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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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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.

Young People Today Are Flooded With Disconnected Images But Lack A Sympathetic Instrument To Analyze Them As Well As A Historical Frame Of Reference In Which To Situate Them. I Am Reminded Of An Unnerving Scene In Stanley Kubrick's Epic Film, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Where An Astronaut, His Air Hose Cut By The Master Computer Gone Amok, Spins Helplessly Off Into Space.

Although I'm An Atheist Who Believes Only In Great Nature, I Recognize The Spiritual Richness And Grandeur Of The Roman Catholicism In Which I Was Raised.

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.

The Reform Of A College English Department Cuts No Ice Down At The Corner Garage.

Sex At The Age Of 90 Is Like Playing Billiards With A Rope

A Serious Problem In America Is The Gap Between Academe And The Mass Media, Which Is Our Culture. Professors Of Humanities, With All Their Leftist Fantasies, Have Little Direct Knowledge Of American Life And No Impact Whatever On Public Policy.

Personality Maintains Its Discreetness By An Act Of Will. Otherwise One Person Will Flow Helplessly Into Another.

The Stigma Of The Prostitute Is The Badge Of Her Identity. That Is Why The Client Goes To Her. If He Wanted Someone Without A Stigma, He'd Go And Screw The Lady Next Door.

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.

What Feminism Calls Patriarchy Is Simply Civilization , An Abstract System Designed By Men But Augmented And Now Co-owned By Women.

I Cannot Be Convinced That Great Artists Are Moralists. Art Is First Appearances, Then Meaning.

Minerva Save Us From The Cloying Syrup Of Coercive Compassion!

Effeminate Men Have Suffered A Bad Press The World Over.

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.

Popular Culture - Above All Rock 'n' Roll, With Its African-american R & B Roots - Did Far More To Radicalize Us Than Did Any Feminist Leader.

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.

The Post-war "publish Or Perish" Tyranny Must End. The Profession Has Become Obsessed With Quantity Rather Than Quality. [...] One Brilliant Article Should Outweigh One Mediocre Book.

[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.

One Of The Most Startling Discoveries Of My Career Was When I Realized That The Strongest Women In The World Are Not Lesbians But Heterosexual Women, Who Know How To Handle Men.

Homosexuality Is Not 'normal' On The Contrary It Is A Challenge To The Norm...nature Exists Whether Academics Like It Or Not. And In Nature, Procreation Is The Single Relentless Rule. That Is The Norm. Our Sexual Bodies Were Designed For Reproduction...no One Is Born Gay. The Idea Is Ridiculous...homosexuality Is An Adaptation, Not An Inborn Trait.

Bisexuality Is Our Best Hope Of Escape From The Animosities And False Polarities Of The Current Sex Wars.

[sarah] Palin Is Solidifying Her Status As A Bona Fide American Cultural Heroine.

[on Hollywood:] America's Greatest Achievement.

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.

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.

The Female Body Is A Chthonian Machine, Indifferent To The Spirit Who Inhabits It.

No One Is Born Gay. The Idea Is Ridiculous, But It Is Symptomatic Of Our Overpoliticized Climate That Such Assertions Are Given Instant Credence By Gay Activists And Their Media Partisans. I Think What Gay Men Are Remembering Is That They Were Born Different.

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.

My Generation Of Bossy, Confident, Baby-boom Women Were Something Brand New In History. Our Energy And Assertiveness Weren't Created By Betty Friedan, Unknown Before Her 1963 Book, Or By Gloria Steinem, Whose Political Activism, As Even The Lifetime Profile Admitted, Did Not Begin Until 1969.

Popular Culture Is The New Babylon, Into Which So Much Art And Intellect Now Flow. It Is Our Imperial Sex Theater, Supreme Temple Of The Western Eye. We Live In The Age Of Idols. The Pagan Past, Never Dead, Flames Again In Our Mystic Hierarchies Of Stardom.

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

Science Cannot Avert A Single Thunderbolt.

Lacan Is A Tyrant Who Must Be Driven From Our Shores. Narrowly Trained English Professors Who Know Nothing Of Art History Or Popular Culture Think They Can Just Wade In With Lacan And Trash Everything In Sight.

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.

Pursuit And Seduction Are The Essence Of Sexuality. It's Part Of The Sizzle.

