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All Great Stars Are Competitive. That's A Sign Of A True Artist - If You Don't Have The Fire Of Competition Deep Down Inside, You're Never Going To Achieve Anything. You Have To Want To Be King Of The Heap.

-Camille Paglia

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All Great Stars Are

Camille Paglia

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All Great Stars Are Competitive. That's A Sign Of A True Artist - If You Don't Have The Fire Of Competition Deep Down Inside, You're Never Going To Achieve Anything. You Have To Want To Be King Of The Heap.

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If You Read Only The New York Times- I Said, 'oh My God!' The Readers Of The New York Times Are Heading For A Major, Major Breakdown Shock If Trump Is In Fact Elected.

Despite Crime's Omnipresence, Things Work In Society, Because Biology Compels It. Order Eventually Restores Itself, By Psychic Equilibrium.

I Believe That History Has Shape, Order, And Meaning; That Exceptional Men, As Much As Economic Forces, Produce Change; And That Passe Abstractions Like Beauty, Nobility, And Greatness Have A Shifting But Continuing Validity.

Butterfield 8, With Its Call-girl Heroine Working Her Way Down The Alphabet Of Men From Amherst To Yale, Appeared At A Very Formative Moment In My Adolescence And Impressed Me Forever With The Persona Of The Prostitute, Whom I Continue To Revere. The Prostitute Is Not, As Feminists Claim, The Victim Of Men, But Rather Their Conqueror, An Outlaw, Who Controls The Sexual Channels Between Nature And Culture.

American Feminism's Nose Dive Began When Kate Millet, That Imploding Beanbag Of Poisonous Self-pity, Declared Freud A Sexist. Trying To Build A Sex Theory Without Studying Freud, Women Have Made Nothing But Mud Pies.

Everyone Of My Generation Who Preached Free Love Is Responsible For Aids.

There Is No Gay Leader Anywhere Near The Stature Of Martin Luther King, Because Black Activism Drew On The Profound Spiritual Tradition Of The Church, To Which Gay Political Rhetoric Is Childishly Hostile.

There Are No Accidents, Only Nature Throwing Her Weight Around. Even The Bomb Merely Releases Energy That Nature Has Put There. Nuclear War Would Be Just A Spark In The Grandeur Of Space. Nor Can Radiation Alter Nature: She Will Absorb It All. After The Bomb, Nature Will Pick Up The Cards We Have Spilled, Shuffle Them, And Begin Her Game Again.

A War Still Rages Over The Legacy Of The 1960s.

The Damage Done To U.s. Prestige By The Feckless, Buffoonish George W. Bush Will Take Years To Repair.

In Negotiating With Rejected Lovers Or Husbands, Women Must Stop Thinking They Can Make Everyone Happy. In Many Cases Of Harassment And Stalking, It Is Clear That The Woman Never Learned How To Terminate The Fantasy Which Requires Resolution And Decisiveness On Their Part. Wavering, Dithering, Or Passive Hysterical Fear Will Only Intensify Or Prolong Pursuit.

The Bible Has Come Under Fire For Making Woman The Fall Guy In Man's Cosmic Drama. But In Casting A Male Conspirator, The Serpent, As God's Enemy, Genesis Hedges And Does Not Take Its Misogyny Far Enough. The Bible Defensively Swerves From God's True Opponent, Chthonian Nature. The Serpent Is Not Outside Eve But In Her. She Is The Garden And The Serpent.

There Are No Female Geniuses Because There Are No Female Jack-the-rippers.

Masculinity Is Risky And Elusive. It Is Achieved By A Revolt From Woman, And It Is Confirmed Only By Other Men. Manhood Coerced Into Sensitivity Is No Manhood At All.

The Moment Is Ripe For An Experienced Businessman To Talk Practical, Prudent Economics To The Electorate - Which Is Why Mitt Romney's Political Fortunes Are Steadily Being Resurrected From The Grave.

Out With Stereotypes, Feminism Proclaims. But Stereotypes Are The West's Stunning Sexual Personae, The Vehicles Of Art's Assault Against Nature. The Moment There Is Imagination, There Is Myth.

Anti-religious Sneers Are A Hallmark Of Perpetual Adolescents.

At The Opening Of The Odyssey, Telemachus, Inspired By The Male-born Athena, Searches For His Father By Turning Against His Mother. Jesus Too Publicly Spurns His Mother To Be About His Father's Business. Male Adulthood Begins With The Breaking Of Female Chains.

Great Women Scholars Like Jane Harrison And Gisela Richter Were Produced By The Intellectual Discipline Of The Masculine Classical Tradition, Not The Wishy-washy Sentimentalism Of Clingy, All-forgiving Sisterhood, From Which No First-rate Book Has Yet Emerged. Every Year, Feminists Provide More And More Evidence For The Old Charge That Women Can Neither Think Nor Write.

Lately, I've Been Doing A Lot Of Tuning In And Impatiently Tuning Out. As A Longtime Fan Of Talk Radio, I Don't Think This Bodes Well For The Long-term Broad Appeal Of The Medium.

