Venus of Willendorf carries her cave with her. She is blind, masked. Her ropes of corn-row hair look forward to the invention agriculture. She has a furrowed brow. Her facelessness is the impersonality of primitive sex and religion. There is no psychology or identity yet, because there is no society, no cohesion. Men cower and scatter at the blast of the elements. Venus of Willendorf is eyeless because nature can be seen but not known. She is remote even as she kills and creates. The statuette, so overflowing and protuberant, is ritually invisible. She stifles the eye. She is the cloud of archaic night.

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For over a decade Paglia was the partner of artist Alison Maddex. Clive James noted that Paglia tends to focus on American works as it moves from Shakespeare forward through time with Yeats following Coleridge as the last European discussed but emphasized her range of sympathy and her ability to juxtapose and unite distinct art forms in her analysis.

She is known as a critic of American feminism and is also strongly critical of the influence of French writers such as Jacques Lacan Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault. Paglia has celebrated Madonna and taken radical libertarian positions on controversial social issues such as abortion homosexuality and drug use. She wrote Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990) a best-selling work of literary criticism among other books and essays.