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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.

-Camille Paglia

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I'm A Professor Of

Camille Paglia

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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.

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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.

Straight Men Who Visit Prostitutes Are Valiantly Striving To Keep Sex Free From Emotion, Duty, Family--in Other Words, From Society, Religion, And Procreative Mother Nature.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

I Respect The Astute And Rigorously Unsentimental David Horowitz As One Of America's Most Original And Courageous Political Analysts. He Has The True 1960s Spirit - Audacious And Irreverent, Yet Passionately Engaged And Committed To Social Change.

The 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.

Except For Naval And Air Exercises, Our Military Should Be Stationed On American Soil, Where Service Men And Women Can Lead Normal Lives In Close Proximity To Family And Friends.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

Modernization Means Westernization.

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

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

The Greatest Honor That Can Be Paid To The Work Of Art, On Its Pedestal Of Ritual Display, Is To Describe It With Sensory Completeness. We Need A Science Of Description. Criticism Is Ceremonial Revivification.

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

I Do Not Believe In God, But I Believe God Is Man’s Greatest Idea. Those Incapable Of Religious Feeling Or Those (like Hard-core Gay Activists) Who Profane Sacred Ground Do Not Have The Imagination To Educate The Young. … Until The Left Comes To Its Senses About The Cultural Power Of Religion, The Right Will Continue To Broaden Its Appeal.

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

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.

Profanation And Violation Are Part Of The Perversity Of Sex, Which Never Will Conform To Liberal Theories Of Benevolence. Every Model Of Morally Or Politically Correct Sexual Behavior Will Be Subverted By Nature's Daemonic Law.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

I Guess I'm Just A Natural Warrior.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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!

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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!

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

Minerva Save Us From The Cloying Syrup Of Coercive Compassion!

Cinema Is The Culmination Of The Obsessive, Mechanistic Male Drive In Western Culture. The Movie Projector Is An Apollonian Straight-shooter, Demonstrating The Link Between Aggression And Art. Every Pictorial Framing Is A Ritual Limitation, A Barred Precinct.

Western Culture

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

Manhood Coerced Into Sensitivity Is No Manhood At All.

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.

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

The Devil Is A Woman.

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 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.'

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

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

The Unhappy Truth Is That Male Homosexuality Will Never Be Fully Accepted By The Heterosexual Majority, Who Are Obeying The Dictates Not Of Bigoted Society Or Religion But Of Procreative Nature.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Capitalism Is An Art Form.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

The Search For Freedom Through Sex Is Doomed To Failure.

Most People Aren't Sure What's Going To Happen On A First Date. Given That Ambiguity, Every Woman Must Be Totally Aware At Every Moment That She Is Responsible For Every Choice She Makes... Protect Yourselves. See Trouble Coming.

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.

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.

Sotomayor's Vainglorious Lecture Bromide About Herself As 'a Wise Latina' Trumping White Men Is A Vulgar Embarrassment - A Vestige Of The Bad Old Days Of Male-bashing Feminism.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

The Gothic Tradition Was Begun By Ann Radcliffe, A Rare Example Of A Woman Creating An Artistic Style.

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.

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.

Cats Are Autocrats Of Naked Self-interest.

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

Rule Of Art: Cant Kills Creativity!

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.

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.

[on Hollywood:] America's Greatest Achievement.

I Am A Very Reclusive, Private Person.

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

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.

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

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

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

Though Men May Be Deep, Mentally They Are Slow.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Science Cannot Avert A Single Thunderbolt.

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

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

It's High Time For The Art World To Admit That The Avant-garde Is Dead. It Was Killed By My Hero, Andy Warhol, Who Incorporated Into His Art All The Gaudy Commercial Imagery Of Capitalism (like Campbell's Soup Cans) That Most Artists Had Stubbornly Scorned.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

Mind Is A Captive Of The Body.

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.

Is There Intellectual Life In America? At Present, The Answer Is No.

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

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

African American

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

I Support, Defend, And Admire Prostitutes, Gay Or Straight. They Do Important And Necessary Work, Whether Moralists Of The Left And Right Like It Or Not. Feminists Who Think They Can Abolish The Sex Trade Are In A State Of Massive Delusion. Only A Ruthless, Fascist Regime Of Vast Scale Could Eradicate The Rogue Sex Impulse That Is Indistinguishable From The Life Force. Simply In The Western World, Pagan Sexuality Has Survived 2000 Years Of Judaeo-christian Persecution And Is Hardly Going To Be Defeated By A Few Feminists Whacking At It With Their Brooms.

Before Feminism Was, Paglia Was!

Self-importance

The 1990s, After The Reign Of Terror Of Academic Vandalism, Will Be A Decade Of Restoration: Restoration Of Meaning, Value, Beauty, Pleasure, And Emotion To Art And Restoration Of Art To Its Audience.

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

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

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

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

Perhaps There Is No Greater Issue Facing Contemporary Women Than The Choices They Must Make About Balancing Home And Work.

The Moment There Is Imagination There Is Myth

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Poetry Is The Connecting Link Between Body And Mind.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

A Woman Simply Is, But A Man Must Become.

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?

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

As A Scholar Who Regularly Surveys Archival Material, I Think That, A Century From Now, Cultural Historians Will Find David Horowitz's Spiritual And Political Odyssey Paradigmatic For Our Time.

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Gabriela Sabatini

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