It's Time For A Recovery And Reassessment Of North American Thinkers. Marshall Mcluhan, Leslie Fiedler And Norman O. Brown Are The Linked Triad I Would Substitute For Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida And Michel Foucault, Whose Work Belongs To Ravaged Postwar Europe And Whose Ideas Transfer Poorly Into The Anglo-american Tradition.

The Male Orientation Of Classical Athens Was Inseparable From Its Genius. Athens Became Great Not Despite But Because Of Its Misogyny.

Sex Is Power. Identity Is Power. In Western Culture, There Are No Nonexploitative Relationships. Everyone Has Killed In Order To Live.

Is There Intellectual Life In America? At Present, The Answer Is No.

Television Is Actually Closer To Reality Than Anything In Books. The Madness Of Tv Is The Madness Of Human Life.

Every Revolution Eventually Needs A New Revolution.

I Am A Registered Democrat Who Is Determined To Return My Party To The Proletarian Principles Of The Franklin D. Roosevelt Era.

It Was In Reading Tristam Shandy That I Noticed How It Is Primarily Men Who Gravitate Towards The Game-playing Self-reflexive Style. There Is An Alienation From Emotion In It, A Nervous Nelly Fear Of Letting Go And Being "exposed." As An Attitude Towards Life, It Betrays A Perpetual Adolescence. Those Who Hurled Themselves After Derrida Were Not The Most Sophisticated But The Most Pretentious, And Least Creative Members Of My Generation Of Academics.

The Visual Is Sorely Undervalued In Modern Scholarship. Art History Has Attained Only A Fraction Of The Conceptual Sophistication Of Literary Criticism. Drunk With Self-love, Criticism Has Hugely Overestimated The Centrality Of Language To Western Culture. It Has Failed To See The Electrifying Sign Language Of Images.

Teaching Is A Performance Art.

Prostitution Is Not Just A Service Industry, Mopping Up The Overflow Of Male Demand, Which Always Exceeds Female Supply. Prostitution Testifies To The Amoral Power Struggle Of Sex, Which Religion Has Never Been Able To Stop. Prostitutes, Pornographers, And Their Patrons Are Marauders In The Forest Of Archaic Night.

Woman Is The Dominant Sex. Men Have To Do All Sorts Of Stuff To Prove That They Are Worthy Of Woman's Attention.

Woman's Sexuality Is Disruptive Of The Dully Mechanical Workaday World, In Which Efficiency Means Uniformity. The Problems Of Woman's Entrance Into The Career System Spring From More Than Male Chauvinism. She Brings Nature Into The Social Realm, Which May Be Too Small To Contain It.

Western Man Represents Himself, On The Political Or Psychological Stage, In A Spectacular World-theater. Our Personality Is Innately Cinematic, Light-charged Projections Flickering On The Screen Of Western Consciousness.

Sotomayor's Vainglorious Lecture Bromide About Herself As 'a Wise Latina' Trumping White Men Is A Vulgar Embarrassment - A Vestige Of The Bad Old Days Of Male-bashing Feminism.

The Last Western Society To Worship Female Powers Was Minoan Crete. And Significantly, That Fell And Did Not Rise Again.

Hollywood, America's Greatest Modern Contribution To World Culture, Is A Business, A Religion, An Art Form, And A State Of Mind.

We Must Accept Our Pain Change What We Can And Laugh At The Rest

In 1974 I Nearly Got Into A Fistfight With Some Early Academic Feminists In A Restaurant When I Casually Alluded To A Hormonal Element In Sex Differences. It Was Utterly Unacceptable At That Time To Think Or Say Such A Thing... If You Have Any Doubts About The Effect Of Hormones On Emotion, Libido And Aggression, Have A Chat With A Transexual, Who Must Take Hormones Medically. He Or She Will Set You Straight.

Modern Bodybuilding Is Ritual, Religion, Sport, Art, And Science, Awash In Western Chemistry And Mathematics. Defying Nature, It Surpasses It.

There Is No Female Mozart Because There Is No Female Jack The Ripper.

Nature Herself Is A Mass Murderer, Making Casual, Cruel Experiments And Condemning 10,000 To Die So That One More Fit Will Live And Thrive.

When I Was A Child, My Father Taught Me To Put Up My Fists Like A Boy And To Be Prepared To Defend Myself At All Times.

I Guess I'm Just A Natural Warrior.

The Only Thing That Will Be Remembered About My Enemies After They're Dead Is The Nasty Things I've Said About Them.

Nefertiti Is Like Athena Born From The Brow Of Zeus, A Head-heavy Armored Goddess. She Is Beautiful But Desexed.

There You Have It: An Expensive Higher Education Based On Sloganeering, On Pat, Trite Phrases That Substitute Moral Posturing For Political Reasoning. It's Elitism Masquerading As Egalitarianism.

Lacan , Derrida And Foucault Are The Perfect Prophets For The Weak, Anxious Academic Personality, Trapped In Verbal Formulas And Perennially Defeated By Circumstances. They Offer A Self-exculpating Cosmic Explanation For The Normal Professorial State Of Resentment, Alienation, Dithering Passivity And Inaction.

