"Sex and nature are brutal pagan forces" (S.P., p.1)
"Sex cannot be understood because nature cannot be understood. Science is a method of logical analysis of nature's operations. It has lessened human anxiety about the cosmos by demonstrating the materiality of nature's forces, and their frequent predictability. But science is always playing catch-up ball. Nature breaks its own rules whenever it wants. Science cannot avert a single thunderbolt. 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." (S.P. p. 5)
"Our idea of the pretty is a limited cataclysmic realm of chthonian violence. We choose not to see this violence on our daily strolls. Every time we say nature is beautiful, we are saying a prayer, fingering our worry beads." (S.P. p. 15)
"Mythology's identification of women with nature is correct. The male contribution to procreation is momentary and transient. Conception is a pinpoint of time, another of our phallic peaks of action, from which the male slide back uselessly. The pregnant woman is daemonically, devilishly complete. As an ontological entity, she needs nothing and no one. (S.P. p. 12)
"Women are not in control of their bodies; nature is." (V&T p. 30)
" ... the idea of beauty is a defensive swerve from the ugliness of sex and nature. Female genitals are literally grotesque. That is, they are of the grotto, earth fissures leading to the chthonian cavern of the womb." (S.P. p. 286)
"Menstruation and childbirth are too barbaric for comedy. Their ugliness has produced the giant displacement of women's historical status as sex object, whose beauty is endlessly discussed and modified. Woman's beauty is a compromise with her dangerous archetypal allure. It gives the eye the comforting illusion of intellectual control over nature." (S.P.)
"Whenever sexual freedom is sought or achieved, sado-masochism will not be far behind." (S.P. p.3)
"Steinem/Faludi paleofeminism thinks we've got to turn men into women for us all to get along. Meanwhile, under cover of night, women on the sexual prowl are goading men into the dominant mode to maximize female pleasure." (Salon, Febr. 4, 1997)
"Homosexuality is not "normal." On the contrary, it is a challenge to the norm; therein rests its eternally revolutionary character. Note I do not call it a challenge to the *idea* of the norm. Queer theorists - that wizened crew of flimflamming free-loaders - have tried to take the poststructuralist tack of claiming that there is no norm, since everything is relative and contingent. This is the kind of silly bind that word-obsessed people get into when they are deaf, dumb, and blind to the outside world. 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. Penis fits vagina: no fancy linguistic game- playing can change that basic fact. However, my libertarian view, here as in regard to abortion, is that we have not only the right, but the obligation to defy nature's tyranny. The highest human identity consists precisely in such assertions of freedom against material limitation. Gays are heroes and martyrs who have given their lives in the greatest war of them all." (V&T p. 71)
"[Catherine] MacKinnon and [Andrea] Dworkin detest pornography because it symbolizes everything they don't understand and can't control about their own bodies. Current feminism, with its antiscience and social constructionist bias, never thinks about nature. Hence it cannot deal with sex, which begins in the body and is energized by instinctual drives. ... Pornography, which erupts into the open in periods of personal freedom, shows the dark truth about nature, concealed by the artifices of sivilization. Pornography is about lust, our animal reality that will never be fully tamed by love. Lust is elemental, aggresive, asocial. Pornography allows us to explore our deepest, most forbidden selves." "Pornography lets the body live in pagan glory, the lush, disorderly fullness of the flesh. When it defines man as the enemy, feminism is alienating women from their own bodies." "MacKinnon never deals with women as mother, lover, or hore. Snuff films are her puritan hallucinations of hellfire. She traffics in tales of terror, hysterical fantasies of death and dismemberment, which shows that she does not understand the great god Dionysus, with his terrible duality. The demons are within us." (V&T p. 108-111)
"The prostitute is not, as feminists claim, the victims of men but rather their conqueror, an outlaw who controls the sexual channel between nature and culture." (SA&AC p. 18)
"I regard all strip tease or belly dancing today as part of that long line, coming down from when dance was sacred in the cult around the Great Mother." (V&T p. 417)
"Foucault, whom I normally loathe, this is the only place where I agree with him. He believes that laws against sex shouldn't exist. I believe that as well. Where violence occurs or coercion occurs, that is the only thing you should have rules about. So much about sex is invisible." (From Seconds, January 1996)
"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."
