire", a "witty controversialist", and a maverick, is known for her critical views of many aspects of modern culture, including feminism and liberalism. Margaret Wente has called Paglia "a writer in a category of her own...a feminist who hates affirmative action; an atheist who respects religion" and "a Democrat who thinks her party doesn't get it". Martha Duffy writes that Paglia "advocates a core curriculum based mostly on the classics" and rails against "chic French theorists Michel Foucault and Jacques Lacan", and "has a strong libertarian streak — on subjects like pornography — that go straight to her '60s coming-of-age". Elaine Showalter has called Paglia a "radical libertarian", noting her socially liberal stands on abortion, sodomy, prostitution, drug use, and suicide. Paglia has denounced feminist academics and women's studies, celebrated popular culture and Madonna, and become a media celebrity, writing op-eds and gossip columns, appearing on television and telling her story to journalists.
Paglia has said that she is willing to have her entire career judged on the basis of her composition of what she considers to be "probably the most important sentence that she has ever written": "God is man's greatest idea."
Paglia's Sexual Personae was rejected by numerous publishers, but when finally published, became a best seller, reaching seventh place on the paperback best-seller list, a rare accomplishment for a scholarly book. Sexual Personae was published by Yale University Press after being rejected by seven other publishers. Paglia called it her "prison book", commenting, "I felt like Cervantes, Genet. It took all the resources of being Catholic to cut myself off and sit in my cell." Sexual Personae has been called an "energetic, Freud-friendly reading of Western art", one that seemed "heretical and perverse", at the height of political correctness; according to Daniel Nester, its characterization of "William Blake as the British Marquis de Sade or Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson as 'self-ruling hermaphrodites who cannot mate' still pricks up many an English major’s ears".
Paglia is a devotee of Oscar Wilde and Walter Pater, cherishing "performance, artifice and play rather than earnestness." She has expressed admiration for Dorothy Parker and Mary McCarthy, as well as for models, singers and movie stars such as Elizabeth Taylor, Madonna, and Barbra Streisand.
In 2005, Paglia was named as one of the top 100 public intellectuals by the journals Foreign Policy and Prospect.
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