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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.

-Camille Paglia

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For All The Feminist

Camille Paglia

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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.

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Patriarchal Society

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

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Effeminate Men Have Suffered A Bad Press The World Over.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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 In Doubt, I Read Oscar Wilde.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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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.

Poetry Is The Connecting Link Between Body And Mind.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

Though Men May Be Deep, Mentally They Are Slow.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Every Reading Is Partial, But That Does Not Absolve Us From The Quest For Meaning, Which Defines Us As A Species.

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

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.

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I'm For A High Libido President! I Applaud Him If He Gets Up And Picks Up Women.

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.

Madonna's Great Instinctive Intelligence Was Evident To Me From Her Earliest Videos.

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.

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

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.

Foucault Is The Cagliostro Of Our Time.

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.

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.

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.

Cats Are Autocrats Of Naked Self-interest.

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

The Search For Freedom Through Sex Is Doomed To Failure.

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.

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

It Is Capitalist America That Produced The Modern Independent Woman.

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.

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

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

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

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

The Dionysian Is No Picnic.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

Before Feminism Was, Paglia Was!

Self-importance

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.

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

Pregnancy Demonstrates The Deterministic Character Of Woman's Sexuality.

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.

[on Hollywood:] America's Greatest Achievement.

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.

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.

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.

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

When Anything Goes, It's Women Who Lose.

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

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.

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

A Woman Simply Is, But A Man Must Become.

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.

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

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