Free Speech Activists

"Women have ironically enjoyed a greater symbolic, if not practical freedom. Thus it is that male and not female homosexuality has been harshly punished by law. A debater in Lucian declares, “Far better that a women, in the madness of her lust, should usurp the nature of man, than that man’s noble nature should be so degraded as to play the woman.” Similarly today, lesbian interludes are a staple of heterosexual pornography. Ever since man emerged from the dominance of nature, masculinity has been the most fragile and problematic of psychic states."

"Effeminate men have suffered a bad press the world over."

"Judaism’s campaign to make divinity invisible has never fully succeeded. Images are always eluding moral control, creating the brilliant western art tradition. Idolatry is fascism of the eye. The western eye will be served, with or without the consent of conscience."

"What is Mona Lisa thinking? Nothing, of course. Her blankness is her menace and our fear. [...] Walter Pater is to call her a 'vampire,' coasting through history on her secret tasks."

"Oil painting and color, said Michelangelo, are for “women and the lazy.” His sharp-edged Apollonian style is the only way to beat back mother nature."

"I cannot be convinced that great artists are moralists. Art is first appearances, then meaning."

"The Fairie Queene makes cinema out of the west's primary principle: to see is to know; to know is to control. The Spenserian eye cuts, wounds, rapes."

"The Faerie Queene is the most extended and extensive meditation on sex in the history of poetry. It charts the entire erotic spectrum, a great chain of being rising from matter to spirit, from the coarsest lust to chastity and romantic idealism. The poem’s themes of sex and politics are parallel: the psyche, like society, must be disciplined by good government. Spenser agrees with the classical and Christian philosophers on the primacy of reason over animal appetites. He looks forward to the Romantic poets, however, in the way that he shows the sex impulse as ultimately daemonic and barbaric, breeding witches and sorcerers of evil allure. Like the Odyssey, The Faerie Queene is a heroic epic in which the masculine must evade female traps or delays."

"The sixteenth century transformed Middle English into modern English. Grammar was up for grabs. People made up vocabulary and syntax as they went along. Not until the eighteenth century would rules of English usage appear. Shakespearean language is a bizarre super-tongue, alien and plastic, twisting, turning, and forever escaping. It is untranslatable, since it knocks Anglo-Saxon root words against Norman and Greco-Roman importations sweetly or harshly, kicking us up and down rhetorical levels with witty abruptness. No one in real life ever spoke like Shakespeare’s characters. His language does not “make sense,” especially in the greatest plays. Anywhere from a third to a half of every Shakespearean play, I conservatively estimate, will always remain under an interpretive cloud. Unfortunately, this fact is obscured by the encrustations of footnotes in modern texts, which imply to the poor cowed student that if only he knew what the savants do, all would be as clear as day. Every time I open Hamlet, I am stunned by its hostile virtuosity, its elusiveness and impenetrability. Shakespeare uses language to darken. He suspends the traditional compass points of rhetoric, still quite firm in Marlowe, normally regarded as Shakespeare’s main influence. Shakespeare’s words have “aura.” This he got from Spenser, not Marlowe."

"The idea that the stars literally influence men (by a falling fluid, an influenza) is plainly untenable. But that the movements of the constellations are a clock by which earthly changes can be measured is less easy to dismiss."

"I subscribe to Jung's theory of synchronicity."

"Romanticism, like the Rousseauist Swinging Sixties, misunderstands the Dionysian as the pleasure principle, when it is in fact the gross continuum of pleasure-pain. Worshiping nature and seeking political and sexual freedom, Romanticism ends in imaginative entrammelment of every kind. Perfect freedom is intolerable and therefore impossible."

"We remain in the Romantic cycle initiated by Rousseau: liberal idealism canceled by violence, barbarism, disillusionment and cynicism."

"In Romanticism, unlike the Renaissance, Amazons retain their power. Rousseau wants it both ways. Idolizing women is natural and right, a cosmic law. On the other hand, male recessiveness is blamed on female coercion. Either way, sadomasochistic dominance and submission are inherent in Rousseausism from the start."

