Feminists have no idea that some women like to flirt with danger because there is a sizzle in it. You know what gets me sick and tired? The battered-woman motif. It’s so misrepresented, the way we have to constantly look at it in terms of male oppression and tyranny, and female victimization. When, in fact, everyone knows throughout the history of the world that many of these working-class relationships where women get beat up have hot sex. They ask why won’t she leave him? Maybe she won’t leave him because the sex is very hot. I say we should start looking at the battered-wife motif in terms of sex. If gay men go down to bars and like to get tied up, beaten up, and have their asses whipped, how come we can’t allow that a lot of wives like the kind of sex they are getting in these battered wife relationships? We can’t consider that women have kinky tastes, can we? No, because women are naturally benevolent and nurturing, aren’t they? Everything is so damn Mary Poppins and sanitized." - Meaning and context.">
p. 65
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Feminists have no idea that some women like to flirt with danger because there is a sizzle in it. You know what gets me sick and tired? The battered-woman motif. It’s so misrepresented, the way we have to constantly look at it in terms of male oppression and tyranny, and female victimization. When, in fact, everyone knows throughout the history of the world that many of these working-class relationships where women get beat up have hot sex. They ask why won’t she leave him? Maybe she won’t leave him because the sex is very hot. I say we should start looking at the battered-wife motif in terms of sex. If gay men go down to bars and like to get tied up, beaten up, and have their asses whipped, how come we can’t allow that a lot of wives like the kind of sex they are getting in these battered wife relationships? We can’t consider that women have kinky tastes, can we? No, because women are naturally benevolent and nurturing, aren’t they? Everything is so damn Mary Poppins and sanitized.

— Camille Paglia

What It Means

This is a placeholder explanation generated by the low-overhead model. It interprets "Feminists have no idea that some women like to flirt with danger because there is a sizzle in it. You know what gets me sick and tired? The battered-woman motif. It’s so misrepresented, the way we have to constantly look at it in terms of male oppression and tyranny, and female victimization. When, in fact, everyone knows throughout the history of the world that many of these working-class relationships where women get beat up have hot sex. They ask why won’t she leave him? Maybe she won’t leave him because the sex is very hot. I say we should start looking at the battered-wife motif in terms of sex. If gay men go down to bars and like to get tied up, beaten up, and have their asses whipped, how come we can’t allow that a lot of wives like the kind of sex they are getting in these battered wife relationships? We can’t consider that women have kinky tastes, can we? No, because women are naturally benevolent and nurturing, aren’t they? Everything is so damn Mary Poppins and sanitized." in the context of "p. 65" to mean that wisdom is timeless.

Quote Image
Source: Wikiquote: "Camille Paglia" (Quotes, Sex, Art and American Culture : New Essays (1992): , The Rape Debate, Continued) The 'What it means' explanation text was generated by Google Gemini Flash (accessed January 18, 2026). https://gemini.google.com/app
Camille Paglia

About Camille Paglia

Camille Paglia (born 2 April 1947) is an American author, scholar, feminist and critic, best known for writing Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson, a survey of Western art and literature from earliest recorded history to the 20th Century.