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Camille Paglia ’74PhD

By the staff | 10:12am October 10 2008

The reaction of most left-leaning critics and commentators to the choice of Sarah Palin as John McCain’s running mate has been uniform and predictable. Perhaps just as predictably, Camille Paglia ’74PhD begs to differ. Paglia, best known for her 1990 book Sexual Personae, is a confirmed Obama supporter, but her recent columns about Palin in the online magazine Salon have been the talk of the blogosphere. In her October 8 column, she praised Palin as an “Amazon warrior” and said she admires her “competitive spirit and her exuberant vitality, which borders on the supernormal.”

Paglia also predicted that “even if she disappears from the scene forever after a McCain defeat, Palin will still have made an enormous and lasting contribution to feminism. As I said in my last column, Palin has made the biggest step forward in reshaping the persona of female authority since Madonna danced her dominatrix way through the shattered puritan barricades of the feminist establishment.”

Paglia forgot to mention that the record label founded by Madonna in 1992 was called Maverick Records. Coincidence?

Filed under alumnae, Graduate School, feminism
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