The Moment There Is Imagination There Is Myth

We Should Teach General Ethics To Both Men And Women, But Sexual Relationships Themselves Must Not Be Policed. Sex, Like The City Streets, Would Be Risk-free Only In Totalitarian Regimes.

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.

The Most Successful Prostitutes Are Invisible, Because The Sign Of A Prostitute's Success Is Her Absolute Blending With The Environment. She's So Shrewd, She Never Becomes Visible. She Never Gets In Trouble. She Has Command Of Her Life, And Her Clients.

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.

Within The U.s., The Obama Presidency Will Be Mainly Measured By The Success Or Failure Of His Economic Policies. And Here, I Fear, The Monstrous Stimulus Package With Which This Administration Stumbled Out Of The Gate Will Prove To Be Obama's Waterloo.

As A Major Contemporary Composer, Madonna Should Not Let The Eye Dictate To The Ear.

Capitalism Is An Art Form.

American Universities Are Organized On The Principle Of The Nuclear Rather Than The Extended Family. Graduate Students Are Grimly Trained To Be Technicians Rather Than Connoisseurs. The Old German Style Of Universal Scholarship Has Gone.

I Am A Very Reclusive, Private Person.

Capitalism Is An Art Form, An Apollonian Fabrication To Rival Nature. It Is Hypocritical For Feminists And Intellectuals To Enjoy The Pleasures And Conveniences Of Capitalism While Sneering At It. Everyone Born Into Capitalism Has Incurred A Debt To It. Give Caesar His Due.

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

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

Every Man Harbors An Inner Female Territory Ruled By His Mother, From Whom He Can Never Entirely Break Free.

Working Moms Commonly Testify That They Feel Guilty When They Are Away From Their Children And Guilty When They Are Not At Their Jobs. Devoted Fathers Certainly Miss Their Children Deeply, But It Does Not Seem To Be With The Same Gnawing, Primal Anxiety That Often Afflicts Women.

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 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.

Considering The Popularity Of Soaps With The African-american Audience, It's Grotesque That The Entertainment Industry, For All Its Vaunted Liberalism, Is Lagging So Far Behind Social Changes In The United States. And Why Has There Never Been An All-black Daytime Network Soap? It Would Probably Blow The White Soaps Off The Map.

African American

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.

Butchery Is Not The Point Of Vampirism. Sex - Domination And Submission - Is.

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.

Nature, I Have Constantly Argued In My Work, Is The Real Superpower Of This Godless Universe. It Is The Ultimate Disposer Of Human Fate, Randomly Recarving Geography Over 10,000-year Epochs.

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

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.

Visionary Idealism Is A Male Art Form. The Lesbian Aesthete Does Not Exist. But If There Were One, She Would Have Learned From The Perverse Male Mind.

History Shows That Male Homosexuality, Which Like Prostitution Flourishes With Urbanization And Soon Becomes Predictably Ritualized, Always Tends Toward Decadence.

Are We Like Late Rome, Infatuated With Past Glories, Ruled By A Complacent, Greedy Elite, And Hopelessly Powerless To Respond To Changing Conditions?

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

Women's Studies Is A Comfy, Chummy Morass Of Unchallenged Groupthink . It Is, With Rare Exception, Totally Unscholarly. Academic Feminists Have Silenced Men And Dissenting Women.

The Search For Freedom Through Sex Is Doomed To Failure.

It's Patriarchal Society That Has Freed Me As A Woman.

Patriarchal Society

We Need A New Kind Of Feminism, One That Stresses Personal Responsibility And Is Open To Art And Sex In All Their Dark, Unconsoling Mysteries. The Feminist Of The Fin De Si?cle Will Be Bawdy, Streetwise, And On-the-spot Confrontational, In The Prankish Sixties Way.

Ballet Is The Body Rising. Ballet Is Ceremonial And Hieratic. Its Disdain For The Commonplace Material World Is The Source Of Its Authority And Glamour.

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

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 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.

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

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

Elizabeth Taylor Is, In My Opinion, The Greatest Actress In Film History. She Instinctively Understands The Camera And Its Nonverbal Intimacies. Opening Her Violet Eyes, She Takes Us Into The Liquid Realm Of Emotion, Which She Inhabits By Pisces Intuition. Richard Burton Said That Taylor Showed Him How To Act For The Camera. Economy And Understatement Are Essential. At Her Best, Elizabeth Taylor Simply Is. An Electric, Erotic Charge Vibrates The Space Between Her Face And The Lens. It Is An Extra-sensory, Pagan Phenomenon.

