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Many, Perhaps Most, Very Learned People Prefer The Company Of Their Books To Sitting In A Crowd Listening To History And Art Being Mangled; Furthermore, It Is Unlikely That The Venerable Scholars Will Stand Up Afterward To Declare, "this Lecture Was A Load Of Crap." The More Profound A Professor's Distaste With The Proceedings, The More Likely He Is To Melt Away At The End Of The Talk.

-Camille Paglia

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Many, Perhaps Most, Very

Camille Paglia

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Many, Perhaps Most, Very Learned People Prefer The Company Of Their Books To Sitting In A Crowd Listening To History And Art Being Mangled; Furthermore, It Is Unlikely That The Venerable Scholars Will Stand Up Afterward To Declare, "this Lecture Was A Load Of Crap." The More Profound A Professor's Distaste With The Proceedings, The More Likely He Is To Melt Away At The End Of The Talk.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

Anti-religious Sneers Are A Hallmark Of Perpetual Adolescents.

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.

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

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.

Charisma Is The Numinous Aura Around A Narcissistic Personality. It Flows Outward From A Simplicity Or Unity Of Being And A Composure And Controlled Vitality. There Is Gracious Accommodation, Yet Commanding Impersonality. Charisma Is The Radiance Produced By The Interaction Of Male And Female Elements In A Gifted Personality. The Charismatic Woman Has A Masculine Force And Severity. The Charismatic Man Has An Entrancing Female Beauty. Both Are Hot And Cold, Glowing With Presexual Self Love.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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 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.

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.

It Is Not Male Hatred Of Women But Male Fear Of Women That Is The Great Universal.

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.

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

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

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.

A Woman Simply Is, But A Man Must Become.

Economic Analysis Is The First Principle Of Marxism. Professors Who Were Genuine Leftists Would Have Challenged The Entire Economics-driven Machinery Of American Academe The Wasteful Multidepartmental Structure, The Divisive Pedantry Of Overspecialization, The Cronyism And Sycophancy In Recruitment And Promotion, The Boondoggling Ostentation Of Pointless Conferences, The Exploitation Of Graduate Students And Part-time Teachers, The Subservience Of Faculty To Overpaid Administrators, The Mediocrity And Folly Of The Ruling Cliques Of The Modern Language Association.

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.

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

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Very Gifted People May Be Sociopathic In Varying Degrees.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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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.

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

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.

There's Something Retro About Your Persona. It's Like The Pre-world War Ii Generation Of Reporters - Those Unpretentious, Working-class Guys Who Hung Around Saloons And Used Rough Language. Now They've All Been Replaced With These Effete Ivy League Elitists Who Swarm Over The Current Media. Nerds - Utterly Dull And Insipid.

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.

Cats Are Autocrats Of Naked Self-interest.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Feminism Has Tried To Dismiss The Femme Fatale As A Misogynist Libel, A Hoary Cliche. But The Femme Fatale Expresses Woman's Ancient And Eternal Control Of The Sexual Realm. The Specter Of The Femme Fatale Stalks All Of Men's Relationships With Women.

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

Capitalism Is An Art Form.

Science Cannot Avert A Single Thunderbolt.

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.

Greek Pederasty Honored The Erotic Magnetism Of Male Adolescence In A Way That Today Brings Police To The Door. Children Are More Conscious And Perverse Than Parents Like To Think.

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

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.

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.

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 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 Western Mind Makes Definitions; It Draws Lines.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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 Believe That History Has Shape, Order, And Meaning; That Exceptional Men, As Much As Economic Forces, Produce Change; And That Passe Abstractions Like Beauty, Nobility, And Greatness Have A Shifting But Continuing Validity.

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

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.

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.

In The Theory Of Gender I Began From Zero. There Is No Masculine Power Or Privilege I Did Not Covet. But Slowly, Step By Step, Decade By Decade, I Was Forced To Acknowledge That Even A Woman Of Abnormal Will Cannot Escape Her Hormonal Identity.

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.'

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.

Man Has Traditionally Ruled The Social Sphere; Feminism Tells Him To Move Over And Share His Power. But Woman Rules The Sexual And Emotional Sphere, And There She Has No Rival. Victim Ideology, A Caricature Of Social History, Blocks Women From Recognition Of Their Dominance In The Deepest, Most Important Realm. ?

Teaching Is A Performance Art.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Nature, I Have Constantly Argued In My Work, Is The Real Superpower Of This Godless Universe. It Is The Ultimate Disposer Of Human Fate, Randomly Recarving Geography Over 10,000-year Epochs.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

Everyone Of My Generation Who Preached Free Love Is Responsible For Aids.

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

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

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.

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

Although I'm An Atheist Who Believes Only In Great Nature, I Recognize The Spiritual Richness And Grandeur Of The Roman Catholicism In Which I Was Raised.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

Manhood Coerced Into Sensitivity Is No Manhood At All.

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

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

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.

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.

Minerva Save Us From The Cloying Syrup Of Coercive Compassion!

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

I Consider Myself 100 Percent A Feminist, At Odds With The Feminist Establishment In America. For Me The Great Mission Of Feminism Is To Seek The Full Political And Legal Equality Of Women With Men. However, I Disagree With Many Of My Fellow Feminists As An Equal Opportunity Feminist, Who Believes That Feminism Should Only Be Interested In Equal Rights Before The Law. I Utterly Oppose Special Protection For Women Where I Think That A Lot Of The Feminist Establishment Has Drifted In The Last 20 Years.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

The Idea That Emotion Can Be Separated From Sex Is A Christian Illusion, One Of The Most Ingenious But Finally Unworkable Strategies In Christianity's Ancient Campaign Against Pagan Nature.

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

Women's Studies Needed A Syllabus And So Invented A Canon Overnight. It Puffed Up Clunky, Mundane Contemporary Women Authors Into Oz-like, Skywriting Dirigibles. Our Best Women Students Are Being Force-fed An Appalling Diet Of Cant, Drivel And Malarkey.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

It Is Capitalist America That Produced The Modern Independent Woman.

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

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.

Madonna Is The True Feminist. She Exposes The Puritanism And Suffocating Ideology Of American Feminism, Which Is Stuck In An Adolescent Whining Mode. Madonna Has Taught Young Women To Be Fully Female And Sexual While Still Exercising Control Over Their Lives.

The Devil Is A Woman.

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

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