Characterized variously as the "bete noire" of feminism, a "controversialist", and a maverick, Paglia is known for her critical views of many aspects of modern culture, including feminism and liberalism. Paglia has challenged what she calls the "liberal establishment", including academia, feminist advocacy groups such as the National Organization for Women (NOW), and AIDS activists ACT UP.

In 2005, Paglia was named as one of the top 100 public intellectuals by the journals Foreign Policy and The Prospect.

Paglia was born in Endicott, New York, the elder daughter of Pasquale and Lydia Anne (Colapietro) Paglia. Both of her parents immigrated to the United States from Italy. Paglia attended primary school in rural Oxford, New York, where her family lived in a working farmhouse. Her father, a veteran of World War II, taught at the Oxford Academy high school. In 1957, her family moved to Syracuse, New York, so that her father could begin graduate school; he eventually became a professor of Romance languages at Le Moyne College. She attended the Edward Smith Elementary school, T. Aaron Levy Junior High and William Nottingham High School. In 1992, Carmelia Metosh, her Latin teacher for three years, said "She always has been controversial. Whatever statements were being made (in class), she had to challenge them. She made good points then, as she does now.". Paglia thanked Metosh in the acknowledgements to Sexual Personae, later describing her as "the dragon lady of Latin studies, who breathed fire at principals and school boards".

She attended Spruce Ridge Camp, a Girl Scout facility in the Adirondacks where, by her later account, she had crushes on the women counselors. She took a variety of names when she was there, including Anastasia (her confirmation name, inspired by the Ingrid Bergman film); Stacy; and Stanley. An iconic experience was the time the outhouse exploded when she poured too much lime into it. "It symbolized everything I would do with my life and work. Excess and extravagance and explosiveness. I would be someone who would look into the latrine of culture, into pornography and crime and psychopathology...and I would drop the bomb into it".

For over a decade, Paglia was partners with artist Alison Maddex. Paglia legally adopted Maddex's son (who was born in 2002). In 2009, the couple separated.

Paglia's poem "Atrophy" was published in her local newspaper in 1964, the same year she entered the Harpur College at Binghamton University, where she took courses in Metaphysical poetry and John Milton. She later wrote that the biggest impact on her thinking were the classes taught by poet Milton Kessler. "He believed in the responsiveness of the body, and of the activation of the senses to literature... And oh did I believe in that. graduating as class valedictorian in 1968.

According to Paglia, while in college she punched a "marauding drunk", and take pride in being put on probation for committing 39 pranks. She told an interviewer in 2003 that she follows the model of the "Hindu gurus, the aging masters and sage" because they're "actually very funny. They're funny, they're prankish. Zen masters are known to be prankish." She said, "To me, comedy is a symptom of a balanced perspective on life, and people who are going around, like gloomy gusses, in that Sontag style of intellectual, these people are suffering from something coming from their childhood, it has nothing to do with the proper intellectual response to life...".

Paglia attended Yale as a graduate student, and she claims to have been the only open lesbian at Yale Graduate School from 1968 to 1972.While at Yale, Paglia quarreled with Rita Mae Brown, whom she later characterised as "then darkly nihilist", and argued with the New Haven, Connecticut Women's Liberation Rock Band when they dismissed the Rolling Stones as sexist.

In 1971 Paglia received an M.Phil from Yale, a degree awarded when all coursework and examinations towards a Ph.D. have been completed but the dissertation has not yet been written and accepted, and began her dissertation under the supervision of her mentor Harold Bloom. It was then titled "The Androgynous Dream: the image of the androgyne as it appears in literature and is embodied in the psyche of the artist, with reference to the visual arts and the cinema."

In the fall 1972, Paglia began teaching at Bennington College, which hired her in part thanks to a recommendation from Harold Bloom. At Bennington, she befriended the philosopher James Fessenden, who first taught there that very semester. One of her students, Mitchell Lichtenstein became a prominent filmmaker, writing and directing Teeth in 2007, a movie that was inspired by the myth of the vagina dentata, and was heavily influenced by Paglia's work.

Yet another Bennington student from Paglia's time there was Judith Butler, who went on to a successful academic career. In a 2005 interview, Paglia said of Butler: "She was a student when I was at my first job at Bennington in the 70s, and I saw her up close. And I know what she knows. I mean, she transferred from there, to Yale, and her background in anything is absolutely minimal. She started a career in philosophy, abandoned that, and has been taken as this sort of major philosophical thinker by people in literary criticism. But has she ever made any exploration of science? For her to be dismissing biology, and to say gender is totally socially constructed — where are her readings, her studies? It's all gameplay, wordplay, and her work is utterly pernicious, a total dead-end."