"Sade has barely made a dent on American academic consciousness. It is his violence far more than his sex which is so hard for liberals to accept. For Sade, sex is violence. Violence is the authentic spirit of mother nature."

"Simply follow nature, Rousseau declares. Sade, laughing grimly, agrees."

"Serial or sex murder, like fetishism, is a perversion of male intelligence. It is a criminal abstraction, masculine in its deranged egoism and orderliness. It is the asocial equivalent of philosophy, mathematics and music. There is no female Mozart because there is no female Jack the Ripper."

"Every male copulating with a woman returns to his origins in the womb. Goethe postponed intercourse until he was forty. This must be related to his self-imposed distance from his forceful mother. To refuse phallic penetration is to refuse surrender to the female matrix."

"The Gothic tradition was begun by Ann Radcliffe, a rare example of a woman creating an artistic style."

"The thrill of terror is passive, masochistic, and implicitly feminine. It is imaginative submission to overwhelming superior force."

"Butchery is not the point of vampirism. Sex - domination and submission - is."

"Woman's flirtatious arts of self-concealment mean man's approach must take the form of rape."

"Personality maintains its discreetness by an act of will. Otherwise one person will flow helplessly into another."

"In 'A Room of One's Own', Virginia Woolf satirically describes her perplexity at the bulging card catalog of the British Museum: why, she asks, are there so many books written by men about women but none by women about men? The answer to her question is that from the beginning of time men have been struggling with the threat of woman's dominance."

"Gautier says, “Baudelaire abhorred philanthropy, progressivists, utilitarians, humanitarians and utopianists.” In other words, Baudelaire condemned Rousseausism in all its forms. Today, Rousseausism has so triumphed that the arts and the avant-garde are synonymous with liberalism, an error enforced by literature teachers, with their humanist bias. I follow the Decadents in trying to drive Rousseauist benevolence out of the discourse in art and literature. The Decadents satirized the liberal faith in progress with sizzling prophecies of catastrophe and cultural collapse."

"Tranvestism is far more common among men, I noted, because it originates in the primary relation of mother and son."

"Charisma is the radiance produced by the interaction of male and female elements in a gifted personality. The charismatic woman has a masculine force and severity. The charismatic man has an entrancing female beauty. Both are hot and cold, glowing with presexual self-love."

"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."

"[Henry] James’s repressions and evasions are many, varied and exhausting. Why more people are not seen rushing shrieking from libraries, shredding James novels in their hands, I cannot say. I used to wonder whether enthusiasm for him was based on identification, since his passive, tentative heroes resemble many academics. Perhaps what is intolerable is his enshrinement in a soporific criticism. So much must be overlooked to crown him with laurel."

"Even the best critical writing on Emily Dickinson underestimates her. She is frightening. To come to her directly from Dante, Spenser, Blake, and Baudelaire is to find her sadomasochism obvious and flagrant. Birds, bees, and amputated hands are the dizzy stuff of this poetry. Dickinson is like the homosexual cultist draping himself in black leather and chains to bring the idea of masculinity into aggressive visibility."

"Emily Dickinson is the female Sade, and her poems are the prison dreams of a self-incarcerated, sadomasochistic imaginist. When she is rescued from American Studies departments and juxtaposed with Dante and Baudelaire, her barbarities and diabolical acts of will become glaringly apparent. Dickinson inherits through Blake the rape cycle of The Faerie Queene. Blake and Spenser are her allies in helping pagan Coleridge defeat Protestant Wordsworth."

"Richard Chase declares, "No great poet has written so much bad verse as Emily Dickinson." He blames the Victorian cult of little women for the fact that "two thirds of her work" is seriously flawed: "Her coy and oddly childish poems of nature and female friendship are products of a time when one of the careers open to women was perpetual childhood." Dickinson's sentimental feminine poems remain neglected by embarrassed scholars. I would maintain, however, that her poetry is a closed system of sexual reference and that the mawkish poems are designed to dovetail with those of violence and suffering."