Men, Gay Or Straight, Can Get Beauty And Lewdness Into One Image. Women Are Forever Softening, Censoring, Politicizing. ?

I Regard Affirmative Action As Pernicious - A System That Had Wonderful Ideals When It Started But Was Almost Immediately Abused For The Benefit Of White Middle-class Women.

The 1990s, After The Reign Of Terror Of Academic Vandalism, Will Be A Decade Of Restoration: Restoration Of Meaning, Value, Beauty, Pleasure, And Emotion To Art And Restoration Of Art To Its Audience.

Gay Men May Seek Sex Without Emotion; Lesbians Often End Up In Emotion Without Sex.

I'm A Professor Of Media Studies As Well As Humanities, And I'm An Evangelist Of Popular Culture, But When There's Only Media, Then There's Going To Be A Slow Debasement Of Language, And That's What I Think We're Fighting.

I Believe That The Shocking Toll Of Aids On Gay Men In The West Was Partly Due To Their Seventies Delusions That A World Without Women Was Possible. All-male Energies, Unbalanced And Ravenous, Literally Tore The Body Apart.

Capitalism, Gaudy And Greedy, Has Been Inherent In Western Aesthetics From Ancient Egypt On. It Is The Mysticism And Glamour Of Things , Which Take On A Personality Of Their Own. As An Economic System, It Is In The Darwinian Line Of Sade, Not Rousseau.

If Obama Fails To Win Reelection, Let The Blame Be First Laid At The Door Of Speaker Of The House Nancy Pelosi, Who At A Pivotal Point Threw Gasoline On The Flames By Comparing Angry American Citizens To Nazis.

Because I'm Criticizing Liberalism, People Automatically Call Me A Conservative. This Is Madness! The Idea That Somehow One Cannot Critique Liberalism From The Left, From The Left Wing Of Liberalism. I Mean, How Can People Be So Stupid?

If Civilization Had Been Left In Female Hands We Would Still Be Living In Grass Huts.

Men Knew That If They Devirginized A Woman, They Could End Up Dead Within Twenty-four Hours. These Controls Have Been Removed.

The Born-yesterday French-besotted Faddists, Addicted Sniffers Of Wet Printer's Ink, Think They're Starting On The Ground Floor; So They're Condemned To Another Hundred Years Of Trial And Error. The Rest Of Us Can Safely Ignore Them.

I Admire Hard-bitten, Wisecracking Realism Of Ida Lupino And The Film Noir Heroines. I'm Sick Of Simpering White Girls With Their Princess Fantasies.

You Have To Accept The Fact That Part Of The Sizzle Of Sex Comes From The Danger Of Sex. You Can Be Overpowered.

Liberalism Defines Government As Tyrant Father But Demands It Behave As Nurturant Mother.

I Respect The Astute And Rigorously Unsentimental David Horowitz As One Of America's Most Original And Courageous Political Analysts. He Has The True 1960s Spirit - Audacious And Irreverent, Yet Passionately Engaged And Committed To Social Change.

Elegance Is Reduction, Simplification, Condensation. It Is Spare, Stark, Sleek. Elegance Is Cultivated Abstraction. The Source Of Greek And Roman Classicism - Clarity, Order, Proportion, Balance - Is In Egypt.

Academic Marxists, With Their Elitist Sense Of Superiority To Popular Taste, Are The Biggest Snobs In America.

I Want To Fall On The Floor Laughing - Imagining Hillary Clinton Working Well In The Senate With Everybody Else! Oh, Give Me A Break. I've Already Joked In Print That They Would Need To Build Her A Private Cloakroom On The Mall. This Is Not A Woman Who Has Any Ability To Deal With The Mass Of Humanity. She Is The Most Arrogant, The Most Moralistic, The Most Sermonizing And Annoying Person On Earth.

Madonna Remains The Most Visible Performer On The Planet, As Well As One Of The Wealthiest, But Would Anyone Seriously Say That Artistic Self-development Is Her Primary Motivating Principle? She Is Too Busy With Kabbalah, Fashion Merchandising, Adoption Melodramas, The Gym, And Ill-starred Horseback Riding To Study Art.

Male Urination Really Is A Kind Of Accomplishment, An Arc Of Transcendance. A Woman Merely Waters The Ground She Stands On.

A Lesser Complaint: Hair Extensions. There Are Moments On 'all My Children' When Half The Women Actors, Young And Old, Seem To Be Afflicted By Android Barbie Creep. All Those Thick Swatches Of Lifeless Strands Clustering Lankly Round Ladies' Necks! Like Orange Tanning Spray, This Is A Fashion Fad That Should Be Put Out Of Its Misery.

Simply Follow Nature, Rousseau Declares. Sade, Laughing Grimly, Agrees.

[t]he Most Viciously Intolerant Campus I Ever Visited As A Lecturer Was Brown, Where The Humanities Program Has Been Gutted By A Jejune Brand Of Feminist Theory And Cultural And Media Studies.

[on Hollywood:] America's Greatest Achievement.

All The Genres Of Philosophy, Science, High Art, Athletics And Politics Were Invented By Men. But By The Promethean Law Of Conflict And Capture, Woman Has A Right To Seize What She Will And Vie With Man On Her Own Terms.