"True radicals committed to revolutionary principles should be able to find a more thrilling poetry for their banners. Mottos I would have liked to see fly on violet satin over (the church) St. Patrick's: Penis Power; Long Live Gay Love; Paradise Now; Sympathy For The Devil; Flesh And Fantasy; There Is No God; Eat Of My Body; Sex Is Sacred; Art, Pleasure, Sex; Dionysus Lives; Bring Back Babylon; Pagans Unite; Disobey Authority; Free Your Mind." (From "That old-time religion", in Advocate, December 26. 1995)
"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."
"If you go into a women's bookstore, there's all these goddess books filled with artifacts. It's a false Jungianism. I happen to know a lot about this. All goddesses were dual: there's a positive and a negative. Like Kali: half of her arms are giving, the other half will kill you. That's what's missing, the complexity, the ambiguity, the ambivalence of woman. The power of woman. All this feminist goddess-imagery is just a schmaltzy version of a white middle-class mother who makes me want to throw up. My Sexual Personae was intended to debunk all this sentimentality." (From a pseudo-interview in Trivia, 1995, n.22)
"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 cliché. 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. "
"I have intensely disliked the tendency of many feminists to want men to be remade in a kind of shy, sensitive form to become, in essence, new kinds of women, contemporary eunuchs which is less inconvenient to women. I think that this is not in the interests of the human race. We want masculine vigor, and I'm afraid that in order to get men macho again we may have to endure a certain amount of instability in sexual relations. That is, there may have to be a kind of honorable truce between enemy camps. So what would my advice be to the sexes at the end of the century? I would say to men: get it up! And to women I would say: deal with it." (Vamps & Tramps)
"Male fear of woman's self-containment is written all over mythology and culture." (Sexual Personae, p. 277.)
"It is woman's destiny to rule men. Not to serve them, flatter them, or hang on them for guidance. Nor to insult them, demean them, or stereotype them as oppressors. Gay men and artists create a realm marked off from woman's power, but most men require women to center them and connect them to the underworld of emotional truth. When women withdraw from men, as have been done on a massive scale in lesbian feminism, we have a major cultural disaster on our hands." (V&T p. 80)
"Women must realize that in making a commitment to a man, they have merged in his unconscious life with his mother and have therefore inherited the ambivalence of that relation."
"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."
"What I see is not a world of male oppression and female victimization, but an internation conspiracy by women to keep from men the knowledge of men's own frailty. A strange maternal protectiveness is at work."
"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."
"It may be a principle of womanliness to forgive men for their childish excesses"
"The workplace is the pagan arena, where head-on crashes are the rule."
"In the rough play of the arena, women must make their own way."
Paglia on the pregnant Madonna: "People are having a slight Joan Crawford "Mommy Dearest" feeling about it ... [Does] she want a child because she can't bond with a man? You get the feeling of a child trapped in a horror movie, a fabulous mansion where the child is the only emotional bond the mother has and the mother is a control freak, a tycoon of international standing. There's something vampiristic about it." (Los Angeles Times, May 6, 1996)
"There is no female Mozart because there is no female Jack the Ripper." (S.P. p. 247)
"Happy are those periods when marriage and religion are strong. System and order shelter us against sex and nature. Unfortunalety, we live in a time when the chaos of sex has broken into the open." (S.P. p. 25)
"Art is form struggling to wake from the nightmare of nature."
"Aesthetics is at the heart of human nature." (Playboy, 1991)
"Pornography is human imagination in tense theatrical action; its violations are a protest against the violations of our freedom by nature."
"Pornography and art are indentical for me ... I think Michelangelo is a pornographer."
"... the artist ... like every man, is in exile, doomed to hover at the periphery of woman's solipsistic consciousness." (From "Looking at Art", in Art News, jan. 1986)
"A poet is not always master of his own poem, for imagination can overwhelm moral intention." (From "Sex" in Spenser Encyclopedia, ed. by A.C.Hamilton, 1989)
On Picasso's "Girl before a Mirror" (1932): "Feminism has yet to produce an artistic statement about woman equal to this in magnitude or poetic suggestiveness" ... "Since it shows woman not in her contemporary manifestation as successful careerist but rather in her most ancient archetype of solitary, pregnant divinity, we must wonder whether the painting's emerging popularity [reproductions] is not partly due to dissatisfaction and fatique with feminism's increasingly strained redefinitions of gender."
"Girl Before a Mirror" shows woman as Venus, Eve, Madonna, and witch. Creating and embracing her own reflection, she is like a painter gesturing toward an easel bearing an ovoid tondo rimmed with a rainbow" ... "Picasso's Eve is herself the tree of knowledge, her breasts and swollen belly hanging like heavy fruit."
