Camille Paglia: Pedophile Sex Revolutionary

Paglia advocates for the legalization of sexual contact between adults and children of "any age" as well as child pornography.

September 12 2019

[This article has been republished at Council of European Canadians.]

Camille Paglia is a self-described libertarian feminist and is a professor of Humanities and Media Studies at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia.

For a number of years now, Paglia has been promoted by conservative pundits and media outlets as a sane voice of reason in the midst of an increasingly absurd and malevolent political climate. She is touted as being a renegade feminist, and as an unlikely ally who daringly opposes the most egregious excesses of modern feminist philosophy. YouTube abounds with videos dating all the way back to the early 90s of Paglia playing the foil to mainstream feminist currents.

Paglia has gone on Fox News to speak with Tucker Carlson, who recommended her most recent book, calling her "one of the more interesting people out there".

Breitbart recently published an article in support of Paglia, praising her as a renowned scholar, and applauded her criticism of "social justice culture on campus".

Paglia is frequently promoted by Ben Shapiro's online news publication, The Daily Wire, often to showcase her most recent takes on the subjects of transgenderism, feminism, and campus politics.

Dennis Prager has interviewed Paglia and championed her as a defender of civilization, stating "I have been admiring the person's [Camille Paglia's] thinking that I am about to speak to... One of the fine minds in the United States... She is what I rely on for civilization to continue, she doesn't go with the herd."

Jordan Peterson has promoted Paglia for years. He has recommended Paglia and her work to his university students, praising her as a brilliant genius whom he says he shares influences with, and in 2017 he invited her onto his podcast while recommending her 1990 book 'Sexual Personae'.

Paglia is a featured intellectual in Eric Weinstein's 'Intellectual Dark Web', alongside other illustrious "dark web intellectuals" such as Joe Rogan, Sam Harris, Ben Shapiro, Jordan Peterson, Dave Rubin, Gad Saad, and Michael Shermer, among others.

All of this becomes a baffling sight when one is made aware of the following revelation: Camille Paglia has for almost three decades unrepentantly advocated for the legalization of sexual contact between adults and children of "any age", as well as the legalization of child pornography. She is a pro-pedophilia advocate who has repeatedly given her support to NAMBLA (the North American Man Boy Love Association), and has gone on record numerous times to state that she thinks "kiddie porn" should be legalized.

Timeline

The following is a timeline of Camille Paglia's pro-pedophilia and child pornography advocacy.


In 1990, Paglia's book 'Sexual Personae', which was largely based on her doctoral thesis, was published by Yale University Press. The following quote from that book is currently (as of the writing of this article) published on the official NAMBLA website: "These days, especially in America, boy-love is not only scandalous and criminal, but somehow in bad taste. On the evening news, one sees handcuffed teachers, priests and Boy Scout leaders hustled into police vans. Therapists call them maladjusted, emotionally immature. But beauty has its own laws, inconsistent with Christian morality. As a woman, I feel free to protest that men today are pilloried for something that was rational and honorable in Greece at the height of its civilization."

On September 19, 1991, Paglia published an essay entitled 'Crisis In The American Universities', in which she defended herself from accusations of being a neoconservative by listing the degeneracy that she adamantly supports, including "kiddie porn": "I'm someone who is on the record as being pro-pornography--all the way through kiddie porn and snuff films. I'm pro-prostitution--I mean really pro, not just pro-prostitute and against prostitution. I'm pro-abortion, pro-homosexuality, pro-drag queens, pro-legalization of drugs. This is neoconservative?"

In the October 1991 issue of Esquire magazine, Paglia stated that she sees pedophilia to be "perfectly natural": "Worldwide, in Greece and Rome as in the Near East, China, and Japan, pretty boys have usually been considered by men to be as sexually desirable as women. This seems to me perfectly natural. Judeo-Christianity is unusual in finding the practice of boy-love abhorrent." This essay of hers was later republished in her 1992 book 'Sex, Art, and American Culture'.