The So-called Miracle Of Birth Is Nature Getting Her Own Way.

Sex At Age 90 Is Like Trying To Shoot Pool With A Rope.

Beware Of The Manipulativeness Of Rich Students Who Were Neglected By Their Parents. They Love To Turn The Campus Into Hysterical Psychodramas Of Sexual Transgression, Followed By Assertions Of Parental Authority And Concern. And Don't Look For Sexual Enlightenment From Academe, Which Spews Out Mountains Of Books But Never Looks At Life Directly.

When Anything Goes, It's Women Who Lose.

My Anti-liberal Position Should Not Be Mistaken For Conservatism.

The Gothic Tradition Was Begun By Ann Radcliffe, A Rare Example Of A Woman Creating An Artistic Style.

Academic Marxism Is A Fantasy World, And Unctuous Compassion-sweepstakes, Into Which Real Workers Or Peasants Never Penetrate.

Effeminate Men Have Suffered A Bad Press The World Over.

America Is Still A Frontier Country Of Wide Open Spaces. Our Closeness To Nature Is One Reason Why Our Problem Is Not Repression But Regression; Our Notorious Violence Is The Constant Eruption Of Primi-tiveness, Of Anarchic Individualism.

My Argument Has Always Been That Nature Has A Master Plan Pushing Every Species Toward Procreation And That It Is Our Right And Even Obligation As Rational Human Beings To Defy Nature's Fascism. Nature Herself Is A Mass Murderer, Making Casual, Cruel Experiments And Condemning 10,000 To Die So That One More Fit Will Live And Thrive.

Perhaps There Is No Greater Issue Facing Contemporary Women Than The Choices They Must Make About Balancing Home And Work.

There's Something Retro About Your Persona. It's Like The Pre-world War Ii Generation Of Reporters - Those Unpretentious, Working-class Guys Who Hung Around Saloons And Used Rough Language. Now They've All Been Replaced With These Effete Ivy League Elitists Who Swarm Over The Current Media. Nerds - Utterly Dull And Insipid.

The Only Antidote To The Magic Of Images Is The Magic Of Words.

Greek Pederasty Honored The Erotic Magnetism Of Male Adolescence In A Way That Today Brings Police To The Door. Children Are More Conscious And Perverse Than Parents Like To Think.

We Live In A Period Of Declining Stars. Few Celebrities These Days (aside From The Smoldering Angelina Jolie) Seem To Have Complex Psychic Lives.

I Realize Now How Lucky I Was, In The Total Absence Of Role Models, To Have Only Men To Rebel Against. Today's Women Students Are Meeting Their Oppressors In Dangerously Seductive New Form, As Successful Congenial Female Professors Who View Themselves As Victims Of A Rigid Foreign Ideology.

Education Has Become A Prisoner Of Contemporaneity. It Is The Past, Not The Dizzy Present, That Is The Best Door To The Future.

Madonna Can Still Produce A Catchy Pop Song, But She Hasn't Expanded Her Artistic Vocabulary Since The 1990s. Her Concerts Are Glitzy Extravaganzas Of Special Effects Overkill. She Leaves Little Space In Them For Emotional Depth Or Unscripted Rapport With The Audience.

Feminism Has Tried To Dismiss The Femme Fatale As A Misogynist Libel, A Hoary Cliche. But The Femme Fatale Expresses Woman's Ancient And Eternal Control Of The Sexual Realm. The Specter Of The Femme Fatale Stalks All Of Men's Relationships With Women.

Nothing Is More Hackneyed Than The Liberal Dogma That Shock Value Confers Automatic Importance On An Artwork.

I See Far Stronger And More Charismatic Personalities Strolling Around Philadelphia's Neighborhoods Than Are Being Featured In Most Of Today's Bland Daytime Soaps.

Anyone Who Gets His Or Her Political News Primarily From The New York Times (which Made The Ethically Challenged Carpetbagger Hillary A Senator) Is A Fool.

We Remain In The Romantic Cycle Initiated By Rousseau: Liberal Idealism Canceled By Violence, Barbarism, Disillusionment And Cynicism.

Gay Men Are Guardians Of The Masculine Impulse. To Have Anonymous Sex In A Dark Alleyway Is To Pay Homage To The Dream Of Male Freedom. The Unknown Stranger Is A Wandering Pagan God. The Altar, As In Pre-history, Is Anywhere You Kneel.

[w]earisome As It May Seem, Women Must Realize That, In Making A Commitment To A Man, They Have Merged In His Unconscious With His Mother And Have Therefore Inherited The Ambivalence Of That Relationship.

Many, Perhaps Most, Very Learned People Prefer The Company Of Their Books To Sitting In A Crowd Listening To History And Art Being Mangled; Furthermore, It Is Unlikely That The Venerable Scholars Will Stand Up Afterward To Declare, "this Lecture Was A Load Of Crap." The More Profound A Professor's Distaste With The Proceedings, The More Likely He Is To Melt Away At The End Of The Talk.