"Women have been discouraged from genres such as sculpture that require studio training or expensive materials. But in philosophy, mathematics, and poetry, the only materials are pen and paper. Male conspiracy cannot explain all female failures. I am convinced that, even without restrictions, there still would have been no female Pascal, Milton, or Kant. Genius is not checked by social obstacles: it will overcome. Men's egotism, so disgusting in the talentless, is the source of their greatness as a sex. [...] Even now, with all vocations open, I marvel at the rarity of the woman driven by artistic or intellectual obsession, that self-mutilating derangement of social relationship which, in its alternate forms of crime and ideation, is the disgrace and glory of the human species."

"It is no coincidence that while some major female artists have married, very few have borne children. The issue is not conservation of energy but imaginative integrity. Art is its own self-swelling, proof that the mind is greater than the body."

"Sappho is a great poet because she is a lesbian, which gives her erotic access to the Muse. Sappho and the homosexual-tending Emily Dickinson stand alone above women poets, because poetry's mystical energies are ruled by a hierach requiring the sexual subordination of her petitioners. Women have achieved more as novelists than as poets because the social novel operates outside the ancient marriage of myth and eroticism."

"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."

"Professors of humanities, with all their leftist fantasies, have little direct knowledge of American life and no impact whatever on public policy."

"We do not need French post-structuralism, whose pedantic jargon, clumsy convolutions, and prissy abstractions have spread throughout academe and the arts and are now blighting the most promising minds of the next generation. This is a major crisis if there ever was one, and every sensible person must help bring it to an end."

"Academic Marxists, with their elitist sense of superiority to popular taste, are the biggest snobs in America."

"When in doubt, I read Oscar Wilde."

"Madonna won my undying loyalty by reviving and re-creating the hard glamour of the studio-era Hollywood movie queens, figures of mythological grandeur. Contemporary feminism cut itself off from history and bankrupted itself when it spun its paranoid fantasy of male oppressors and female sex-object victims. Woman is the dominant sex. Woman’s sexual glamour has bewitched and destroyed men since Delilah and Helen of Troy."

"Incompetent amateurs have given prostitution a bad name."

"For me, the Profumo affair symbolizes the evanescence of male government compared to women’s cosmic power."

"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."

"Meryl Streep, in her Protestant way, is stuck on words; she flashes clever accents as a mask for her deeper failures. (And she cannot deliver a Jewish line; she destroyed Nora Ephron’s snappy dialogue in Heartburn.) Streep’s work doesn’t travel. Try dubbing her for movie houses in India: there’d be nothing left, just that bony, earnest horse face moving its lips. Imagine, on the other hand, lesser technicians like Hedy Lammarr, Rita Hayworth, Lana Turner: these women have an international and universal appeal, crossing the centuries. They would have been beautiful in Egypt, Greece, Rome, medieval Burgundy, or eighteenth-century Paris. Susan Hayward played Bathsheba. Try to picture Streep in a Bible epic! Streep is incapable of playing the great legendary or mythological roles. She has no elemental power, no smouldering sensuality."

"Gay and straight men have much more in common than do gay men with lesbians or straight men with straight women. Every man must define his identity against his mother. If he does not, he he just falls back into her and is swallowed up. This is the agonizing myth-pattern in the comic, matricidal Psycho (1960), one of the hauntingly emblematic films of our time."

"Contemporary feminists, who are generally poor or narrowly trained scholars, insist on viewing history as a weepy scenario of male oppression and female victimization. But it is more accurate to see men, driven by sexual anxiety away from their mothers, forming group alliances by male bonding to create complex structures of society, art, science and technology."

"When women cut themselves off from men, they sink backward into psychological and spiritual stagnancy."

"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."

"When feminism and gay activism set themselves against organized religion, they have the obligation to put something better in its place."