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

Madonna Is The True Feminist. She Exposes The Puritanism And Suffocating Ideology Of American Feminism, Which Is Stuck In An Adolescent Whining Mode. Madonna Has Taught Young Women To Be Fully Female And Sexual While Still Exercising Control Over Their Lives.

Man Has Traditionally Ruled The Social Sphere; Feminism Tells Him To Move Over And Share His Power. But Woman Rules The Sexual And Emotional Sphere, And There She Has No Rival. Victim Ideology, A Caricature Of Social History, Blocks Women From Recognition Of Their Dominance In The Deepest, Most Important Realm. ?

We Cannot Have A World Where Everyone Is A Victim. "i'm This Way Because My Father Made Me This Way. I'm This Way Because My Husband Made Me This Way." Yes, We Are Indeed Formed By Traumas That Happen To Us. But You Must Take Charge, You Must Take Over, You Are Responsible.

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

The Artist Makes Art Not To Save Mankind But To Save Himself. Every Benevolent Comment By An Artist Is A Fog To Cover His Tracks, The Bloody Trail Of His Assault Against Reality And Others.

Elizabeth Taylor Is Pre-feminist Woman. This Is The Source Of Her Continuing Greatness And Relevance. She Wields The Sexual Power That Feminism Cannot Explain And Has Tried To Destroy. Through Stars Like Taylor, We Sense The World-disordering Impact Of Legendary Women Like Delilah, Salome, And Helen Of Troy. Feminism Has Tried To Dismiss The Femme Fatale As A Misogynist Libel, A Hoary Clich?. But The Femme Fatale Expresses Women's Ancient And Eternal Control Of The Sexual Realm. The Specter Of The Femme Fatale Stalks All Men's Relations With Women.

When It Defines Man As The Enemy, Feminism Is Alienating Women From Their Own Bodies.

Children Are Monsters Of Unbridled Egotism And Will, For They Spring Directly From Nature, Hostile Intimations Of Immorality.

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.

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.

American High Schools Have Physically Imprisoned Young People, Stripped Them Of Civil Liberties And Fed Them A Diet Of P.c. Pap.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Hollywood Movies Of The Fifties, Like The Ten Commandments And Ben-hur, With Their Epic Clash Of Pagan And Judeo-christian Cultures, Tell More About Art And Society Than The French-infatuated Ideologues Who Have Made A Travesty Of The "best" American Higher Criticism.

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.

A Woman Simply Is, But A Man Must Become.

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

American Policy Seems To Be Wed To A Perpetual State Of War. Why? History Shows That The World Will Always Be In Flux Or Turmoil, With Different Peoples Competing For Visibility And Power. The U.s. Cannot Fix The Fate Of Every Nation.

Criticism At Its Best Is Re-creative, Not Spirit-killing.

Every Man Must Define His Identity Against His Mother. If He Does Not, He Just Falls Back Into Her And Is Swallowed Up.

The True Mission Of Feminism Today Is Not To Carp About The Woes Of Affluent Western Career Women But To Turn The Spotlight On Life-and-death Issues Affecting Women In The Third World, Particularly In Rural Areas Where They Have Little Protection Against Exploitation And Injustice.

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

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.

I Say The Law Should Be Blind To Race, Gender And Sexual Orientation, Just As It Claims To Be Blind To Wealth And Power. There Should Be No Specially Protected Groups Of Any Kind, Except For Children, The Severely Disabled And The Elderly, Whose Physical Frailty Demands Society's Care.

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

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.

Men Chase By Night Those They Will Not Greet By Day.

We Must Take The Best From The Left And The Best From The Right To Devise New Strategies For The Global Twenty-first Century. The Reluctance Of Liberal Professors To Speak Out Against Rampant Abuses Committed On Their Side (e.g., Suppression Of Free Speech, The Excesses Of Women's Studies And French Theory) Has Simply Increased The Power Of The Right.

High Romanticism Shows You Nature In All Its Harsh And Lovely Metamorphoses. Flood, Fire And Quake Fling Us Back To The Primal Struggle For Survival And Reveal Our Gross Dependency On Mammoth, Still Mysterious Forces.

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.

