Bullet Quotes from “Rigid Scholarship”
Rigid Scholarship on Male Sexuality - Chronicle.com is a kind of three-way book report from Camille Paglia who I guess has been actively writing things in the ten or whatever years since I last even wondered what she was up to. But wait! it’s a book report about scholarly books about male sexuality. Well, I’m not even really going to allow that the book report concerns male sexuality and here’s why: Paglia mainly focuses on ejaculation:
- “It has been called sperm, semen, ejaculate, seed, man fluid, baby gravy, jizz, cum, pearl necklace, gentleman’s relish, wad, pimp juice, number 3, load, spew, donut glaze, spunk, gizzum, cream, hot man mustard, squirt, goo, spunk, splooge, love juice, man cream, and la leche.”
- A scientist of the 1930s cataloged “50 variations in sperm morphology with names such as micro-sperm, megalo-sperm, puff-ball, and double neck.”
- hilarious illustrations of a “romantic and irresistible sperm” sporting a top hat and gift rose
- murky waters of infinite subjectivity
- Leonardo is reductively discussed in terms of penises:
- McLaren kneads Greece and Rome together like one big honey cake.
- In the 1950s, virility was heralded as the way “to beat back the perversions of communism and homosexuality”
Of course it’s not fair, what I said about focusing on the jizz. The third book in the report is about impotence, I just wasn’t able to pay attention that long. Here’s a pull-quote from that part and you’ll see what I mean: “missing the fertility symbolism in the ithyphallic Athenian herms, for example, which were apotropaic vestiges of the agrarian past (rather than a sexist parading of male power)”
