Book detail: Sex, Art, and American Culture: Essays is presented as a focused source page for quotations connected with this book, collection, transcript, or source record.
This book delves into the complex relationship between sex and art within the context of American culture, offering insights into various aspects of societal norms, artistic expression, and cultural values.
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“Minerva save us from the cloying syrup of coercive compassion!”
Source: Sex, Art, and American Culture: Essays
“Even a woman of abnormal will cannot escape her hormonal identity.”
Source: Sex, Art, and American Culture: Essays
“When in doubt, I read Oscar Wilde.”
Source: Sex, Art, and American Culture: Essays
“What troubles me about the "hostile workplace" category of sexual harassment policy is that women are being returned to their old status of delicate flowers who must be protected from assault by male lechers. It is anti-feminist to ask for special treatment for women.”
Source: Sex, Art, and American Culture: Essays
“Minerva save us from the cloying syrup of coercive compassion! What feminism does not need, it seems to me, is an endless recycling of Doris Day Fifties clichés about noble womanhood.”
Source: Sex, Art, and American Culture: Essays
“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.”
Source: Sex, Art, and American Culture: Essays
“Not since the Black Panthers sailed into their Upper East Side tea party has there been so daffy an exercise in radical chic.”
Source: Sex, Art, and American Culture: Essays
“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.”
Source: Sex, Art, and American Culture: Essays
“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.”
Source: Sex, Art, and American Culture: Essays
“When feminism and gay activism set themselves against organized religion, they have the obligation to put something better in its place.”
Source: Sex, Art, and American Culture: Essays
“The saints, many of them women, warred with themselves as well as God. The body has its own animal urges, just as there are attractions and repulsions in sex that modern liberalism cannot face.”
Source: Sex, Art, and American Culture: Essays
“Running to Mommy and Daddy on the campus grievance committee is unworthy of strong women.”
Source: Sex, Art, and American Culture: Essays
“Lacan is a tyrant who must be driven from our shores. Narrowly trained English professors who know nothing of art history or popular culture think they can just wade in with Lacan and trash everything in sight.”
Source: Sex, Art, and American Culture: Essays
“Academic Marxists, with their elitist sense of superiority to popular taste, are the biggest snobs in America.”
Source: Sex, Art, and American Culture: Essays
“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.”
Source: Sex, Art, and American Culture: Essays
“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.”
Source: Sex, Art, and American Culture: Essays
“Men knew that if they devirginized a woman, they could end up dead within twenty-four hours. These controls have been removed.”
Source: Sex, Art, and American Culture: Essays
“Education has become a prisoner of contemporaneity.”
Source: Sex, Art, and American Culture: Essays
“My anti-liberal position should not be mistaken for conservatism.”
Source: Sex, Art, and American Culture: Essays
“Every year, feminists provide more and more evidence for the old charge that women can neither think nor write.”
Source: Sex, Art, and American Culture: Essays
“Hollywood, America's greatest modern contribution to world culture, is a business, a religion, an art form, and a state of mind.”
Source: Sex, Art, and American Culture: Essays
“before feminism was, Paglia was!”
Source: Sex, Art, and American Culture: Essays
“Madonna's great instinctive intelligence was evident to me from her earliest videos.”
Source: Sex, Art, and American Culture: Essays
“Man is not merely the sum of his masks. Behind the shifting face of personality is a hard nugget of self, a genetic gift.... The self is malleable but elastic, snapping back to its original shape like a rubber band. Mental illness is no myth, as some have claimed. It is a disturbance in our sense of possession of a stable inner self that survives its personae.”
Source: Sex, Art, and American Culture: Essays
“Gay men may seek sex without emotion; lesbians often end up in emotion without sex.”
Source: Sex, Art, and American Culture: Essays
“Western man represents himself, on the political or psychological stage, in a spectacular world-theater. Our personality is innately cinematic, light-charged projections flickering on the screen of Western consciousness.”
Source: Sex, Art, and American Culture: Essays
“Every man must define his identity against his mother. If he does not, he just falls back into her and is swallowed up.”
Source: Sex, Art, and American Culture: Essays
“Woman is the dominant sex. Men have to do all sorts of stuff to prove that they are worthy of woman's attention.”
Source: Sex, Art, and American Culture: Essays
“The only thing that will be remembered about my enemies after they're dead is the nasty things I've said about them.”
Source: Sex, Art, and American Culture: Essays
“Pursuit and seduction are the essence of sexuality. It's part of the sizzle.”
Source: Sex, Art, and American Culture: Essays
“Manhood coerced into sensitivity is no manhood at all.”
Source: Sex, Art, and American Culture: Essays
“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.”
Source: Sex, Art, and American Culture: Essays
“A woman simply is, but a man must become.”
Source: Sex, Art, and American Culture: Essays
“Modern bodybuilding is ritual, religion, sport, art, and science, awash in Western chemistry and mathematics. Defying nature, it surpasses it.”
Source: Sex, Art, and American Culture: Essays
“Though men may be deep, mentally they are slow.”
Source: Sex, Art, and American Culture: Essays
“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.”
Source: Sex, Art, and American Culture: Essays
“I believe that history has shape, order, and meaning; that exceptional men, as much as economic forces, produce change; and that passe abstractions like beauty, nobility, and greatness have a shifting but continuing validity.”
Source: Sex, Art, and American Culture: Essays
“The prostitute is not, as feminists claim, the victim of men, but rather their conqueror, an outlaw, who controls the sexual channels between nature and culture”
Source: Sex, Art, and American Culture: Essays
“Teenage boys, goaded by their surging hormones run in packs like the primal horde. They have only a brief season of exhilarating liberty between control by their mothers and control by their wives.”
Source: Sex, Art, and American Culture: Essays
“Masculinity is risky and elusive. It is achieved by a revolt from woman, and it is confirmed only by other men. Manhood coerced into sensitivity is no manhood at all.”
Source: Sex, Art, and American Culture: Essays
“Women are in league with each other, a secret conspiracy of hearts and pheromones”
Source: Sex, Art, and American Culture: Essays
“Despite crime's omnipresence, things work in society, because biology compels it. Order eventually restores itself, by psychic equilibrium.”
Source: Sex, Art, and American Culture: Essays
“There is no true expertise in the humanities without knowing all of the humanities. Art is a vast, ancient interconnected web-work, a fabricated tradition. Over-concentration on any one point is a distortion.”
Source: Sex, Art, and American Culture: Essays
“Mental illness is no myth, as some have claimed. It is a disturbance in our sense of possession of a stable inner self that survives its personae.”
Source: Sex, Art, and American Culture: Essays
“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.”
Source: Sex, Art, and American Culture: Essays
“When anything goes, it's women who lose.”
Source: Sex, Art, and American Culture: Essays
“Education has become a prisoner of contemporaneity. It is the past, not the dizzy present, that is the best door to the future.”
Source: Sex, Art, and American Culture: Essays
“Leaving sex to the feminists is like letting your dog vacation at the taxidermist.”
Source: Sex, Art, and American Culture: Essays
“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 clich?. 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.”
Source: Sex, Art, and American Culture: Essays
“You have to accept the fact that part of the sizzle of sex comes from the danger of sex. You can be overpowered.”
Source: Sex, Art, and American Culture: Essays