Paglia's first scholarly publication was "Lord Hervey and Pope," published in the 1973 18th Century Studies. (A Times Literary Supplement cover story on Lord Hervey, November 2, praised the paper as "brilliant.").

Another intellectual disappointment for Paglia was Marija Gimbutas, who published The Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe in 1974. At the same time, Paglia launched "a detailed attack on an exhibit at Bennington's Crossett Library, 'Matriarchy: The Golden Age,' which used appallingly shoddy feminist materials alleging the existence of a peaceful, prehistoric matriarchy, later supposedly overthrown by nasty males."

Through her study of the classics and the scholarly work of Jane Ellen Harrison, James George Frazer, Erich Neumann and others, Paglia developed a theory of sexual history that contradicted a number of ideas in vogue at the time, hence her criticism of Gimbutas, Heilbrun, Millett and others. She laid out her ideas on matriarchy, androgyny, homosexuality, sadomasochism and other topics in her Yale Ph.D. thesis Sexual Personae: The Androgyne in Literature and Art, which she defended in December 1974. In September 1976, she gave a public lecture drawing on that dissertation, in which she discussed Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene, followed by remarks on Diana Ross, Gracie Allen, Yul Brynner, and Stephane Audran.

In another disheartening experience, Paglia "nearly came to blows with the founding members of the women's studies program at the State University of New York at Albany, when they categorically denied that hormones influence human experience or behavior. These women (whose field was literature) attributed my respect for science to 'brainwashing' by men." Similar fights with feminists, lesbians, chauvinists, homophobes and academics culminated in a 1978 incident that led her to resign from Bennington a year later.

Paglia finished Sexual Personae in the early 1980s, but could not get it published. She supported herself with visiting and part-time teaching jobs at Yale, Wesleyan, and other Connecticut colleges. She taught night classes at the Sikorsky Helicopter plant. Her paper, "The Apollonian Androgyne and the Faerie Queen," was published in English Literary Renaissance, Winter 1979, and her dissertation was cited by J. Hillis Miller in his April 1980 article "Wuthering Heights and the Ellipses of Interpretation," in Journal of Religion in Literature, but her academic career was otherwise stalled at a time when her peers were moving on to important positions at major universities. In a 1995 letter to Boyd Holmes, she recalled: "I earned a little extra money by doing some local features reporting for a New Haven alternative newspaper (The Advocate) in the early 1980s." She wrote articles on New Haven's historic pizzerias and on an old house that was a stop on the Underground Railroad."

In 1984, she joined the faculty of the Philadelphia College of Performing Arts, which merged in 1987 with the Philadelphia College of Art to become the University of the Arts.

Paglia wrote a column for Salon.com from its inception in 1995 until 2001. Paglia rejoined Salon in February 2007. She is a contributing editor at Interview magazine and is on the editorial board of the classics and humanities journal Arion.

Paglia is a noted critic of feminism characterizing it as a debilitating ideology. She has often criticized leaders of the American feminist movement, comparing feminists to cults such as the Unification Church. She has been characterized as an "anti-feminist feminist". Susan Sontag said of Paglia, "We used to think Norman Mailer was bad, but she makes Norman Mailer look like Jane Austen."

After the publication of Sexual Personae, Gloria Steinham declared that "[Paglia] calling herself a feminist is sort of like a Nazi saying they're not anti-Semitic. In response, Paglia called Steinem "evil" and compared her to Stalin. Paglia has also claimed that Gloria Steinem compared Sexual Personae to Mein Kampf without having read the former, and likened Paglia to Adolf Hitler.

In an interview in Playboy, when asked about Paglia, Betty Friedan responded "How can you take her seriously? She is an exhibitionist, and she takes the most extreme elements of the women's movement and tries to make the whole movement antisexual, antilife, antijoy. And neither I nor most of the women I know are that way."

Naomi Wolf traded a series of sometimes personal attacks with Paglia throughout the early 1990s. In The New Republic, Wolf labeled Paglia, "the nipple-pierced person's Phyllis Schlafly who poses as a sexual renegade but is in fact the most dutiful of patriarchal daughters" and characterized Paglia's writing as "full of howling intellectual dishonesty."

When asked about Paglia in an interview, Katha Pollitt said that the media tend to present feminism as a "cat fight" between two camps, one represented by Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon, and the other by Andrea Dworkin and Paglia, but that both sides view sex as inherently linked to sadomasochism, and do not subscribe to the notion that sex can represent a variety of emotions. Pollit continues to characterizes this kind of "debate thinking" as "grim and hateful" and questions whether anyone would bother with sex if that view were correct. Pollitt also accuses Paglia of "glorify[ing] male dominance", writing that Paglia's characterized the Spur Posse as "beautiful".