Repression Is An Evolutionary Adaptation Permitting Us To Function Under The Burden Of Our Expanded Consciousness. For What We Are Conscious Of Could Drive Us Mad.

Human Life Began In Flight And Fear. Religion Rose From Rituals Of Propitiation, Spells To Lull The Punishing Elements.

Society Is An Artificial Construction, A Defense Against Nature's Power.

Pregnancy Demonstrates The Deterministic Character Of Woman's Sexuality.

Most People Aren't Sure What's Going To Happen On A First Date. Given That Ambiguity, Every Woman Must Be Totally Aware At Every Moment That She Is Responsible For Every Choice She Makes... Protect Yourselves. See Trouble Coming.

Sappho Is A Great Poet Because She Is A Lesbian, Which Gives Her Erotic Access To The Muse. Sappho And The Homosexual-tending Emily Dickinson Stand Alone Above Women Poets, Because Poetry's Mystical Energies Are Ruled By A Hierach Requiring The Sexual Subordination Of Her Petitioners. Women Have Achieved More As Novelists Than As Poets Because The Social Novel Operates Outside The Ancient Marriage Of Myth And Eroticism.

What I See Is Not A World Of Male Oppression And Female Victimization, But An Internation Conspiracy By Women To Keep From Men The Knowledge Of Men's Own Frailty. A Strange Maternal Protectiveness Is At Work.

Daytime Soap Operas, Which I Used To Adore, Have Been Declining In Quality And Importance For Over A Decade, And I Gradually Stopped Monitoring Them.

In Insisting, For Political Purposes, On A Sharp Division Between Gay And Straight, Gay Activism, Like Much Of Feminism, Has Become As Rigid And Repressive As The Old Order It Sought To Replace.

The Western Mind Makes Definitions; It Draws Lines.

There Is Such A Thing As Seduction, And It Needs Encouragement Rather Than Discouragement In Our Puritanical Anglo-american World.

Our Major Universities Are Now Stuck With An Army Of Pedestrian, Toadying Careerists, Fifties Types Who Wave Around Sixties Banners To Conceal Their Record Of Ruthless, Beaver-like Tunneling To The Top.

If You Live In Rock And Roll, As I Do, You See The Reality Of Sex, Of Male Lust And Women Being Aroused By Male Lust. It Attracts Women. It Doesn't Repel Them.

Now That Virtually Every Career Is An Option For Ambitious Girls, It Can No Longer Be Considered Regressive Or Reactionary To Reintroduce Discussion Of Marriage And Motherhood To Primary Education. We Certainly Do Not Want To Return To The Simplistic Duality Of Home Economics Classes For Girls And Wood Shop For Boys.

Manhood Coerced Into Sensitivity Is No Manhood At All.

Your Life Is A Fellini Film, Lacking Only Anita Ekberg With A Cat On Her Head.

Women Are Not In Control Of Their Bodies; Nature Is. Ancient Mythology, With Its Sinister Archetypes Of Vampire And Gorgon, Is More Accurate Than Feminism About The Power And Terror Of Female Sexuality.

Our Feminist Culture At The Present Moment Is Completely Dependent On Capitalism. My Grandmother Was Sill Scrubbing Clothes On The Back Porch On A Washboard!

Today, The Ideal Male Is The Gay Man And The Ideal Female Is The Worker Female, The Woman Who Can Work In A Coal Mine Just Like All The Other Men.

The Greatest Honor That Can Be Paid To The Work Of Art, On Its Pedestal Of Ritual Display, Is To Describe It With Sensory Completeness. We Need A Science Of Description. Criticism Is Ceremonial Revivification.

In An Era Ruled By Materialism And Unstable Geopolitics, Art Must Be Restored To The Center Of Public Education.

Foucault Is The Cagliostro Of Our Time.

Male Conspiracy Cannot Explain All Female Failures. I Am Convinced That, Even Without Restrictions, There Still Would Have Been No Female Pascal, Milton, Or Kant. Genius Is Not Checked By Social Obstacles: It Will Overcome.

Younger Women Have No Problem In Reconciling Beauty With Ambitions As A Professional Woman.

Madonna Has A Far Profounder Vision Of Sex Than Do The Feminists. She Sees Both The Animality And The Artifice. Changing Her Costume Style And Hair Color Virtually Every Month, Madonna Embodies The Eternal Values Of Beauty And Pleasure. Feminism Says, 'no More Masks.' Madonna Says We Are Nothing But Masks. Through Her Enormous Impact On Young Women Around The World, Madonna Is The Future Of Feminism.

Even A Woman Of Abnormal Will Cannot Escape Her Hormonal Identity.

Normal And Abnormal

The Smouldering Eroticism Of Great European Actresses Like Jeanne Moreau Demonstrated To My Generations Women's Archetypal Mystery And Glamour, Completely Missing From The Totalitarian World-view Of The Misogynist Foucault. For Me, The Big French D Is Not Derrida, But Deneuve.

Men Who Shrink From Penetration Of The Female Body Are Paralyzed By Justifiable Apprehension, Since They Are Returning To Our Uncanny Site Of Origin.

The Mystique Of The Femme Fatale Cannot Be Perfectly Translated Into Male Terms.

