"Nature is a hard taskmaker. It is the hammer and the anvil, crushing
individuality. Perfect freedom would be to die by earth, air, water,
and fire."
"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. "
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"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)
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Camille Paglia on Pre-Raphaelitism
"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)
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"Feminism has betrayed women, alienated men and women, replaced dialogue with
political correctness". (Playboy, May 1995)
"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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"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."
"True Leftism is all about releasing your own tongue." (From Seconds, January 1996)
"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!"
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"Mye idol is Keith Richards, the Rolling Stones rhythm guitarist who
made menacing music out of the Dionysian darkness never seen by the
society-obsessed Foucault. The thunderous power chords of the hard rock smash
the dreary little world of French theory." (SA&AC p. 228-9)
"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)
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"We need someone like [Gore] Vidal present in the country all the time...
He is a true gay role model, a man of culture and learning and style who
represents the best of a worldliness that is conspicuously lacking today.
With his courtly manner, Vidal is a patrician throwback. I love his
acerbic, waspish style. His fearlessness. The bold attacks."
"... 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."
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"At this point, I'm the leading woman intellectual in the world. There's no one else." (From Seconds, January 1996)
"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)
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"The Internet is simply the ultimate proof - the ultimate demonstration - of the
imaginary content of sexual desire."
"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)
A few more great quotes On Cyber Nation
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