V 1.2
The Bible has come under fire for making woman the fall guy in man's cosmic drama.
Tragedy plays a male game, a game it invented to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat.
Tragedy is the most western literary genre.
Sex cannot be understood because nature cannot be understood.
The western eye makes thing, idols of Apollonian objectification.
We could make an epic catalog of male achievements, from paved roads, indoor plumbing, and washing machines to eyeglasses, antibiotics, and disposable diapers.
Western love has been ambivalent from the start.
The westerner knows by seeing.
Society is an artificial construction.
The femme fatale is one of the most mesmerizing of sexual personae.
Woman's reproductive apparatus is vastly more complicated than man's, and still ill-understood.
The permanence of the femme fatale as a sexual persona is part of the weary weight of eroticism, beneath which both ethics and religion founder.
Western culture has a roving eye.
Every menstruating or childbearing woman is a pagan and primitive cast back to those distant ocean shores from which we have never fully evolved.
Sexuality and eroticism are the intricate intersection of nature and culture.
Buddhist cultures retained the ancient meanings of femaleness long after the west renounced them.
Feminism dismisses the femme fatale as a cartoon and libel.
The old "double standard" gave men a sexual liberty denied to women.
Every month for women is a new defeat of the will.
Sex is daemonic.
Art is a temenos, a sacred place.
Through concentration to projection into the beyond.
Western culture from the start has swerved from femaleness.
The pagan dialectic of Apollonian and Dionysian was sweepingly comprehensive and accurate about mind and nature.
Modern liberalism suffers unresolved contradictions.
Emotion is passion, a continuum of eroticism and aggression.
The cool beauty of the femme fatale is another transformation of chthonian ugliness.
Art makes things.
My explanation for the male domination of art, science, and politics, an indisputable fact of history, is based on an analogy between sexual physiology and aesthetics.
Paganism never was the unbridled sexual licentiousness portrayed by missionaries of the young, embattled Christianity.
We are voyeurs at the perimeters of art, and there is a sadomasochistic sensuality in our responses to it.
The male genital metaphor is concentration and projection.
Hence the sexes are caught in a comedy of historical indebtedness.
Everything great in western culture has come from the quarrel with nature.
Tragedy's inhospitality to woman springs from nature's inhospitality to man.
Pornography's male-born explicitness renders visible what is invisible, woman's chthonian internality.
Apollonian thing-making is the main line of western civilization, extending from ancient Egypt to the present.
Androgyny, which some feminists promote as a pacifist blueprint for sexual utopia, belongs to the contemplative rather than active life.
Even now, it is usually men rather than women who claim logic's superiority to emotion.
The major women of tragedy - Euripides' Medea and Phaedra, Shakespeare's Cleopatra and Lady Macbeth, Racine's Phèdra - skew the genre by their disruptive relation to male action.
The femme fatale was produced by the mystique of connection between mother and child.
Profanation and violation are part of the perversity of sex, which never will conform to liberal theories of benevolence.
Hence the male domination of art and science.
Woman's body is a secret, sacred space.
Mythology's identification of woman with nature is correct.
Man's metaphors of concentration and projection are echoes of both body and mind.
Rousseau rejects original sin, Christianity's pessimistic view of man born unclean, with a propensity for evil.
The cumbersome, solipsistic character of female physiology is tediously evident at sports events and rock concerts, where fifty women wait in line for admission to the sequestered cells of the toilet.
The daemonism of chthonian nature is the west's dirty secret.
This book shows how much in culture goes against our best wishes.
That popular culture reclaims what high culture shuts out is clear in the case of pornography.
Sex object, art work, personality: western experience is cellular and divisive.
How we know the world and how it knows us are underlain by shadow patterns of sexual biography and sexual geography.
Woman was an idol of belly-magic.
The chthonian superflux of emotion is a male problem.
The search for freedom through sex is doomed to failure.
Christianity, wiping out paganism's secular glamours, tried to make spirituality primary.
Art is order.
