In the introduction to her essay collection Sex, Art and American Culture, Camille Paglia lays out her philosophy of sexual politics. Writing in the early 1990s, she felt what her time lacked was a feminism that emphasised personal responsibility, in contrast to the hysterical anti-porn, anti-sex feminism of writers like Andrea Dworkin.
This emphasis on personal responsibility, Paglia argued, ought to be emboldened with the global consciousness and progressivism associated with the Sixties. “We need a fusion of idealism and realism,” she writes, something that combines these elements from the Sixties with the “hard political lessons of the Seventies and Eighties, sobering decades of rational reaction against the arrogant excesses of my generation”.
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