247 quotes
Sexual freedom, sexual liberation. A modern delusion. We are hierarchical animals. Sweep one hierarchy away, and another will take its place, perhaps less palatable than the first.
Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990)
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.
Vamps and Tramps (1994)
Pornography does not cause rape or violence, which predate pornography by thousands of years. Rape and violence occur not because of patriarchal conditioning but because of the opposite, a breakdown of social controls.
Vamps and Tramps (1994)
For me, I don't believe in God, yet I believe in all Gods. I believe that the great religions of the world are these repositories of spiritual experience. And each one of the great world religions contains insights about the nature of the universe.
I'm an atheist, but I see the great world religions as enormous works of art. As the best way to understand the universe and man's place in it.
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)
Leaving sex to the feminists is like letting your dog vacation at the taxidermist.
Sex from Plato to Paglia : A Philosophical Encyclopedia (2006)
I don't want special protection for gays or transgender. I'm saying there should be protections for all dissident behavior and speech. Dissidents of every kind.
Free Women, Free Men (2017)
Sotomayor's vainglorious lecture bromide about herself as 'a wise Latina' trumping white men is a vulgar embarrassment - a vestige of the bad old days of male-bashing feminism.
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)
It was intended to please no one and to offend everyone. The entire process of the book was to discover the repressed elements of contemporary culture, whatever they are, and palpate them.
I admire hard-bitten, wisecracking realism of Ida Lupino and the film noir heroines. I’m sick of simpering white girls with their princess fantasies.
Vamps and Tramps (1994)
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)
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.
Vamps and Tramps (1994)
What I see is not a world of male oppression and female victimization but an international conspiracy by women to keep from men the knowledge of men's own frailty. A strange maternal protectiveness is at work.
Vamps and Tramps (1994)
[W]omen will never be taken seriously until they accept full responsibility for their sexuality.
Sex, Art and American Culture : New Essays (1992)
The reason Wilde did his best work after turning homosexual is that women simply reinforced his own feminine sentimentality. … Heterosexuality inhibited his imagination because woman is physically and psychologically internal.
Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990)
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)
I’m saying that men go from control by their mothers to control by their wives, and this is the horror of men’s lives. And feminism refuses to see this.
Vamps and Tramps (1994)