The Real Butches Are Straight ... Dealing With And Controlling Men Makes You Stronger.

I Support, Defend, And Admire Prostitutes, Gay Or Straight. They Do Important And Necessary Work, Whether Moralists Of The Left And Right Like It Or Not. Feminists Who Think They Can Abolish The Sex Trade Are In A State Of Massive Delusion. Only A Ruthless, Fascist Regime Of Vast Scale Could Eradicate The Rogue Sex Impulse That Is Indistinguishable From The Life Force. Simply In The Western World, Pagan Sexuality Has Survived 2000 Years Of Judaeo-christian Persecution And Is Hardly Going To Be Defeated By A Few Feminists Whacking At It With Their Brooms.

It Is Capitalist America That Produced The Modern Independent Woman. Never In History Have Women Had More Freedom Of Choice In Regard To Dress, Behavior, Career, And Sexual Orientation.

It's So Tiring To Make Love To Women, It Takes Forever. I'm Too Lazy To Be A Lesbian.

What Has Been Forgotten Is That There Were Major Intellectual Breakthroughs In The 1960s, Thanks To North American Writers Of An Older Generation. There Was A Rupture In Continuity, Since Most Young People Influenced By Those Breakthroughs Did Not Enter The Professions.

Education Has Become A Prisoner Of Contemporaneity.

When I Meet Gay Men Anywhere In The World, There Is A Spontaneity And A Spirit Of Fun And Mischief That Lesbians Seem Incapable Of.

My Stress On The Truth In Sexual Stereotypes And On The Biologic Basis Of Sex Differences Is Sure To Cause Controversy.

Rule Of Art: Cant Kills Creativity!

What Is Pretty In Nature Is Confined To The Thin Skin Of The Globe Upon Which We Huddle. Scratch That Skin, And Nature's Daemonic Ugliness Will Erupt.

I Sometimes Call My New System 'italian Pagan Catholicism,' But It Could More Accurately Be Called 'pragmatic Liberalism,' With Roots In Enlightenment Political Philosophy. It Is A Synthesis Of The Enduring Dual Elements In Our Culture, Pagan And Judeo-christian, Romantic And Classic.

Very Gifted People May Be Sociopathic In Varying Degrees.

In The Real World, Very Smart People Fail And Mediocre People Rise. Part Of What Makes People Fail Or Succeed Are Skills That Have Nothing To Do With Iq. Also, The Idea That Intelligence Can Be Gauged By An Iq Test Is Erroneous.

The More Woman Aims For Personal Identity And Autonomy ... The Fiercer Will Be Her Struggle With Nature - That Is, With The Intractable Physical Laws Of Her Own Body. And The More Nature Will Punish Her: 'do Not Dare To Be Free! For Your Body Does Not Belong To You.'

I Do Not Believe In God, But I Believe God Is Man’s Greatest Idea. Those Incapable Of Religious Feeling Or Those (like Hard-core Gay Activists) Who Profane Sacred Ground Do Not Have The Imagination To Educate The Young. … Until The Left Comes To Its Senses About The Cultural Power Of Religion, The Right Will Continue To Broaden Its Appeal.

What Is Mona Lisa Thinking? Nothing, Of Course. Her Blankness Is Her Menace And Our Fear. [...] Walter Pater Is To Call Her A 'vampire,' Coasting Through History On Her Secret Tasks.

Profanation And Violation Are Part Of The Perversity Of Sex, Which Never Will Conform To Liberal Theories Of Benevolence. Every Model Of Morally Or Politically Correct Sexual Behavior Will Be Subverted By Nature's Daemonic Law.

Man Is Not Merely The Sum Of His Masks. Behind The Shifting Face Of Personality Is A Hard Nugget Of Self, A Genetic Gift.... The Self Is Malleable But Elastic, Snapping Back To Its Original Shape Like A Rubber Band. Mental Illness Is No Myth, As Some Have Claimed. It Is A Disturbance In Our Sense Of Possession Of A Stable Inner Self That Survives Its Personae.

Feminism Has Exceeded Its Proper Mission Of Seeking Political Equality For Women And Has Ended By Rejecting Contingency, That Is, Human Limitation By Nature Or Fate.

I Consider Myself 100 Percent A Feminist, At Odds With The Feminist Establishment In America. For Me The Great Mission Of Feminism Is To Seek The Full Political And Legal Equality Of Women With Men. However, I Disagree With Many Of My Fellow Feminists As An Equal Opportunity Feminist, Who Believes That Feminism Should Only Be Interested In Equal Rights Before The Law. I Utterly Oppose Special Protection For Women Where I Think That A Lot Of The Feminist Establishment Has Drifted In The Last 20 Years.

Despite Popular Opinion, There Are No Important Parallels Between Madonna And Monroe, Who Was A Virtuoso Comedienne But Who Was In Secure, Depressive, Passive-aggressive, And Infuriatingly Obstructionist In Her Career Habits. Madonna Is Manic, Perfectionist, Workaholic. Monroe Abused Alcohol And Drugs, While Madonna Shuns Them. Monroe Had A Tentative, Melting, Dreamy Solipsism; Madonna Has Judy Holliday's Wisecracking Smart Mouth And Joan Crawford's Steel Will And Bossy, Circus Master Managerial Competence.

