Background Image

...

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.

-Camille Paglia

...

Please Wait....
Translating....

Lacan Is A Tyrant

Camille Paglia

...

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.

Views: 5

Topic

More From Camille Paglia

It Is Capitalist America That Produced The Modern Independent Woman.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

Effeminate Men Have Suffered A Bad Press The World Over.

All The Genres Of Philosophy, Science, High Art, Athletics And Politics Were Invented By Men. But By The Promethean Law Of Conflict And Capture, Woman Has A Right To Seize What She Will And Vie With Man On Her Own Terms.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Education Has Become A Prisoner Of Contemporaneity.

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.

Rule Of Art: Cant Kills Creativity!

Every Revolution Eventually Needs A New Revolution.

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

I Am A Very Reclusive, Private Person.

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

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

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!

Society Is A System Of Inherited Forms Reducing Our Humiliating Passivity To Nature. We May Alter These Forms, Slowly Or Suddenly, But No Change In Society Will Change Nature.

Our Presence In Afghanistan Is Not Worth The Price Of Any More American Lives Or Treasure.

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

When Anything Goes, It's Women Who Lose.

The Western Mind Makes Definitions; It Draws Lines.

Foucault Is The Cagliostro Of Our Time.

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

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.

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.

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 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.

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

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

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.

Science Cannot Avert A Single Thunderbolt.

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

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

Anti-religious Sneers Are A Hallmark Of Perpetual Adolescents.

Capitalism Is An Art Form.

I Sometimes Call My New System 'italian Pagan Catholicism,' But It Could More Accurately Be Called 'pragmatic Liberalism,' With Roots In Enlightenment Political Philosophy. It Is A Synthesis Of The Enduring Dual Elements In Our Culture, Pagan And Judeo-christian, Romantic And Classic.

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

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.

Though Men May Be Deep, Mentally They Are Slow.

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

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.

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

Normal And Abnormal

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

It's Time For A Recovery And Reassessment Of North American Thinkers. Marshall Mcluhan, Leslie Fiedler And Norman O. Brown Are The Linked Triad I Would Substitute For Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida And Michel Foucault, Whose Work Belongs To Ravaged Postwar Europe And Whose Ideas Transfer Poorly Into The Anglo-american Tradition.

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.

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.

Teaching Is A Performance Art.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

My Generation Of Bossy, Confident, Baby-boom Women Were Something Brand New In History. Our Energy And Assertiveness Weren't Created By Betty Friedan, Unknown Before Her 1963 Book, Or By Gloria Steinem, Whose Political Activism, As Even The Lifetime Profile Admitted, Did Not Begin Until 1969.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

We Need A New Kind Of Feminism, One That Stresses Personal Responsibility And Is Open To Art And Sex In All Their Dark, Unconsoling Mysteries. The Feminist Of The Fin De Si?cle Will Be Bawdy, Streetwise, And On-the-spot Confrontational, In The Prankish Sixties Way.

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

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.

Cats Are Autocrats Of Naked Self-interest.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

When In Doubt, I Read Oscar Wilde.

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.

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

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

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.

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

I Believe That The Shocking Toll Of Aids On Gay Men In The West Was Partly Due To Their Seventies Delusions That A World Without Women Was Possible. All-male Energies, Unbalanced And Ravenous, Literally Tore The Body Apart.

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.

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

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

Mind Is A Captive Of The Body.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

Freud Says, "man Fears That His Strength Will Be Taken From Him By Woman, Dreads Becoming Infected With Her Femininity And Then Proving Himself A Weakling." Masculinity Must Fight Off Effeminacy Day By Day. Woman And Nature Stand Ever Ready To Reduce The Male To Boy And Infant.

Poetry Is The Connecting Link Between Body And Mind.

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.

Modernization Means Westernization.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

Very Gifted People May Be Sociopathic In Varying Degrees.

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.

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.

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.

One Of The Most Startling Discoveries Of My Career Was When I Realized That The Strongest Women In The World Are Not Lesbians But Heterosexual Women, Who Know How To Handle Men.

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

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.

Young Feminists Have Been Sold A Bill Of Goods About American Feminism. The Enormous Changes In Women Over The Past 40 Years Are Constantly And Falsely Attributed To The Organized Women's Movement Of The Late 1960s And '70s.

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 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 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.

A Woman Simply Is, But A Man Must Become.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Does Art Have A Future? Performance Genres Like Opera, Theater, Music And Dance Are Thriving All Over The World, But The Visual Arts Have Been In Slow Decline For Nearly 40 Years. No Major Figure Of Profound Influence Has Emerged In Painting Or Sculpture Since The Waning Of Pop Art And The Birth Of Minimalism In The Early 1970s.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

There Are No Accidents, Only Nature Throwing Her Weight Around. Even The Bomb Merely Releases Energy That Nature Has Put There. Nuclear War Would Be Just A Spark In The Grandeur Of Space. Nor Can Radiation Alter Nature: She Will Absorb It All. After The Bomb, Nature Will Pick Up The Cards We Have Spilled, Shuffle Them, And Begin Her Game Again.

Working Moms Commonly Testify That They Feel Guilty When They Are Away From Their Children And Guilty When They Are Not At Their Jobs. Devoted Fathers Certainly Miss Their Children Deeply, But It Does Not Seem To Be With The Same Gnawing, Primal Anxiety That Often Afflicts Women.

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

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.

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.

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

The Moment There Is Imagination There Is Myth

Promiscuity In Men May Cheapen Love But Sharpen Thought. Promiscuity In Women Is Illness, A Leakage Of Identity.

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.

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

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.

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

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

Pregnancy Demonstrates The Deterministic Character Of Woman's Sexuality.

My Prescription For Women Entering The War Zone Of The Professions: Study Football. . . . Women Who Want To Remake The Future Should Look For Guidance Not To Substitute Parent Figures But To The Brash Assertions Of Pagan Sport.

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

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

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

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

A Lesser Complaint: Hair Extensions. There Are Moments On 'all My Children' When Half The Women Actors, Young And Old, Seem To Be Afflicted By Android Barbie Creep. All Those Thick Swatches Of Lifeless Strands Clustering Lankly Round Ladies' Necks! Like Orange Tanning Spray, This Is A Fashion Fad That Should Be Put Out Of Its Misery.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

[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.

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.

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

[on Hollywood:] America's Greatest Achievement.

Trending Author

Norman Rockwell

Category