"Picasso's fascination with women was deeply rooted: compare the multiple faces of this painting to his 1895 pastel and 1923 oil of his brunette mother, Maria, in right and left profile. Picasso's blonde mistress has his mother's name and his mother's face, which ruled his inner world."
"Picasso's gargantuan oevre demonstates not that he hated and demeaned women but that he was awed by and obsessed with female sexual power, which he observes, engages, and transmutes in all its modalities from motherhood to prostitution."
"In "The Importance of Being Earnest", the failed poet created a magnificent new poetry, one that even he did not recognize. [Oscar] Wilde's play, after Spenser's "Faerie Queene" and Shelley's "Epipsychidion", is the most dazzling burst of Apollonian poetry in English literature. It was made possible by a hermaphroditic transformation, the strangest I have ever studied. The desirable male body was efficacious for Wilde by its fixing of visible limits. Ordinarily, the epicene is synonymous with effeminacy. But the epicene made Wilde *more masculine* by giving him the aggressive power of Apollonian delimitation, which I found everywhere in the language, manners, and aristocratic social order of "The Importance of Being Earnest". The epicene gave Wilde the discipline of conceptual form that he most lacked as a sentimental lyricist. When, through his own self-thwartings, he was forced by tomblike imprisonment to abandon the amoral Greek worship of the visible world, his sentimentality returned, flooding back into the empathic "De Profundis" and bringing woman with it." (S.P. p. 571)
"TV is an art form, like Haiku." (Elle, December 1995)
"McLuhan said that we have returned to the oral tradition - the preliterate style of communication - through mass media. African-American culture for me is part of that; it's the oral tradition. So a book like [The Bell Curve] comes at the African-American culture with totally passe formulas, and I think people should realize that the electronic intelligence of Africa-American culture can be much better understood via metaphors drawn from the Internet and multimedia computer technology." (From "A Page From Paglia's Book," an interview in Netguide, May 1995)
"I feel I am Italian Catholic in by bones ... with all my interest in pornography, I've never left the Church, I've simply penetrated to its heart ... I've simply taken my religious feelings and put them into the religion of art ... What I'm doing is a homage to the artwork or to the sexual persona of Elizabeth Taylor or Rita Hayworth. They're like odes ... I feel very close to what Teresa of Avila was doing, or St. Ignatious. There's definitely a contemplative religious thing going on." (Interviewed by Thomas Ferraro, South Atlantic quarterly, 93 (1994) no 3)
"Feminism is 200 years old. It's had many phases. We can criticize the present phase without necessarily criticizing feminism, I want to save feminism from the feminists. What I identify with is the prewar feminism, ... that period of women where you had independence, self-reliance, personal responsibility, and not blaming other people for your problems." ... My feminist models are the boldly independent and childless Amelia Earhart and Katharine Hepburn, who has been outspoken in her opposition to the delusion of "having it all"." (SA&AC)
"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."
"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."
"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 siècle will be bawdy, streetwise, and on-the-spot confrontational, in the prankish Sixties way."
"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 excerising control over their lives."
"Something went very wrong in feminism ... Every revolution eventually needs a new revolution. That's what I'm trying to do. I'm not trying to get rid of feminism. I'm trying to reform it, to save it, to bring it into the twenty-first century, in a way that allows the sexes to come together instead of being alienated from each other, that allows sex to be HOT and not have, like wet blankets of sermonizing thrown over it." (SA&AC p. 274)
"An enlightened feminism of the twenty-first century will embrace all sexuality and will turn away from the delusionalism, sanctimony, prudery, and male-bashing of the MacKinnon-Dworkin brigade. Women will never know who they are until they let men be men." (V&T p. 111)
"I reject feminist rant about the "male gaze", which supposedly renders passive and inert everything it touches. ... Sexual objectification is characteristically human and indistinguishable from the art impulse." (V&T p. 62)
"Feminism, in all fields, has yet to produce a single scholar of the intellectual rank of scores of [the] learned men in the German and British academic tradition." (SA&AC p. 204)
"[Catherine] "MacKinnon is a totalitarian. She wants a risk-free, state-controlled world. .... Literature, art, music, film, television - nothing intrudes on MacKinnon's consciousness unless it has been filtered through feminism. ... She is a Stalinist who believes that art must serve a political agenda and that all opposing voices are enemies of humanity who must be silenced. MacKinnon and [Andrea] Dworkin are victim-mongers, ambulance chasers, atrocity addicts... [they] are fanatics, zealots, fundamentalists of the new feminist religion. Their alliance with the reactionary, antiporn far right is no coincidence." (V&T p. 108, 110)
On Naomi Wolf: This is a woman who graduated from Yale magna cum laude ..., and cannot write a coherent paragraph ... who cannot do historical analysis. She's full of paranoid fantasies about the world." (SA&AC p. 262)
On Germaine Greer: "What a loss. What a LOSS! If that woman had stayed on her original track, all of feminism would have been different. She was sophisticated, sexy, literate. What HAPPENED to her? After three years, she turned into this drone, this whining, "Woe is me, all the problems of the world!" (SA&AC p. 274)
"Madonna is the true feminist ... [She] has taught young women to be fully female and sexual while still exercising control over their lives. Though her enormous impact on young women around the world, Madonna is the future of feminism." (V&T p. 4-5)
(FINALLY - ONE OF MY ABSOLUTE FAVOURITES!)
