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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.

-Camille Paglia

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And What Do Democrats

Camille Paglia

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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.

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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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Far From Poisoning The Mind, Pornography Shows The Deepest Truth About Sexuality, Stripped Of Romantic Veneer.

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

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.

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.

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.

Teaching Is A Performance Art.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

The Search For Freedom Through Sex Is Doomed To Failure.

My Dream Is Someday To Have A Bank Of Tvs, Where All The Different Channels Could Be On And I Could Be Monitoring Them. I Would Love That. The More The Better. I Love The Tabloid Stuff. The Trashier The Program Is, The More I Feel It's Tv. ... Because That's Tv's Mode. That's The Age Of Hollywood. The Idea Of Pbs - Heavy-duty Masterpiece Theater, Bill Moyers - I Hate All That.

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.

Poetry Is The Connecting Link Between Body And Mind.

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

If Someone Offends You By Speech, You Must Learn To Defend Yourself By Speech.

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.

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.

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

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.

Manhood Coerced Into Sensitivity Is No Manhood At All.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

When Anything Goes, It's Women Who Lose.

Contemporary Feminism Cut Itself Off From History And Bankrupted Itself When It Spun Its Puerile, Paranoid Fantasy Of Male Oppressors And Female Sex-object Victims. Woman Is The Dominant Sex.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

Normal And Abnormal

Young Feminists Have Been Sold A Bill Of Goods About American Feminism. The Enormous Changes In Women Over The Past 40 Years Are Constantly And Falsely Attributed To The Organized Women's Movement Of The Late 1960s And '70s.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

Tranvestism Is Far More Common Among Men, I Noted, Because It Originates In The Primary Relation Of Mother And Son.

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.

Judeo-christians Have Got To Respect The Pagan Truth Shown In The Popular Culture Of Sex And Violence. It's Meaningful About The Elemental Forces Of Life, The Brutality Of Life And Nature.

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.

Though Men May Be Deep, Mentally They Are Slow.

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

Because Of My Own Family's Service (in The U.s. Army, Navy, And Massachusetts And New York National Guard), I Am A Strong Supporter Of The Military And Do Believe That There Are Just Wars.

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

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.

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.

Cats Are Autocrats Of Naked Self-interest.

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

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.

When In Doubt, I Read Oscar Wilde.

It Is Capitalist America That Produced The Modern Independent Woman.

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

I Am A Very Reclusive, Private Person.

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.

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.

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. ?

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.

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.

I Feel Genuinely Sorry For Those Who Are So Blinded By Narrow Partisanship That They Cannot Appreciate Limbaugh's Energy, Intelligence And Satiric Skill. They Live In A Box With Bags Over Their Heads. Though He And I Hardly Agree On Politics (i Voted For Ralph Nader Last Year And May Go Green Again In 2004), I Respect Limbaugh As A Political Analyst And Deft Rhetorician Who Is A Master Of The Microphone And Who Knows How To Engage And Challenge A Vast Audience.

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

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.

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.

All Objects, All Phases Of Culture Are Alive. They Have Voices. They Speak Of Their History And Interrelatedness. And They Are All Talking At Once!

I Certainly Derived My Skills As A Prose Writer From My Scrutiny Of Poetry And Of The Individual Word. But Schools Don't Do Things Like That Anymore - Tracking Words Down To Their Roots.

Patriarchy, Routinely Blamed For Everything, Produced The Birth Control Pill, Which Did More To Free Contemporary Women Than Feminism Itself.

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

Old School Feminism, Coveting Social Power, Is Blind To Woman's Cosmic Sexual Power.

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.

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.

One Of The Main Reasons I Am So Drawn To Hitchcock Is That He Planned His Shots Way In Advance On Story-boards, Which He Designed Like Classic Paintings (he Was An Art Connoisseur). It's Why He Found Shooting On Set Boring - Because He Had Already Composed The Film In His Head.

If Feminism Has Receded In Visibility And Prestige, It Is Precisely Because Its Vision Of Life's Goals And Rewards Has Become Too Narrow And Elitist.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

The Airheads Of Congress Will Keep Their Own Plush Healthcare Plan - It's The Rest Of Us Guinea Pigs Who Will Be Thrown To The Wolves.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Serial Or Sex Murder, Like Fetishism, Is A Perversion Of Male Intelligence. It Is A Criminal Abstraction, Masculine In Its Deranged Egotism And Orderliness. It Is The Asocial Equivalent Of Philosophy, Mathematics, And Music. There Is No Female Mozart Because There Is No Female Jack The Ripper.

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

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.

Obama's Folksy Come-on Is As Bad As Madonna's Faux British - And Both Are In Need Of Fresh Inspiration.

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

Minerva Save Us From The Cloying Syrup Of Coercive Compassion!

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

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.

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.

A Woman Simply Is, But A Man Must Become.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

The Western Mind Makes Definitions; It Draws Lines.

