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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.

-Camille Paglia

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I Support, Defend, And

Camille Paglia

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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.

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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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

When Feminism And Gay Activism Set Themselves Against Organized Religion, They Have The Obligation To Put Something Better In Its Place.

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.

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

We Should Teach General Ethics To Both Men And Women, But Sexual Relationships Themselves Must Not Be Policed. Sex, Like The City Streets, Would Be Risk-free Only In Totalitarian Regimes.

Effeminate Men Have Suffered A Bad Press The World Over.

Government Has No Business Intervening In Any Consensual Private Behavior.

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.

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

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.

Modernization Means Westernization.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Minerva Save Us From The Cloying Syrup Of Coercive Compassion!

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.

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.

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.

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.

Capitalism Is An Art Form.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

Lately, I've Been Doing A Lot Of Tuning In And Impatiently Tuning Out. As A Longtime Fan Of Talk Radio, I Don't Think This Bodes Well For The Long-term Broad Appeal Of The Medium.

The Western Mind Makes Definitions; It Draws Lines.

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

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

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

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.

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

As A Major Contemporary Composer, Madonna Should Not Let The Eye Dictate To The Ear.

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.

Foucault Is The Cagliostro Of Our Time.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

The 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.

My Advice To The Reader Approaching A Poem Is To Make The Mind Still And Blank. Let The Poem Speak. This Charged Quiet Mimics The Blank Space Ringing The Printed Poem, The Nothing Out Of Which Something Takes Shape.

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.

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

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.

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

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

Mind Is A Captive Of The Body.

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

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.

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

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.

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

The Stigma Of The Prostitute Is The Badge Of Her Identity. That Is Why The Client Goes To Her. If He Wanted Someone Without A Stigma, He'd Go And Screw The Lady Next Door.

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

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.

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

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

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

What Is Mona Lisa Thinking? Nothing, Of Course. Her Blankness Is Her Menace And Our Fear. [...] Walter Pater Is To Call Her A 'vampire,' Coasting Through History On Her Secret Tasks.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

It Is Capitalist America That Produced The Modern Independent Woman.

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.

[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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

Madonna Has A Far Profounder Vision Of Sex Than Do The Feminists. She Sees Both The Animality And The Artifice. Changing Her Costume Style And Hair Color Virtually Every Month, Madonna Embodies The Eternal Values Of Beauty And Pleasure. Feminism Says, 'no More Masks.' Madonna Says We Are Nothing But Masks. Through Her Enormous Impact On Young Women Around The World, Madonna Is The Future Of Feminism.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

In Insisting, For Political Purposes, On A Sharp Division Between Gay And Straight, Gay Activism, Like Much Of Feminism, Has Become As Rigid And Repressive As The Old Order It Sought To Replace.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

Teaching Is A Performance Art.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

Out With Stereotypes, Feminism Proclaims. But Stereotypes Are The West's Stunning Sexual Personae, The Vehicles Of Art's Assault Against Nature. The Moment There Is Imagination, There Is Myth.

If 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.

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 Registered Democrat Who Is Determined To Return My Party To The Proletarian Principles Of The Franklin D. Roosevelt Era.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

Though Men May Be Deep, Mentally They Are Slow.

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

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

The Bible Has Come Under Fire For Making Woman The Fall Guy In Man's Cosmic Drama. But In Casting A Male Conspirator, The Serpent, As God's Enemy, Genesis Hedges And Does Not Take Its Misogyny Far Enough. The Bible Defensively Swerves From God's True Opponent, Chthonian Nature. The Serpent Is Not Outside Eve But In Her. She Is The Garden And The Serpent.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Men Who Shrink From Penetration Of The Female Body Are Paralyzed By Justifiable Apprehension, Since They Are Returning To Our Uncanny Site Of Origin.

The 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.

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.

The Moment There Is Imagination There Is Myth

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

Men Know They Are Sexual Exiles. They Wander The Earth Seeking Satisfaction, Craving And Despising, Never Content. There Is Nothing In That Anguished Motion For Women To Envy.

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

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.

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.

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

Your Life Is A Fellini Film, Lacking Only Anita Ekberg With A Cat On Her Head.

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

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