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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.

-Camille Paglia

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Even The Best Critical

Camille Paglia

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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.

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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.

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

Science Cannot Avert A Single Thunderbolt.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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!

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

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

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.

Imperialism And Slavery Are No White Male Monopoly, But Are Everywhere From Egypt, Assyria, And Persia To India, China And Japan.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 Moment There Is Imagination There Is Myth

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

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.

Rule Of Art: Cant Kills Creativity!

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

Patriarchal Society

Minerva Save Us From The Cloying Syrup Of Coercive Compassion! What Feminism Does Not Need, It Seems To Me, Is An Endless Recycling Of Doris Day Fifties Clichés About Noble Womanhood.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Woman'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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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'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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

Western Science Is A Product Of The Apollonian Mind: Its Hope Is That By Naming And Classification, By The Cold Light Of Intellect, Archaic Night Can Be Pushed Back And Defeated.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

The Western Mind Makes Definitions; It Draws Lines.

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.

Education Has Become A Prisoner Of Contemporaneity.

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

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

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.

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

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

I Guess I'm Just A Natural Warrior.

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.

[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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

When In Doubt, I Read Oscar Wilde.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

Whiffle [whine And Wheeze And Snuff And Sniffle]: The Annoying Scratchy Sound Made By Weepy Feminists As They Lament The Sufferings Of Women And, Houndlike, Sniff Out Evidence Of Male Oppression.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

Effeminate Men Have Suffered A Bad Press The World Over.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

The Devil Is A Woman.

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.

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.

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.

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

Foucault Is The Cagliostro Of Our Time.

Pregnancy Demonstrates The Deterministic Character Of Woman's Sexuality.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Capitalism Is An Art Form.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

Mind Is A Captive Of The Body.

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

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.

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

Not Until All Babies Are Born From Glass Jars Will The Combat Cease Between Mother And Son.

I Want A Revamped Feminism. Putting The Vamp Back Means The Lady Must Be A Tramp. My Generation Of The Sixties Rebels Wanted To Smash The Bourgeois Codes That Had Become Authoritarian Totems Of The Fifties. The 'nice' Girl With Her Soft, Sanitized Speech And Decorous Manners Had To Go. Thirty Years Later, We're Still Stuck With Her - In The Official Spokesmen And The Anointed Heiresses Of The Feminist Establishment.

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

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

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

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.

Though Men May Be Deep, Mentally They Are Slow.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

The Search For Freedom Through Sex Is Doomed To Failure.

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.

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.

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

The Followers Of Derrida Are Pathetic, Snuffling In French Pockets For Bits Of Pieces Of A Deconstructive Method Already Massively And Coherently Presented And With A Mature Sense Of The Sacred In Buddhism And Hinduism.

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

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.

This Was A Good Example Of The Fascist Policing Of Public Discourse In This Country By Nominal Liberals Who Have Become As Unthinkingly Wedded To Dogma As Any Junior Member Of The Spanish Inquisition.

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

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.

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

Normal And Abnormal

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.

Minerva Save Us From The Cloying Syrup Of Coercive Compassion!

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.

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

Government Has No Business Intervening In Any Consensual Private Behavior.

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

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

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.

I Am A Very Reclusive, Private Person.

It Is Capitalist America That Produced The Modern Independent Woman.

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?

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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