In a 1992 interview with Time magazine, Paglia proudly reminded the interviewer of how offensive her book 'Sexual Personae' is, listing her support for both child pornography and snuff films among the reasons why people might find it offensive: "I am proabortion, pro the legal use of drugs, propornography, child pornography, snuff films."

In 1994, Paglia published another book, entitled 'Vamps and Tramps', wherein she went into greater detail regarding her views on child pornography and pedophilia. She wrote that she had been privately thanked by many men for advocating for social acceptance of pedophilia: "I have been thanked for my views by many men, by letter and in person after lectures, because of their own adolescent liaisons with supportive adults." She also wrote that while teaching at Bennington college in the 1970s, she discovered that an adult poet whom she was associated with was having a sexual relationship with a young boy, and that she "saw nothing wrong with it": "At Bennington, I became aware (when Polaroid photos of a kneeling boy's golden genitals fell out of a book) of a private connection between a genial aging male poet and a good-looking local youth in his early teens. It was against the law, but I saw nothing wrong with it."

She went to write that "the present age of consent is far too high", asking "who is to say whether or not a juvenile is capable of informed choice?" She then adamantly declared: "My position on child pornography is that no images, if drawn, painted, or sculpted, may be banned," with the caveat that some restrictions may be reasonable so as not to run afoul of child labor laws: "As for the use of actual children in erotic photographs and videos, some restriction may seem reasonable, given our modern repugnance to child labor, but there is no easy answer, since government is notoriously unable to discriminate among kinds of art."

In Paglia's mind, children are being harmed not by sexual contact with adults, but by society's stigma surrounding pedophilia: "The damage from many pedophiliac encounters probably comes, as some psychologists suggest, less from the contact itself than from the culturally enforced stress and secrecy surrounding it." She also explained that the way to put an end to under-age sex tourism in third world countries was to replace Christian morality in the West with "a more liberal pagan one" that would allow for adults to freely court children for sex in our own societies. In her mind, the "sexual borderline" between adults and children is an artificial construct that society would benefit from deconstructing: "Lolita melts the sexual borderline that society has artificially drawn between child and adult."




Also in 1994, a film entitled 'Glennda and Camille Do Downtown' premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, which featured Paglia taking a stroll in downtown New York with a transvestite going by name of "Glennda Orgasm". After declaring they were going to go shopping for "gay male pornography", they entered a store, and Camille came across a photograph that she believed had a "Greek motif", spurring her to remark: "Gay male porn is honest about the sexual allure of young people. If you'll notice, even when there are boys of indeterminate age and even when there are boys who are over the correct legal age, they're made to look below the age... it's a cult of youth and beauty, and I think that's absolutely correct, and it's like one of the great repressed subjects of right now. We're into child abuse hysteria right now. Everyone's hysterical about it..." to which "Glennda Orgasm" replied that he believed such repression is "killing sexuality". Paglia agreed, then continued: "I believe the Lolita syndrome is one of the few examples of it in a heterosexual context, and I think we're ripe for a revival of Lolita."




On January 30, 1995, Paglia was interviewed by Charlie Rose. During the interview, Rose asked Paglia to clarify whether or not she in fact believed that the distribution of child pornography should be legalized, to which she gave a roundabout answer, first stating that she believes pornography should not be publicly displayed and thus potentially seen by people without their consent, but concluded that she believes child pornography magazines should be available for purchase at news stands.

In an issue of 'The Advocate' magazine published on the 31st of October, 1995, Paglia wrote an article entitled 'Kids for Sale', in which she defended the Calvin Klein fashion company's decision to sexualize teenage boys in a controversial ad campaign for CK jeans. In this article we learn that in 1993, Paglia signed "a manifesto supporting NAMBLA" alongside Allen Ginsberg: "Two years ago, with Allen Ginsberg and others, I signed a manifesto supporting NAMBLA (the North American Man Boy Love Association)...".