"They're calling anti-woman a woman who has spent hundreds of hours with her
head between other women's legs. And who loves it and is great at it,
because I played the clarinet for years. So did Woody Allen."(From "Hurricane Camille Wreaks Havoc!" San Francisco Chronicle Image
Magazine, 9/27/92)
And if you still want MORE ...
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"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 Advocate, March 7, 1995: "Language and the Left".)
"I now address the graduate students. This is a time of enormous opportunity for you. There is an ossified political establishment of invested self-interest. Conformism and empty pieties dominate academe. Rebel. Do not read Lacan, Derrida, and Foucault, and treat as insignificant nothings those that still prate of them. You need no contemporaries to interpret the present for you. Born here, alive, now, *you* are modernity. You are the living link between the past and future. Charge yourself with the high ideal of scholarship, connecting you to Alexandria and to the devoted, distinguished scholars who came before you. When you build on learning, you build on a rock. You become greateer by a humility toward great things. Let your work follow its own organic rhythm. Seek no material return from it, and it will reward you with spiritual gold. Hate dogma. Shun careerists. If you keep the faith, the gods may give you, at midlife, the sweet pleasure of seeing the hotshots who were so fast out of the gate begin to flag and sink, just as your studies are reaching their point of maturation. Among the many important messages coming from African-American culture is this, from a hit song by Midnight Star: "No parking, baby, no parking on the dance floor." All of civilized life is a dance, a fiction. You must learn the steps without becoming enslaved by them. Sitting out the dance is not an option." ("Junk Bonds and Corporate Raiders", SA&AC p. 247)
I do not work well in meetings or committees. I'm an inflammatory type. I get very impatient. I think people are wasting time. My attitude toward committees is, "Just give me all the work and I'll do it! I'll do it in less time than it takes us to talk about what we're going to do!"
"Foucault sees power everywhere except where it is greatest: the female principle... I see his hurried, compulsive writing as a massive rationalist defense-formation to avoid thinking about a) woman, b) nature, c) emotions, and d) the sexual body." (SA&AC p. 230)
"The French theorists are eros-killers. The smouldering eroticism of great European actresses like Jeanne Moreau demonstrated to my generation woman'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." (SA&AC p. 218)
"Popular culture now offers the cosmic view, the complete view: "love and romance" and barbarity, rape, mutilation. (Interview with Thomas Ferraro, South Atlantic quarterly, 93(1994) no.3)
"... if anyone is a symbol of the establishment, it is sanctimonious, nebbishy [Noam] Chomsky, ensconced in a plush position at MIT for thirty-eight years, while [I] could get no job at a major research institution - including MIT itself, where [I] was interviewed in the Seventies." (V&T p. 495)
"[Howard Stern] is a true 60's spirit. He's completely anarchic, outside the establishment. He's bawdy, lewd, lustful. Constantly attacking sacred cows. He's also genuinely funny. He treats sex in a lustful manner. That's what we need."
"Sappho and Emily Dickinson are the only woman geniuses in poetic history. Love in Sappho, as never in Homer, is an affliction, a near-death experience. [Sappho] created our romantic tradition of emotional ambivalence." (SA&AC p. 203-205)
"I regard the Internet as a new form of guerilla theater attack against the forces of political correctness, against the feminist establishment."
"The Internet makes it possible to live anywhere in the country now; you don't have to live in a city ... I'm hoping that in the long run, the Internet will actually be a way to recover our contact with nature, because it allows people to live away from urban centers."
"I think that this new global technology is not risk-free. This is why we must resist anyone who tries to take over or oversee the Internet. Once you get a consilidation of power, then you are one step away from fascism. The minute you have a power vacuum, you have the military step in."
(All quotations: NetGuide, May 1995)