Considering Kate Millet, whose dissertation became the 1970 best seller Sexual Politics (a title which Paglia mirrors in her own work, Sexual Personae), Paglia claims that Millett began "the repressive, Stalinist style in feminist criticism".

Paglia has repeatedly criticized Patricia Ireland, former president of the National Organization for Women, calling her a "sanctimonious," unappealing role model for women whose "smug, arrogant" attitude is accompanied by "painfully limited processes of thought." Paglia contends that under Ireland's leadership, NOW "damaged and marginalized the women's movement."

Paglia has called feminist philosopher Martha Nussbaum a "PC diva," and accused her of borrowing her ideas without acknowledgement. She further contends that Nussbaum's "preparation or instinct for sex analysis is dubious at best."

In March 1975, she saw Germaine Greer speak in Albany. She was disappointed, reporting later that "During the question period, I nervously raised my hand from the crowd and asked if Greer, a former English professor, would be writing on literary subjects again soon. Her reply was stern and swift: 'There are far more important things in the world than literature!'" Paglia later criticized Greer for becoming a "drone" after only three years of success.

Paglia is critical of the influence modern French writers have had on the humanities, claiming that universities are in the "thrall" of Post-modernists, and claiming that in the works of Jean Baudrillard, Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan and Michel Foucault, she never once found a sentence that interested her and that Post-structuralism has broken the link between the word and the thing, and thus endangers the western canon. However, Paglia's assessment of French writers is not purely negative. Paglia has called Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex "brilliant" and "the only thing undergraduate sex study needs", and identified Jean-Paul Sartre's work as part of a high period in literature. Paglia has made positive comments about Roland Barthes's Mythologies and Gilles Deleuze's Masochism: Coldness and Cruelty, while finding both men's later work flawed. Of Gaston Bachelard, who influenced Paglia, she wrote "[his] dignified yet fluid phenomenological descriptive method seemed to me ideal for art", adding that he was "the last modern French writer I took seriously."

Critics have characterized some of her views as conservative, but Paglia characterizes herself as a Clinton Democrat and Libertarian. She opposes laws against prostitution, pornography, drugs, and abortion. Paglia campaigned for John F. Kennedy as an adolescent and later voted for Bill Clinton. She criticized Clinton for not resigning after the Monica Lewinsky scandal, which she says led to America being "blindsided by 9/11". In the 2000 US presidential campaign she voted for the Green Party candidate Ralph Nader, "[because] I detest the arrogant, corrupt superstructure of the Democratic Party, with which I remain stubbornly registered". In the 2008 U.S. presidential election, Paglia supported Barack Obama.

Sexual Personae

In Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990) Paglia asserts that human nature has an inherently dangerous Dionysian aspect, especially in regard to human sexuality. Culture and civilization are created by men and represent an attempt to contain that force. Women are powerful, too, but as natural forces, and both marriage and religion are means to contain chaotic forces. A best seller, the book's neoconservative message was well received by many, but rejected by many feminists. In a review of Sexual Personae, Feminist author Molly Ivins accused Paglia of historical inaccuracy, demagoguery of second-wave feminists, egocentrism, and writing in sweeping generalizations. Ivins concluded her review with this passage: "There is one area in which I think Paglia and I would agree that politically correct feminism has produced a noticeable inequity. Nowadays, when a woman behaves in a hysterical and disagreeable fashion, we say, 'Poor dear, it's probably PMS.' Whereas, if a man behaves in a hysterical and disagreeable fashion, we say, 'What an asshole.' Let me leap to correct this unfairness by saying of Paglia, Sheesh, what an asshole."

Break, Blow, Burn

Break, Blow, Burn: Camille Paglia Reads Forty-three of the World's Best Poems (2005) is a collection of 43 short selections of verse with an accompanying essay by Paglia. The collection is primarily oriented to those unfamiliar with the works, but does not pander to the new reader. Clive Jones notes 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. In his review, Christopher Nield remarks that Paglia has "a rare gift to capture a poem’s mood and scene in terse, spiky phrases of descriptive insight" and exhibits moments of brilliance, but also notes that some of her selections from recent writers fall flat. He also praises her pedagogical slant towards basic interpretation, suggesting that her approach might be what is required to reinvigorate studies in the humanities.

Sex, Art and Political Culture

Sex, Art and American Culture: Essays (1992) is a collection of short pieces, many published previously as editorials or reviews, and some transcripts of interviews. It made the New York Times bestseller list for paperbacks.

Paglia has announced that she is currently working on "a study of the visual arts intended as a companion book to Break, Blow, Burn"