Aging & Wisdom Quote by Camille Paglia

Paglia comes in swinging, and the swing isn’t really at Sotomayor so much as at a whole moral economy: the way identity can be converted into credential, sermon, and social leverage. The phrasing is engineered for maximum abrasion. “Vainglorious” frames the “wise Latina” remark as self-worship rather than experience speaking. “Lecture bromide” turns it into a tired prefab slogan, not a hard-won insight. Calling it a “vulgar embarrassment” isn’t just insult; it’s a bid to strip the comment of legitimacy by making it sound gauche, unserious, beneath the dignity of the judiciary.

The subtext is classic Paglia: a heterodox feminist policing feminism. She’s drawing a line between liberation as she imagines it - tough, individualist, skeptical of pieties - and what she depicts as grievance-as-virtue politics. “Trumping white men” is doing a lot of work: it translates Sotomayor’s suggestion that background can shape perception into a crude hierarchy where demographic identity beats merit. That framing flatters a certain audience’s fear that institutions are replacing standards with symbolism.

Context matters. Sotomayor’s “wise Latina” line, delivered before her Supreme Court nomination, became a conservative media flashpoint during the 2009 confirmation cycle, when anxieties about “empathy” and “identity judging” were already primed. Paglia taps that moment to revive an older intra-feminist feud: second-wave “male-bashing” caricatures versus a post-90s push to treat gender rhetoric with irony and suspicion. The quote works because it weaponizes shame - not disagreement - as the verdict, casting the offender as stuck in an outdated script while Paglia claims the fresher, cooler heresy.