Much Violence Against Women Originates In Emotional Territory That They Already Command. By Midlife And Early Old Age, As The Hormones Of Both Genders Change, Women Are In Total, Despotic Control Of Their Marriages.

I Am Waiting Impatiently For The Day When Beleaguered, Like-minded Academics Can Order James Wolcott's Collected Essays For Their Classes.

For Me, The Profumo Affair Symbolizes The Evanescence Of Male Government Compared To Women's Cosmic Power.

Modernization Means Westernization.

Poetry Is The Way Into A Spiritual Vision Of Society And The Universe.

Art Is Something Out Of The Ordinary Commenting On The Ordinary.

I Despise The Phony, Fancy-pants Rhetoric Of Professors Aping Jargon-filled European Locutions - Which Have Blighted Academic Film Criticism For Over 30 Years.

Our Presence In Afghanistan Is Not Worth The Price Of Any More American Lives Or Treasure.

Running To Mommy And Daddy On The Campus Grievance Committee Is Unworthy Of Strong Women.

Because Most Of My Career In The Classroom Has Been At Art Schools (beginning At Bennington In The 1970s), I Am Hyper-aware Of The Often Grotesque Disconnect Between Commentary On The Arts And The Actual Practice Or Production Of The Arts.

The Thrill Of Terror Is Passive, Masochistic, And Implicitly Feminine. It Is Imaginative Submission To Overwhelming Superior Force.

In The West, Apollo And Dionysus Strive For Victory. Apollo Makes The Boundary Lines That Are Civilization But That Lead To Convention, Constraint, Oppression. Dionysus Is Energy Unbound, Mad, Callous, Destructive, Wasteful. Apollo Is Law, History, Tradition, The Dignity And Safety Of Custom And Form. Dionysus Is The New, Exhilarating But Rude, Sweeping All Away To Begin Again. Apollo Is A Tyrant, Dionysus Is A Vandal.

Computer Enhancement Has Spread To Still Photography In Advertisements, Fashion Pictorials, And Magazine Covers, Where The Human Figure And Face Are Subtly Elongated Or Remodeled At Will. Caricature Is Our Ruling Mode.

There Is No True Expertise In The Humanities Without Knowing All Of The Humanities. Art Is A Vast, Ancient Interconnected Web-work, A Fabricated Tradition. Over-concentration On Any One Point Is A Distortion.

Women Are In League With Each Other, A Secret Conspiracy Of Hearts And Pheromones

Cats Are Autocrats Of Naked Self-interest. They Are Both Amoral And Immoral, Consciously Breaking Rules. Their ''evil'' Look At Such Times Is No Human Projection: The Cat May Be The Only Animal Who Savors The Perverse Or Reflects Upon It

Not Since The Black Panthers Sailed Into Their Upper East Side Tea Party Has There Been So Daffy An Exercise In Radical Chic.

All Fear Of 'offensive' Speech Is Bourgeois And Reactionary. Historically, Profane Or Bawdy Language Was Common In Both The Upper And The Lower Classes, Who Lived Together In Rural Areas Amid The Untidy Facts Of Nature. Notions Of Propriety And Decorum Come To The Fore In Urbanized Periods Ruled By An Expanding Middle Class, Which Is Obsessed With Cleanliness, Respectability, And Conformism.

Charisma Is The Numinous Aura Around A Narcissistic Personality. It Flows Outward From A Simplicity Or Unity Of Being And A Composure And Controlled Vitality. There Is Gracious Accommodation, Yet Commanding Impersonality. Charisma Is The Radiance Produced By The Interaction Of Male And Female Elements In A Gifted Personality. The Charismatic Woman Has A Masculine Force And Severity. The Charismatic Man Has An Entrancing Female Beauty. Both Are Hot And Cold, Glowing With Presexual Self Love.

The Moral Ambivalence Of The Great Mother Goddesses Has Been Conveniently Forgotten By Those American Feminists Who Have Resurrected Them. We Cannot Grasp Nature's Bare Blade Without Shedding Our Own Blood.

Pornography Is Human Imagination In Tense Theatrical Action; Its Violations Are A Protest Against The Violations Of Our Freedom By Nature.

The [sexual Harassment] Situation Has Gotten So Out Of Hand That, In 1993, In One Of The First British Cases, A Plumber Was Fired For Continuing To Use The Traditional Term "ballcock" For The Toilet Flotation Unit, Instead Of The New Politically Correct Term, Sanitized Of Sexual Suggestiveness. This Is Insane. We Are Back To The Victorian Era, When Table Legs Had To Be Draped Lest They Put The Thought Of Ladies' Legs Into Someone's Dirty Mind.

Last Time I Checked, There Were No Americans At All In Renaissance Art.

Except For Naval And Air Exercises, Our Military Should Be Stationed On American Soil, Where Service Men And Women Can Lead Normal Lives In Close Proximity To Family And Friends.

