76 quotes
Pursuit and seduction are the essence of sexuality. It’s part of the sizzle.
Sex, Art and American Culture : New Essays (1992)
Women have to understand this correctly and they'll protect themselves better. If a real rape occurs, it's got to go to the police.
Sex, Art and American Culture : New Essays (1992)
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.
Sex, Art and American Culture : New Essays (1992)
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.
Sex, Art and American Culture : New Essays (1992)
I feel that the moment a date happens that it’s a social encounter that is potentially a sexual encounter. And the question of sex needs to be negotiated from the first moment on.
Sex, Art and American Culture : New Essays (1992)
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.
Sex, Art and American Culture : New Essays (1992)
[W]omen will never be taken seriously until they accept full responsibility for their sexuality.
Sex, Art and American Culture : New Essays (1992)
I am saying that many of the problems between the sexes are coming from something prior to socialization, a turbulence that has to do with every boy’s origin in a woman’s body, and the way he is overwhelmed by this huge, matriarchal shadow of a goddess figure from his childhood.
Sex, Art and American Culture : New Essays (1992)
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.
Sex, Art and American Culture : New Essays (1992)
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.
Sex, Art and American Culture : New Essays (1992)
[T]here’s a lot to be said for celibacy, for the concentration of your mental and physical energy.
Sex, Art and American Culture : New Essays (1992)
Rape is an outrage that cannot be tolerated in a civilized society. Yet feminism, which has waged a crusade for rape to be taken more seriously, has put young women in danger by hiding the truth about sex from them.
Sex, Art and American Culture : New Essays (1992)
In high school in the early Sixties, I dreamed of intellectual work by women that would match the highest male standards and set men on their ear. A lot of women have done a lot of academic work since then, but most of them fall short of that standard.
Sex, Art and American Culture : New Essays (1992)
Men knew that if they devirginized a woman, they could end up dead within twenty-four hours. These controls have been removed.
Sex, Art and American Culture : New Essays (1992)
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.
Sex, Art and American Culture : New Essays (1992)
Feminism has tried to dismiss the femme fatale as a misogynist libel, a hoary cliche. But the femme fatale expresses woman's ancient and eternal control of the sexual realm. The specter of the femme fatale stalks all of men's relationships with women.
Sex, Art and American Culture : New Essays (1992)
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.
Sex, Art and American Culture : New Essays (1992)
The junk-bond era has also spawned something that calls itself New Historicism. This seems to be a refuge for English majors without critical talent or broad learning in history or political science. [...] To practice it, you must apparently lack all historical sense.
Sex, Art and American Culture : New Essays (1992)
When in doubt, I read Oscar Wilde.
Sex, Art and American Culture : New Essays (1992)
A woman simply is, but a man must become. Masculinity is risky and elusive. It is achieved by a revolt from woman, and is confirmed only by other men. Feminist fantasies about the ideal “sensitive” male have failed. Manhood coerced into sensitivity is no manhood at all.
Sex, Art and American Culture : New Essays (1992)