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

-Camille Paglia

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The Piddling Ignoramuses Who

Camille Paglia

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

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Anti-religious Sneers Are A Hallmark Of Perpetual Adolescents.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

Education Has Become A Prisoner Of Contemporaneity.

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.

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.

Effeminate Men Have Suffered A Bad Press The World Over.

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 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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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!

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.

Very Gifted People May Be Sociopathic In Varying Degrees.

Rule Of Art: Cant Kills Creativity!

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

When In Doubt, I Read Oscar Wilde.

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.

Government Has No Business Intervening In Any Consensual Private Behavior.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Poetry Is The Connecting Link Between Body And Mind.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

Science Cannot Avert A Single Thunderbolt.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

Contemporary Feminism Cut Itself Off From History And Bankrupted Itself When It Spun Its Puerile, Paranoid Fantasy Of Male Oppressors And Female Sex-object Victims. Woman Is The Dominant Sex.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

Capitalism Is An Art Form.

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.

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

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.

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. ?

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.

I Say The Law Should Be Blind To Race, Gender And Sexual Orientation, Just As It Claims To Be Blind To Wealth And Power. There Should Be No Specially Protected Groups Of Any Kind, Except For Children, The Severely Disabled And The Elderly, Whose Physical Frailty Demands Society's Care.

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.

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.

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

I Believe That Everybody Has The Right To View His Or Her Own Body As A Palette. However, I Think Intellectuals Should At Least Try To Be Role Models.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

It's Patriarchal Society That Has Freed Me As A Woman.

Patriarchal Society

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

The Moment There Is Imagination There Is Myth

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.

Cats Are Autocrats Of Naked Self-interest.

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.

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.

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

[t]he Most Viciously Intolerant Campus I Ever Visited As A Lecturer Was Brown, Where The Humanities Program Has Been Gutted By A Jejune Brand Of Feminist Theory And Cultural And Media Studies.

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.

Every Revolution Eventually Needs A New Revolution.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

Woman Is The Dominant Sex. Men Have To Do All Sorts Of Stuff To Prove That They Are Worthy Of Woman's Attention.

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

Manhood Coerced Into Sensitivity Is No Manhood At All.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

It Is Capitalist America That Produced The Modern Independent Woman.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

[on Hollywood:] America's Greatest Achievement.

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!

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

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

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

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

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.

Elizabeth Taylor Is Pre-feminist Woman. This Is The Source Of Her Continuing Greatness And Relevance. She Wields The Sexual Power That Feminism Cannot Explain And Has Tried To Destroy. Through Stars Like Taylor, We Sense The World-disordering Impact Of Legendary Women Like Delilah, Salome, And Helen Of Troy. Feminism Has Tried To Dismiss The Femme Fatale As A Misogynist Libel, A Hoary Clich?. But The Femme Fatale Expresses Women's Ancient And Eternal Control Of The Sexual Realm. The Specter Of The Femme Fatale Stalks All Men's Relations With Women.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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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