The Moment There Is Imagination There Is Myth

Heaven Help The American-born Boy With A Talent For Ballet.

Male Mastery In Marriage Is A Social Illusion, Nurtured By Women Exhorting Their Creations To Play And Walk. At The Emotional Heart Of Every Marriage Is A Pietà Of Mother And Son.

Over The Past 20 Years, I Have Noticed That The Most Flexible, Dynamic, Inquisitive Minds Among My Students Have Been Industrial Design Majors. Industrial Designers Are Bracingly Free Of Ideology And Cant. The Industrial Designer Is Trained To Be A Clear-eyed Observer Of The Commercial World - Which, Like It Or Not, Is Modern Reality.

Straight Men Who Visit Prostitutes Are Valiantly Striving To Keep Sex Free From Emotion, Duty, Family--in Other Words, From Society, Religion, And Procreative Mother Nature.

Women's Studies Needed A Syllabus And So Invented A Canon Overnight. It Puffed Up Clunky, Mundane Contemporary Women Authors Into Oz-like, Skywriting Dirigibles. Our Best Women Students Are Being Force-fed An Appalling Diet Of Cant, Drivel And Malarkey.

When Feminism And Gay Activism Set Themselves Against Organized Religion, They Have The Obligation To Put Something Better In Its Place.

The Plastic Surgery Issue Is Really Looming Because Girls In The U.s. Are Getting It In Their Teens.

It's High Time For The Art World To Admit That The Avant-garde Is Dead. It Was Killed By My Hero, Andy Warhol, Who Incorporated Into His Art All The Gaudy Commercial Imagery Of Capitalism (like Campbell's Soup Cans) That Most Artists Had Stubbornly Scorned.

The Saints, Many Of Them Women, Warred With Themselves As Well As God. The Body Has Its Own Animal Urges, Just As There Are Attractions And Repulsions In Sex That Modern Liberalism Cannot Face.

I Believe That Everybody Has The Right To View His Or Her Own Body As A Palette. However, I Think Intellectuals Should At Least Try To Be Role Models.

The Unhappy Truth Is That Male Homosexuality Will Never Be Fully Accepted By The Heterosexual Majority, Who Are Obeying The Dictates Not Of Bigoted Society Or Religion But Of Procreative Nature.

Teenage Boys, Goaded By Their Surging Hormones Run In Packs Like The Primal Horde. They Have Only A Brief Season Of Exhilarating Liberty Between Control By Their Mothers And Control By Their Wives.

I Am A Very Reclusive, Private Person.

Even The Best Critical Writing On Emily Dickinson Underestimates Her. She Is Frightening. To Come To Her Directly From Dante, Spenser, Blake, And Baudelaire Is To Find Her Sadomasochism Obvious And Flagrant. Birds, Bees, And Amputated Hands Are The Dizzy Stuff Of This Poetry. Dickinson Is Like The Homosexual Cultist Draping Himself In Black Leather And Chains To Bring The Idea Of Masculinity Into Aggressive Visibility.

The Prostitute Is Not, As Feminists Claim, The Victim Of Men, But Rather Their Conqueror, An Outlaw, Who Controls The Sexual Channels Between Nature And Culture

Men Have Sacrificed And Crippled Themselves Physically And Emotionally To Feed, House, And Protect Women And Children. None Of Their Pain Or Achievement Is Registered In Feminist Rhetoric, Which Portrays Men As Oppressive And Callous Exploiters.

The Piddling Ignoramuses Who Deny That There Is A Distinct, Discernible, Objective Western Tradition Are Just Woozy Literati.

When Feminist Discourse Is Unable To Discriminate The Drunken Fraternity Brother From The Homicidal Maniac, Women Are In Trouble.

Feminism Has Become A Catch-all Vegetable Drawer Where Bunches Of Clingy Sob Sisters Can Store Their Moldy Neuroses.

Why Has The Democratic Party Become So Arrogantly Detached From Ordinary Americans? Though They Claim To Speak For The Poor And Dispossessed, Democrats Have Increasingly Become The Party Of An Upper-middle-class Professional Elite, Top-heavy With Journalists, Academics And Lawyers.

The Idea That Emotion Can Be Separated From Sex Is A Christian Illusion, One Of The Most Ingenious But Finally Unworkable Strategies In Christianity's Ancient Campaign Against Pagan Nature.

Society Is A System Of Inherited Forms Reducing Our Humiliating Passivity To Nature. We May Alter These Forms, Slowly Or Suddenly, But No Change In Society Will Change Nature.

Science Is A Method Of Logical Analysis Of Nature's Operations. It Has Lessened Human Anxiety About The Cosmos By Demonstrating The Materiality Of Nature's Forces, And Their Frequent Predictability.

Cinema Is The Culmination Of The Obsessive, Mechanistic Male Drive In Western Culture. The Movie Projector Is An Apollonian Straight-shooter, Demonstrating The Link Between Aggression And Art. Every Pictorial Framing Is A Ritual Limitation, A Barred Precinct.

Western Culture

Love For All Means Coldness To Something Or Someone. Even Jesus, Let Us Recall, Was Unnecessarily Rude To His Mother At Cana.

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