The November 6, 1995 issue of 'New York' magazine featured a blurb about Camille Paglia's outrage at the fact CBS Channel 2 in New York had censored a portion of her recent appearance on Lauren Hutton's late-night talk show 'Lauren Hutton and...'. On the show, Paglia had brought up NAMBLA and America's "irrational fear of pedophilia." Incensed, Paglia remarked: "I'm condemning the decision by a New York station to squelch the discussion. I mean, this is 1:30 in the morning. This isn't Topeka. It's New York! What kind of kids are up at 1:30 anyways?"

In the August 1995 issue of 'The Guide' magazine, Paglia was interviewed by pro-pedophile activist and former NAMBLA spokesman Bill Andriette. In the interview (republished on their website in 1999), which had the subtitle "Has the gay movement turned down the wrong path?", Paglia opened with the statement: "Contemporary gays who try to distance themselves from this issue of boy-love are in effect committing cultural suicide. They're cutting themselves from all the highest achievements of gay men." She then emphasized how important pedophilia is to her, saying: "This issue of man-boy love is not just peripheral in my thinking. To me it symbolizes the kinds of thought processes I was going through until I came to the largest thesis of my career...".

Paglia also brought up Michel Foucault, who was famous for signing a petition that demanded that the French government abolish the age of consent, stating that his doing so was the only thing which she respected him for: "Normally I loathe Foucault, I think he's a fraud. But Foucault did speak out on this issue. All his followers in the academy suppress a lot of this, they suppress the boy-love part...".

She shared her thoughts on how best to "remove the stigma from man-boy contacts", suggesting that Allen Ginsberg's pedophilia be used as a model: "Allen Ginsberg, my great hero, has spoken out on this. He has been in the revolutionary forefront from the start. His kind of sexuality, by the way, is a wonderful model."




Paglia then made her stance on pedophilia clear, stating that she sees nothing wrong with "sex-play" between adults and childen of "any age": "Because what is wrong with some mild sex play? What is the big deal? You know I can see forbidding, or being concerned about, situations where a larger man is convincing a small boy to let him have anal intercourse with him. I can see why people might start to be concerned about this, because does this young child I'm talking about a really young child, say, eight years old is he really cognizant about what is going on here, what anal intercourse is. But just sex play? What is wrong? I feel I have a radical sixties libertarian position on this question. I fail to see what is wrong with erotic fondling with any age. That's the direction I would go right now. I mean the anal inter course thing, that's going to be a hard sell for a thousand years probably. But I would really want to push the issue of what is wrong with anything which gives pleasure? What is wrong with it, even if it does involve fondling of genitals."




In 1997, Paglia offered us an even deeper insight into her views in a column she penned for Salon entitled 'The Purity of Allen Ginsberg's Boy-Love'. Paglia wrote that she "would be proud to call him [Ginsberg] my guru," and described meeting Ginsberg in April 1995 at the State University of New York at Buffalo, greeting him with a reverent bow "with hands pressed together in Buddhist homage." A reader had written Paglia a letter, asking her what she thought of Ginsberg's support for NAMBLA, to which Paglia replied: "As far as Ginsberg's pro-NAMBLA stand goes, this is one of the things I most admire him for. I have repeatedly protested the lynch-mob hysteria that dogs the issue of man-boy love. In 'Sexual Personae,' I argued that male pedophilia is intricately intertwined with the cardinal moments of Western civilization." She argued that Ginsberg was "the apostle of a truly visionary sexuality," explaining that from a pagan perspective "Ginsberg's celebration of boy-love was pure and sinless, demonstrating the limitations of Judeo-Christian paradigms of sexuality."