Manhood Coerced Into Sensitivity Is No Manhood At All.

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

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.

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.

My Prescription For Women Entering The War Zone Of The Professions: Study Football. . . . Women Who Want To Remake The Future Should Look For Guidance Not To Substitute Parent Figures But To The Brash Assertions Of Pagan Sport.

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

Every Year, Feminists Provide More And More Evidence For The Old Charge That Women Can Neither Think Nor Write.

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.

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

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

Every Revolution Eventually Needs A New Revolution.

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

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.

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

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.

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

Poetry Is The Connecting Link Between Body And Mind.

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.

Lesbian Feminists, For All Their Ideals Of Sisterhood And Solidarity, Can Treat Each Other With A Fickleness, A Parasitic Exploitativeness, And Vicious Spite That Have To Be Seen To Be Believed.

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.

The North American Intellectual Tradition Began, I Maintain, In The Encounter Of British Romanticism With Assertive, Pragmatic North American English - The Protestant Plain Style In Both The U.s. And Canada, With Its No-nonsense Scottish Immigrants.

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.

We Do Not Need French Post-structuralism, Whose Pedantic Jargon, Clumsy Convolutions, And Prissy Abstractions Have Spread Throughout Academe And The Arts And Are Now Blighting The Most Promising Minds Of The Next Generation. This Is A Major Crisis If There Ever Was One, And Every Sensible Person Must Help Bring It To An End.

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

There Is A Constant Rush To Judgment In Foucault. He Is Filled With Specious Generalizations, False Categories, Distortions, Fudging, Pretenses To Knowledge In Areas Where He Was Ignorant. He Had No Ability Whatsoever To Distinguish Among Historical Sources, Where He Makes Terrible Blunders.

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

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.

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

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.

Feminism, In All Fields, Has Yet To Produce A Single Scholar Of The Intellectual Rank Of Scores Of These Learned Men [e.g., Bruno Snell, Albin Lesky, Denys Page] In The German And British Academic Tradition.

[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.

Freud Says, "man Fears That His Strength Will Be Taken From Him By Woman, Dreads Becoming Infected With Her Femininity And Then Proving Himself A Weakling." Masculinity Must Fight Off Effeminacy Day By Day. Woman And Nature Stand Ever Ready To Reduce The Male To Boy And Infant.

Our Liberal, New York/washington-based Media Would Never In A Million Years Put Liberal Godfather Ted Kennedy On The Spot About His Clan's Bad Behavior, To Whose Lurid History He Himself Has Contributed So Much.

Anti-religious Sneers Are A Hallmark Of Perpetual Adolescents.

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

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

Education Has Become A Prisoner Of Contemporaneity.

Cats Are Autocrats Of Naked Self-interest.

In Sex, Man Is Driven Into The Very Abyss Which He Flees. He Makes A Voyage To Non-being And Back.

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.

In Today's Impoverished Dialogue, Critiques Of Liberalism Are Often Naively Called "conservative," As If Twenty-five Hundred Years Of Western Intellectual Tradition Presented No Other Alternatives.

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.

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.

I Hate Dogma In Any Form. I Hated It In The Catholic Church And Girl Scout Troops Of The 1950s, And I Hate In In Gay Activism And Established Feminism Today.

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.

When Anything Goes, It's Women Who Lose.

Male Aggression And Lust Are The Energizing Factors In Culture. They Are Men's Tools Of Survival In The Pagan Vastness Of Female Nature.

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

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.

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

If People Could See The Inside Of My Brain, I Would Be In Prison.

Leaving Sex To The Feminists Is Like Letting Your Dog Vacation At The Taxidermist.

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.

Does Art Have A Future? Performance Genres Like Opera, Theater, Music And Dance Are Thriving All Over The World, But The Visual Arts Have Been In Slow Decline For Nearly 40 Years. No Major Figure Of Profound Influence Has Emerged In Painting Or Sculpture Since The Waning Of Pop Art And The Birth Of Minimalism In The Early 1970s.

Beauty Is Our Weapon Against Nature; By It We Make Objects, Giving Them Limit, Symmetry, Proportion. Beauty Halts And Freezes The Melting Flux Of Nature.

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

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.

The Venerable Emeritus Professors Still At Yale When I Entered Graduate School [in The 1960s] May Have Been Reserved, Puritanical Wasps, But They Were Men Of Honor Who Had Given Their Lives To Scholarship. Today In The Elite Schools, Honor And Ethics Are Gone.