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.

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.

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

[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.

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.

Homeric Mind Is Ingenuity, Practical Intelligence. There Is No Rodin-like Deep Thinking, No Mathematical Or Philosophical Speculation. Odysseus Thinks With His Hands.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

[on U.s. Universities:] The Bland Leading The Bland.

My Political Philosophy As A Libertarian Says That Government Has No Business Intervening In Any Consensual Private Behavior. My Professional Ethic As A Thinker And Writer, However, Says That Self-knowledge Is Our Ultimate Responsibility

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.

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!

The Trauma Of The Sixties Persuaded Me That My Generation's Egalitarianism Was A Sentimental Error. I Now See The Hierarchical As Both Beautiful And Necessary. Efficiency Liberates; Egalitarianism Tangles, Delays, Blocks, Deadens.

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.

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.

Heterosexual Love,. Is In Sync With Cosmic Forces. Not Everyone Has The Stomach For Daily War With Nature.

The Number One Problem In Academia Today Is Not Ignorant Students But Ignorant Professors, Who Have Substituted Narrow "expertise" And "theoretical Sophistication" (a Preposterous Term) For Breadth And Depth Of Learning In The World History Of Art And Thought... Art Is A Vast, Ancient Interconnected Web-work, A Fabricated Tradition. Overconcentration On Any One Point Is A Distortion. This Is One Of The Primary Reasons For The Dullness And Ineptitude Of So Much Twentieth-criticism, As Compared To Nineteenth-century Belles-lettres.

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

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.

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

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

How Many Modern Transsexuals Are Unacknowledged Shamans? Perhaps It Is To Poets They Should Go For Counsel, Rather Than Surgeons.

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.

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

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.

Rihanna Is Today's Most Fascinating Performer, A Mysterious Amalgam Of Amiable Warmth And Glittering Charisma. With Her Keen Creative Eye For Line And Color, She Has Become A Fashion Icon, Like Audrey Hepburn. Yet She Is A Tempestuous Wild Child And International Adventuress, Like Ava Gardner. Most Importantly, As An Artist In This Overmechanized Age, She Bravely Draws On Deep Wells Of Pure Emotion, Endearing Her To Millions Of Fans Worldwide.

[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.

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

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

Jesus Was A Brilliant Jewish Stand-up Comedian, A Phenomenal Improviser. His Parables Are Great One-liners.

Effeminate Men Have Suffered A Bad Press The World Over.

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

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

Every Month, It Is Woman's Fate To Face The Abyss Of Time And Being, The Abyss Which Is Herself.

I Guess I'm Just A Natural Warrior.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

[on Hollywood:] America's Greatest Achievement.

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.

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.

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

Education Has Become A Prisoner Of Contemporaneity.

Women Will Never Be Taken Seriously Until They Accept Full Responsibility For Their Sexuality.

Once You Have Become The Centre Of A Conflict In A Complex Governmental Enterprise You Have The Obligation To Resign.

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.

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.

Very Gifted People May Be Sociopathic In Varying Degrees.

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.

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

Modernization Means Westernization.

Consciousness Is A Pitiful Hostage Of Its Flesh-envelope, Whose Surges, Circuits, And Secret Murmurings It Cannot Stay Or Speed. This Is The Chthonian Drama That Has No Climax But Only An Enedless Round, Cycle Upon Cycle. Microcosm Mirrors Macrocosm. Free Will Is Stillborn In The Red Cells Of Our Body, For There Is No Free Will In Nature. Our Choices Come To Us Prepackaged And Special Delivery, Molded By Hands Not Our Own.

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.

They Do Not Understand The Fragility Of Civilization And The Constant Nearness Of Savage Nature.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

French Rhetorical Models Are Too Narrow For The English Tradition. Most Pernicious Of French Imports Is The Notion That There Is No Person Behind A Text. Is There Anything More Affected, Aggressive, And Relentlessly Concrete Than A Parisan Intellectual Behind His/her Turgid Text? The Parisian Is A Provincial When He Pretends To Speak For The Universe.

What Troubles Me About The "hostile Workplace" Category Of Sexual Harassment Policy Is That Women Are Being Returned To Their Old Status Of Delicate Flowers Who Must Be Protected From Assault By Male Lechers. It Is Anti-feminist To Ask For Special Treatment For Women.

Capitalism Is An Art Form.

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

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.

Sappho And Emily Dickinson Are The Only Woman Geniuses In Poetic History.

The Best Introduction By Far To Representation Of The Human Figure In Art. The Nude Is A Beautifully Written Work Of Sophisticated Connoisseurship That Analyzes Art In Its Own Terms Rather Than Imposing Strident, Politicized Categories On It. It Outlines The Major Body Types, Male And Female, In Western Art And, Via A Wealth Of Illustrations, Trains The Reader's Eye To Detect And Evaluate Proportion. This Book Reveres Art

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.

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.

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.

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.

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