Like art, sex is fraught with symbols.
Capitalist products are another version of the art works flooding western culture.
The most effective weapon against the flux of nature is art.
Both the Apollonian and Judeo-Christian traditions are transcendental.
The female body's unbearable hiddenness applies to all aspects of men's dealings with women.
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.
The woundlike rawness of female genitals is a symbol of the unredeemability of chthonian nature.
Happy are those periods when marriage and religion are strong.
The power of the eye in western culture has not been fully appreciated or analyzed.
Our focus on the pretty is an Apollonian strategy.
Paganism is eye-intense.
If sexual physiology provides the pattern for our experience of the world, what is woman's basic metaphor?
That nature acts upon the sexes differently is proved by the test case of modern male and female homosexuality, illustrating how the sexes function separately outside social convention.
The ghost-ridden character of sex is implicit in Freud's brilliant theory of "family romance."
The latent metaphors of the body guarantee the survival of rape, which is a development in degree of intensity alone of the basic movements of sex.
In the beginning was nature.
The Apollonian things of western sex and art reach their economic glorification in capitalism.
Rousseauist psychologies like feminism assert the ultimate benevolence of human emotion.
Nature is a Darwinian spectacle of the eaters and the eaten.
The war between Judeo-Christianity and paganism is still being waged in the latest ideologies of the university.
Feminism has been simplistic in arguing that female archetypes were politically motivated falsehoods by men.
There is no such thing as "mere" image.
Man, the sexual conceptualizer and projector, has ruled art because art is his Apollonian response toward and away from woman.
Everything is melting in nature.
This book takes the point of view of Sade, the most unread major writer in western literature.
We are moving in this chapter toward a theory of beauty.
Sexual freedom, sexual liberation.
Our knowledge of these fantasies is expanded by pornography, which is why pornography should be tolerated, though its public display may reasonably be restricted.
Everything sacred and inviolable provokes profanation and violation.
Woman's current advance in society is not a voyage from myth to truth but from myth to new myth.
Word-worship has made it difficult for scholarship to deal with the radical cultural change of our era of mass media.
Sex is a far darker power than feminism has admitted.
We must ask whether the equivalence of male and female in Far Eastern symbolism was as culturally efficacious as the hierarchization of male over female has been in the west.
The history of costume belongs to art history but is too often regarded as a journalistic lady's adjunct to scholarship.
Few Greek tragedies fully conform to the humanist commentary on them.
Human life began in flight and fear.
Name and person are part of the west's quest for form.
Concentration and projection are remarkably demonstrated by urination, one of male anatomy's most efficient compartmentalizations.
Nature's cycles are woman's cycles.
The evolution from earth-cult to sky-cult shifts woman into the nether realm.
Judeo-Christianity has failed to control the pagan western eye.
The identification of woman with nature is the most troubled and troubling term in this historical argument.
Nature is a Darwinian spectacle of the eaters and the eaten.
Repression is an evolutionary adaptation permitting us to function under the burden of our expanded consciousness.
And erection is a thought and the orgasm an act of imagination.
Female tragic protagonists are rare.Capitalism, gaudy and greedy, has been inherent in western aesthetics from ancient Egypt on.
Male sex is quest romance, exploration and speculation.
The western cells of holiness and criminality are a cognitive advance in human history.
What has nature given man to defend himself against woman?
The pagan ritual identity of sex and violence is mass media's chief check to the complacent Rousseauism of modern humanists.
There are no accidents, only nature throwing her weight around.
Woman does not dream of transcendental or historical escape from natural cycle, since she is that cycle.
The quest romance is a war between identity and annihilation.
The female body is a chthonian machine, indifferent to the spirit who inhabits it.
Mothers can be fatal to their sons.
Each time your browser reloads this page an essay is composed randomly from the first sentences of each paragraph from Sex and Violence, or Nature and Art, the first chapter of Camillie Paglia's Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (London/New Haven: Yale UP, 1990. pgs 1—39.) (Amazon link)