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Economic Analysis Is The First Principle Of Marxism. Professors Who Were Genuine Leftists Would Have Challenged The Entire Economics-driven Machinery Of American Academe The Wasteful Multidepartmental Structure, The Divisive Pedantry Of Overspecialization, The Cronyism And Sycophancy In Recruitment And Promotion, The Boondoggling Ostentation Of Pointless Conferences, The Exploitation Of Graduate Students And Part-time Teachers, The Subservience Of Faculty To Overpaid Administrators, The Mediocrity And Folly Of The Ruling Cliques Of The Modern Language Association.

-Camille Paglia

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Economic Analysis Is The

Camille Paglia

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Economic Analysis Is The First Principle Of Marxism. Professors Who Were Genuine Leftists Would Have Challenged The Entire Economics-driven Machinery Of American Academe The Wasteful Multidepartmental Structure, The Divisive Pedantry Of Overspecialization, The Cronyism And Sycophancy In Recruitment And Promotion, The Boondoggling Ostentation Of Pointless Conferences, The Exploitation Of Graduate Students And Part-time Teachers, The Subservience Of Faculty To Overpaid Administrators, The Mediocrity And Folly Of The Ruling Cliques Of The Modern Language Association.

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

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

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.

Education Has Become A Prisoner Of Contemporaneity.

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

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.

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

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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.

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

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When Anything Goes, It's Women Who Lose.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

Modernization Means Westernization.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

Minerva Save Us From The Cloying Syrup Of Coercive Compassion!

A Woman Simply Is, But A Man Must Become.

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.

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

I Am A Very Reclusive, Private Person.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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The More Women Succeed And Rise Up Into Positions Of Power, The More Remote They Become From Actual Masculine Energy.

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

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

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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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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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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!

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

It Is Not Male Hatred Of Women But Male Fear Of Women That Is The Great Universal.

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.

Any Woman Who Stays With Her Abuser Beyond The First Incident Is Complicitous With Him.

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

Science Cannot Avert A Single Thunderbolt.

Poetry Is The Connecting Link Between Body And Mind.

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.

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

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.

For All The Feminist Jabber About Women Being Victimized By Fashion, It Is Men Who Most Suffer From Conventions Of Dress. Every Day, A Woman Can Choose From An Army Of Personae, Femme To Butch, And Can Cut Or Curl Her Hair Or Adorn Herself With A Staggering Variety Of Artistic Aids. But Despite The Sixties Experiments In Peacock Dress, No Man Can Rise In The Corporate World Today, Outside The Entertainment Industry, With Long Hair Or Makeup Or Purple Velvet Suits.

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.

Rule Of Art: Cant Kills Creativity!

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

The Dionysian Is No Picnic.

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

Anti-religious Sneers Are A Hallmark Of Perpetual Adolescents.

The Capitalist Distribution Network, A Complex Chain Of Factory, Transport, Warehouse And Retail Outlet, Is One Of The Greatest Male Accomplishments In The History Of Culture.

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

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

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.

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

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 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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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 Devil Is A Woman.

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 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.

If Men Are Obsolete, Then Women Will Soon Be Extinct -- Unless We Rush Down That Ominous Brave New World Path Where Women Clone Themselves By Parthenogenesis, As Famously Do Komodo Dragons, Hammerhead Sharks, And Pit Vipers.

Brave New World

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

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.

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.

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

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.

The Search For Freedom Through Sex Is Doomed To Failure.

Capitalism Is An Art Form.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

Cats Are Autocrats Of Naked Self-interest.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

Madonna Is Her Own Hollywood Studio - A Popelike Mogul And Divine Superstar In One. She Has A Laserlike Instinct For Publicity, Aided By Her Visual Genius For Still Photography (which None Of Her Legion Of Imitators Has). Unfortunately, Her Public Life Has Dissolved Into A Series Of Staged Photo Ops.

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.

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

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

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

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.

Though Men May Be Deep, Mentally They Are Slow.

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.

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.

My Thinking Tends To Be Libertarian. That Is, I Oppose Intrusions Of The State Into The Private Realm-as In Abortion, Sodomy, Prostitution, Pornography, Drug Use, Or Suicide, All Of Which I Would Strongly Defend As Matters Of Free Choice In A Representative Democracy.

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

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

Before Feminism Was, Paglia Was!

Self-importance

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

The Western Mind Makes Definitions; It Draws Lines.

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

[on Hollywood:] America's Greatest Achievement.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

Very Gifted People May Be Sociopathic In Varying Degrees.

Eroticism Is Mystique; That Is, The Aura Of Emotion And Imagination Around Sex. It Cannot Be 'fixed' By Codes Of Social Or Moral Convenience, Whether From The Political Left Or Right. For Nature's Fascism Is Greater Than That Of Any Society. There Is A Daemonic Instability In Sexual Relations That We May Have To Accept.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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?

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.

Every Revolution Eventually Needs A New Revolution.

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

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

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