Love & Passion Quote by Camille Paglia

Paglia goes for the jugular with a simile that’s engineered to scandalize: the “taxidermist” isn’t just prudishness, it’s embalming. Sex, in her framing, is feral, comic, risky, and alive; turn it over to feminists and you don’t get safety or dignity, you get preservation-without-pulse. The line is built to perform the very thing she claims to defend: rawness. It’s a rhetorical drive-by, a one-sentence manifesto for her long-running argument that much of institutional feminism sanitizes desire into policy, consent scripts, and moral pedagogy.

The specific intent is provocation with a purpose: to force a split between two feminisms. Paglia positions herself as the libertine dissenter against what she sees as a regulatory, middle-class, campus-shaped politics that treats sex primarily as harm to be managed. The dog is libido: loyal, bodily, impulsive. The taxidermist is the bureaucrat of eros, the professional whose craft requires death before artistry. That’s the insult hidden inside the joke: feminists aren’t merely killjoys; they’re technicians of deadening.

Context matters because Paglia rose to prominence in the late 1980s and early 1990s sex-war crossfire, when debates over pornography, harassment, and “victim feminism” were cultural front-page news. Her subtext is a warning about trading ambiguity for rules, appetite for virtue, pleasure for grievance. It also smuggles in an anxiety about female agency: if feminists “control” sex, sex becomes something women must be protected from rather than something women can want messily, aggressively, even selfishly. The cruelty of the image is the point; it dares you to laugh, then asks what kind of politics can survive without a pulse.