Life & Wisdom Quote by Camille Paglia

Paglia isn’t describing men so much as staging a provocation: male desire as a kind of permanent homelessness. “Sexual exiles” flips the usual script where men are cast as winners in the erotic economy. Exile implies punishment, displacement, a sentence you don’t get to appeal. The sentence continues in restless verbs - “wander,” “seeking,” “craving,” “despising” - making libido feel less like power than compulsion, a motor that won’t shut off. She’s after the humiliating underside of masculinity: the way wanting can make you ridiculous, dependent, and angry at the very thing you need.

The subtext is partly feminist and partly anti-sentimental. Paglia insists that whatever structural advantages men hold, erotic life carries its own asymmetries and costs. The line “craving and despising” is her sharpest barb: it captures a pattern where desire curdles into contempt, especially when gratification doesn’t arrive on command. It’s an explanation of misogyny that doesn’t excuse it; it locates the venom in frustrated longing and the fear of being rejected, rather than in a cool ideology.

Context matters: Paglia’s work emerged against second-wave feminist orthodoxies, pushing a brash, evolutionary, almost Nietzschean view of sex as dark, ancient force. She’s also needling women tempted to romanticize male freedom. “There is nothing...for women to envy” isn’t comfort; it’s a dare. If you want equality, don’t just covet the imagined privileges of male desire. Look at the psychic price tag: perpetual appetite, perpetual dissatisfaction, and the shame of being moved by it.