Ambitious Young Women Today Are Taught To Ignore Or Suppress Every Natural Instinct, If It Conflicts With The Feminist Agenda Posed On Them. All Literary And Artistic Works, No Matter How Great, That Document The Ambivalence Of Female Sexuality They Are Trained To Dismiss As "misogynous." In Other Words, Their Minds Are Being Programmed To Secede From Their Bodies ... There Is A Huge Gap Between Feminist Rhetoric And Women's Actual Sex Lives, Where Feminism Is Of Little Help Except With A Certain Stratum Of Deferential, Malleable, White Middle-class Men.

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

I View The Prostitute As One Of The Few Women Who Is Totally In Control Of Her Fate, Totally In Control Of The Realm Of Sex. The Lesbian Feminists Tried To Take Control Of Female Sexuality Away From Men - But The Prostitute Was Doing That All Along.

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

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 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.

All Men Even, I Have Written, Jesus Christ Began As Flecks Of Tissue Inside A Woman's Womb. Every Boy Must Stagger Out Of The Shadow Of A Mother Goddess, Whom He Never Fully Escapes.

The Devil Is A Woman.

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

Women Are Being Told "you Are Future Leaders." Meanwhile, We Are More Than Our Jobs. One Reason Sex And The City Was Such An Enormous Hit Is That It Expressed Something That Feminism Won't Admit: We Don't Know What We Want. We Don't Know If We Want Children Or Not.

I Want Young Women When They're 14 To Start Thinking About What They Want Over The Course Of Their Lives. I Think It's Criminal - Child Abuse - That They're Not Told To Do This [in School]. Right Now It's Just Sex Education And Putting Condoms On Bananas. Girls Should Be Asked To Think About What They Want In Their Lives When They're 50, 60 And 70.

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

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

When In Doubt, I Read Oscar Wilde.

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

Sex Is The Point Of Contact Between Man And Nature, Where Morality And Good Intentions Fall To Primitive Urges.

We Will Never Get Great Art From Women If Their Education Exposes Them Only To The Second-rate And If The Idea Of Greatness Itself Is Denied. Greatness Is Not A White Male Trick. Every Important World Civilization Has Defined Its Artistic Tradition In Elitist Terms Of Distinction And Excellence.

If People Want To Be Better Writers, They Can't Just Read The Blogs! You've Got To Look At Something That's Outside This Rushing World Of Evanescent Words.

In The Seventies, Women Runners, Developing Amenorrhea And Calcium-related Shin Splints, Were The First To Realize That Nature Is Hovering Over Us, Ready To Shut Down Our Systems If Our Fetus-feeding Fat Reserve Drops Below A Certain Percentage Of Body Weight. In Other Words, In Nature's Eyes We Are Nothing But Milk Sacs And Fat Deposits.

Gloria Steinem's Marriage Is Proof Positive Of The Emotional Desperation Of Ageing Feminists Who For Over 30 Years Worshiped The Steely Career Woman And Callously Trashed Stay-at-home Moms.

Feminism Is Dead. The Movement Is Absolutely Dead. The Women's Movement Tried To Suppress Dissident Voices For Way Too Long. There's No Room For Dissent.

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

Mind Is A Captive Of The Body.

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.

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.

Music Never Dies. Do We Really Need Another Madonna Tour? Does She Have To Compete With Women Performers 25 Years Her Junior?

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.

And What Do Democrats Stand For, If They Are So Ready To Defame Concerned Citizens As The 'mob' - A Word Betraying A Marie Antoinette Delusion Of Superiority To Ordinary Mortals. I Thought My Party Was Populist, Attentive To The Needs And Wishes Of Those Outside The Power Structure. And As A Product Of The 1960s, I Thought The Democratic Party Was Passionately Committed To Freedom Of Thought And Speech.

Promiscuity In Men May Cheapen Love But Sharpen Thought. Promiscuity In Women Is Illness, A Leakage Of Identity.

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.

My Advice To The Reader Approaching A Poem Is To Make The Mind Still And Blank. Let The Poem Speak. This Charged Quiet Mimics The Blank Space Ringing The Printed Poem, The Nothing Out Of Which Something Takes Shape.

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Dominic Chianese

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