Paglia's Revolutionary Spirit

In a recent interview done by Adam Kirsch for Tablet magazine entitled 'Camille Paglia on Jews and Feminism', Paglia explained that her revolutionary fervor came from emulating American Jews: "What I got from Jewish-American culture was a revolutionary fervor for political and institutional reform, totally outside the otherwise wonderfully rich legacy of rural Italian tradition." She also claims she learned how to design strategies for social activism from studying the work of Jews: "I have repeatedly acknowledged my debt to Jewish-American culture. For example, in my long 1991 attack on post-structuralism, 'Junk Bonds and Corporate Raiders,' I wrote: "It was from Jews (beginning at T. Aaron Levy Junior High School) that I learned how to analyze politics, law, business, and medicine, how to decipher the power dynamics of family relationships, and how to plan pragmatic strategies of social activism.'"

Paglia obviously considers advocating for the normalization of pedophilia and pederasty to be important social activism, and frequently laments that Christian morality stands in the way of a pagan sexual revolution that would shift society in that direction. She credited the Jewish-American pedophile Allen Ginsberg with making a profound impact on her intellectual development, described his "boy love" as being "pure" and "sinless", and offered it as an example of what she believes is a form of beauty that the Christian "paradigm of sexuality" fails to recognize. For Paglia, true freedom is defined as the freedom to identify beauty within evil, something which she believes paganism correctly grasped.




Allen Ginsberg, whom Paglia described as being her "guru" and "hero", was a notorious pedophile and member of NAMBLA. Andrea Dworkin, a feminist and nemesis of Paglia's who held anti-pornography views, wrote about Ginsberg in her 2001 book, 'Heartbreak', sharing her opinion that Ginsberg's support of NAMBLA was not an abstract intellectual position based on libertarianism, but in fact stemmed from a genuine desire to engage in sexual contact with children: "On the day of the bar mitzvah in 1982, newspapers reported in huge headlines that the Supreme Court had ruled child pornography illegal. I was thrilled. I knew Allen would not be. I did think he was a civil libertarian. But, in fact, he was a pedophile. He did not belong to the North American Man/Boy Love Association out of some mad, abstract conviction that its voice had to be heard. He meant it. I take this from what Allen said directly to me, not from some inference I made. He was exceptionally aggressive about his right to fuck children and his constant pursuit of underage boys."




Similarly, though Paglia does mention that her position on the legalization of child pornography is influenced by her libertarian ideals, her pro-pedophilia stance comes also from a firm belief that sexual contact between adults and children is somehow "beautiful", as well as a belief that pedophilia and pederasty are positively correlated with the greatest achievements of Western civilization. The result of these beliefs is that she has engaged in social activism with the intent of replacing society's Christian morality with "a more liberal pagan one" to foment a revolution that would legally enshrine pedophile sex as a protected right.

The Mystery of Paglia's Continued Promotion

Though Camille Paglia does not appear to have said or published anything on the subject of pedophilia and child pornography since the late 90s, she has also not amended or recanted any of her previous statements on the subject, and she continues to sell her books in which she expounds upon her pro-pedophilia and child pornography views.

Some have tried to argue that Paglia does not in fact hold radical ideas about adults having sexual contact with children by citing her article 'Kids for Sale' that was published in 'The Advocate', making reference to her statement about lowering the age of consent to 14 years old. This argument however does not hold any water, since Paglia has also gone on record to state that she sees nothing wrong with sexual contact between adults and children of "any age", and has explained at length why she holds that position. It is more than likely that she supports lowering the age of consent to 14 as part of a strategy of incremental social revolution.




This raises an obvious question: Why is Camille Paglia currently being promoted by self-described conservatives and classical liberals (or anyone at all, for that matter)? Not only are her and her books that defend pedophilia being promoted by these individuals, she is lauded as being some kind of underdog hero, as a defender of social stability, and even as a defender of Western civilization itself.

In reality, Camille Paglia wants to make it legal for adults to have sex with children, and for it to be legal for adults to distribute images and videos of themselves doing so, something which she sees as a righteous pagan rebuke of Christian civilization. She wants the freedom to celeberate and parade around the darkest sins of humanity as something that is honorable and beautiful, in an effort to wage a revolution against God Himself.