Are men and women two shades on the gender spectrum? Their differences a result of social upbringing, historical chance and nothing else? In Sexual Personae (1991), Camile Paglia, a philosopher, says no - there's a profound gulf between the sexes. Let's understand it👇

The feminist movement has a litany of complaints against "patriarchy": women have been unduly restricted, banned from making social contributions besides rearing children, and turned into sex-objects for the visual pleasure of men. Paglia provides an alternative view.

For Paglia, the female psyche is Dionysian. The female spirit mirrors the spirit of nature: both are a knot of creation and destruction, uncontrollable and unknowable, more energy than order. In a natural disaster people instinctively refer to the "wrath of Mother Earth."

The Apollonian male spirit is the spirit of society: a heroic, if ultimately doomed, attempt to turn natural chaos into man-made order. Civilization is a male attempt to escape Mother nature: "If civilization had been left in female hands, we'd still be living in grass huts."

Paglia writes: "Sexual physiology (sets) the pattern for our experience of the world." The penis underlines "linearity, focus, aim, directedness." But nature forces females to make peace with hidden genitals - which also makes them more at ease with "greater subjectivity."

K. Horney argues that men believe objectivity is possible because they can see their genitals, women believe it’s impossible because they can’t. Their vagina is folded inward, their womb permanently invisible; this makes them “accept limited knowledge as their natural condition."

As women entered the universities, the departments become increasingly subjective - that is, feminine. Whether 2 +2 is really five was mocked by Orwell as the absolute limit of dystopian absurdity - it's now earnestly asked by Harvard mathematicians like Kareem Carr.

Post-modernism, with its skeptical attitude towards objectivity, has permeated all fields of knowledge. Paglia: "Every woman’s body contains a cell of archaic night, where all knowing must stop." This built-in doubt about truth may explain women's historical absence from science.

Do men objectify women's form? Men fixate on women's shapes to sublimate the fact that feminine energy is unshapely and wild. Men are "erotically fixated on woman’s shapeliness" to repress the fact that "woman's billowy body reflects the surging sea of chthonian nature."

Paglia writes that the man's metaphor is "concentration and projection" - while the woman's metaphor is "mystery." The mysterious female muse becomes a painting via male projection. Paglia: "Let us abandon the pretense of sexual sameness and admit the terrible duality of gender."