Paglia would later tell an interviewer for
Playboy: "I was silent as a child. But it's true that my father was very opinionated, and he trained me in my earliest years to be an individual thinker. Italian culture is like Chinese culture. There is respect for elders. You never raise your voice to elders. There are no explosions. My father was totally in control."
Among Paglia's earliest memories, dating to the age of two and a half, is an episode of rage she experienced when she was not allowed to attend a film because she could not yet read. Rage is an emotion that would serve her well many years later when she became one of America's leading social critics.
Within a few years of the film brouhaha, Paglia had become something of a tomboy, frequently getting into scuffles with her male cohorts. It must have come as a relief to her father when she finally became interested in ancient Egypt. But by then she was just as much a devotee of Hollywood popular culture as of antiquity. Paglia recalled a lecture she received from her father regarding 18th-century Swiss writer Voltaire's poor opinion of actors that came just about the time she started collecting pictures of actress Elizabeth Taylor.
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