247 quotes
The femme fatale is one of the most mesmerizing of sexual personae. She is not a fiction but an extrapolation of biologic realities in women that remain constant.
Sexual Personae (1990)
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.
Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990)
Men are looking for maternal solace in women, and that's the nature of heterosexuality. Now you tell me, who really has all the power?
Playboy interview (1995)
Women have the right to freely choose and to say yes or no. Everyone should be personally responsible for what happens in life.
Sex, Art and American Culture : New Essays (1992)
Are we like late Rome, infatuated with past glories, ruled by a complacent, greedy elite, and hopelessly powerless to respond to changing conditions?
The Seventies French fad was a flight from Sixties truths, a reactionary escape into false abstraction and rationalism, masquerading as distrust of reason.
The capitalist distribution network, a complex chain of factory, transport, warehouse and retail outlet, is one of the greatest male accomplishments in the history of culture.
Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990)
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.
Vamps and Tramps (1994)
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.
Vamps and Tramps (1994)
In insisting, for political purposes, on a sharp division between gay and straight, gay activism, like much of feminism, has become as rigid and repressive as the old order it sought to replace.
Sex, Art and American Culture : New Essays (1992)
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.
Vamps and Tramps (1994)
Metaphorically, every vagina has secret teeth, for the male exits as less than when he entered. The basic mechanics of conception require action in the male but nothing more than passive receptivity in the female.
Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990)
Pursuit and seduction and the essence of sexuality. It’s part of the sizzle.
The money is a confession of weakness. They have to buy women's attention. It's not a sign of power; it's a sign of weakness.
Sexuality and Gender (2002)
Love for all means coldness to something or someone. Even Jesus, let us recall, was unnecessarily rude to his mother at Cana.
Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990)
The thrill of terror is passive, masochistic, and implicitly feminine. It is imaginative submission to overwhelming superior force.
Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990)
Feminism was always wrong to pretend that women could “have it all.” It is not male society but mother nature who lays the heaviest burden on woman.
Sex, Art and American Culture : New Essays (1992)
Beauty is our weapon against nature; by it we make objects, giving them limit, symmetry, proportion. Beauty halts and freezes the melting flux of nature.
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.
Vamps and Tramps (1994)
Our feminist culture at the present moment is completely dependent on capitalism. My grandmother was still scrubbing clothes on the back porch on a washboard!
Vamps and Tramps (1994)