Love & Passion Quote by Camille Paglia

Paglia is doing what she’s always done best: grabbing a cultural live wire and refusing the polite insulation. The “as I do” matters as much as the sex talk. She’s staking authority through proximity to rock-and-roll’s messy backstage anthropology, positioning herself against what she reads as sanitized, campus-bred theories of desire. The line isn’t just descriptive; it’s a provocation aimed at feminisms that treat male lust primarily as contamination rather than fuel.

The intent is to invert the expected moral charge. “Reality” is her battering ram: not an argument so much as a dare. By framing lust as something women are “aroused by,” she’s pushing an older Paglia thesis that erotic life is not naturally egalitarian or neatly ethical, and that denying its volatility leads to bad politics and worse art. Rock becomes her evidentiary stage because it’s one of the few mainstream arenas where raw appetite has historically been allowed to show its face, often crudely, sometimes brilliantly.

The subtext is riskier than the punchy phrasing suggests. She collapses “women” into a single audience response, treating attraction as a kind of marketplace vote: it “attracts” or it “repels.” That move shifts attention away from power and coercion toward libido and performance, implicitly challenging the idea that women’s participation can’t coexist with exploitation. It’s also a rhetorical trap: disagree and you’re cast as naive or prudish; agree and you may sound like you’re naturalizing behavior that, in real life, can slide from lust into entitlement. That friction is the point. Paglia isn’t trying to soothe; she’s trying to force a reckoning between desire as it is lived and the stories we tell about it to feel righteous.