Background Image

...

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.

-Camille Paglia

...

Please Wait....
Translating....

The 1990s, After The

Camille Paglia

...

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.

Views: 11

Topic

More From Camille Paglia

[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.

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'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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

My Political Philosophy As A Libertarian Says That Government Has No Business Intervening In Any Consensual Private Behavior. My Professional Ethic As A Thinker And Writer, However, Says That Self-knowledge Is Our Ultimate Responsibility

It Is Capitalist America That Produced The Modern Independent Woman. Never In History Have Women Had More Freedom Of Choice In Regard To Dress, Behavior, Career, And Sexual Orientation.

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.

Poetry Is The Connecting Link Between Body And Mind.

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.

Teaching Is A Performance Art.

The Devil Is A Woman.

Effeminate Men Have Suffered A Bad Press The World Over.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

Rule Of Art: Cant Kills Creativity!

The Moment There Is Imagination There Is Myth

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

Man Is Not Merely The Sum Of His Masks. Behind The Shifting Face Of Personality Is A Hard Nugget Of Self, A Genetic Gift.... The Self Is Malleable But Elastic, Snapping Back To Its Original Shape Like A Rubber Band. Mental Illness Is No Myth, As Some Have Claimed. It Is A Disturbance In Our Sense Of Possession Of A Stable Inner Self That Survives Its Personae.

The Moral Ambivalence Of The Great Mother Goddesses Has Been Conveniently Forgotten By Those American Feminists Who Have Resurrected Them. We Cannot Grasp Nature's Bare Blade Without Shedding Our Own Blood.

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.

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

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 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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

Normal And Abnormal

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.

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.

Because I'm Criticizing Liberalism, People Automatically Call Me A Conservative. This Is Madness! The Idea That Somehow One Cannot Critique Liberalism From The Left, From The Left Wing Of Liberalism. I Mean, How Can People Be So Stupid?

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.

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 Western Mind Makes Definitions; It Draws Lines.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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 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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

Capitalism Is An Art Form.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

Science Cannot Avert A Single Thunderbolt.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Every Revolution Eventually Needs A New Revolution.

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

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.

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.

The North American Intellectual Tradition Began, I Maintain, In The Encounter Of British Romanticism With Assertive, Pragmatic North American English - The Protestant Plain Style In Both The U.s. And Canada, With Its No-nonsense Scottish Immigrants.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

Masculinity Is Risky And Elusive. It Is Achieved By A Revolt From Woman, And It Is Confirmed Only By Other Men. Manhood Coerced Into Sensitivity Is No Manhood At All.

The Saints, Many Of Them Women, Warred With Themselves As Well As God. The Body Has Its Own Animal Urges, Just As There Are Attractions And Repulsions In Sex That Modern Liberalism Cannot Face.

The More Woman Aims For Personal Identity And Autonomy ... The Fiercer Will Be Her Struggle With Nature - That Is, With The Intractable Physical Laws Of Her Own Body. And The More Nature Will Punish Her: 'do Not Dare To Be Free! For Your Body Does Not Belong To You.'

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.

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

Though Men May Be Deep, Mentally They Are Slow.

Mind Is A Captive Of The Body.

Minerva Save Us From The Cloying Syrup Of Coercive Compassion!

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.

Sappho Is A Great Poet Because She Is A Lesbian, Which Gives Her Erotic Access To The Muse. Sappho And The Homosexual-tending Emily Dickinson Stand Alone Above Women Poets, Because Poetry's Mystical Energies Are Ruled By A Hierach Requiring The Sexual Subordination Of Her Petitioners. Women Have Achieved More As Novelists Than As Poets Because The Social Novel Operates Outside The Ancient Marriage Of Myth And Eroticism.

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

[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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

My Generation Of The Sixties, With All Our Great Ideals, Destroyed Liberalism, Because Of Our Excesses.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

There Is No Gay Leader Anywhere Near The Stature Of Martin Luther King, Because Black Activism Drew On The Profound Spiritual Tradition Of The Church, To Which Gay Political Rhetoric Is Childishly Hostile.

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

Women Will Never Be Taken Seriously Until They Accept Full Responsibility For Their Sexuality.

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

Before Feminism Was, Paglia Was!

Self-importance

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

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

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.

Visionary Idealism Is A Male Art Form. The Lesbian Aesthete Does Not Exist. But If There Were One, She Would Have Learned From The Perverse Male Mind.

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.

Education Has Become A Prisoner Of Contemporaneity.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

Because Most Of My Career In The Classroom Has Been At Art Schools (beginning At Bennington In The 1970s), I Am Hyper-aware Of The Often Grotesque Disconnect Between Commentary On The Arts And The Actual Practice Or Production Of The Arts.

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

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.

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.

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.

A Woman Simply Is, But A Man Must Become.

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.

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

Male Mastery In Marriage Is A Social Illusion, Nurtured By Women Exhorting Their Creations To Play And Walk. At The Emotional Heart Of Every Marriage Is A Pietà Of Mother And Son.

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.

The Dionysian Is No Picnic.

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.

Trending Author

William Nicholson

Category