“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.”

from Sexual Personae (1990)

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“Men are run ragged by female sexuality all their lives. From the beginning of his life to the end, no man ever fully commands any woman. It's an illusion. Men are pussy-whipped. And they know it. That's what the strip clubs are about; not woman as victim, not woman as slave, but woman as goddess.”

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“We are hierarchical animals. Sweep one hierarchy away, and another will take its place, perhaps less palatable than the first.”

from Sexual Personae (1990)

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“Sexuality and eroticism are the intricate intersection of nature and culture. Feminists grossly oversimplify the problem of sex when they reduce it a matter of social convention: readjust society, eliminate sexual inequality, purify sex roles, and happiness and harmony will reign. Here feminism, like all liberal movements of the past two hundred years, is heir to Rousseau.”

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“Judaism, Christianity’s parent sect, is the most powerful of protests against nature. The Old Testament asserts that a father god made nature and that the differentiation into objects and gender was after the fact of his maleness.”

from Sexual Personae (1990)

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“Capitalism, gaudy and greedy, has been inherent in western aesthetics from ancient Egypt on. It is the mysticism and glamour of things, which take on a personality of their own. As an economic system, it is in the Darwinian line of Sade, not Rousseau.”

from Sexual Personae (1990)

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“Marxism is a flight from the magic of the person and the mystique of hierarchy. It distorts the character of western culture, which is based on the charismatic power of person. Marxism can work only in pre-industrial societies of homogeneous populations. Raise the standard of living, and the rainbow riot of individualism will break out. Personality and art, which Marxism fears and censors, rebound from every effort to oppress them.”

from Sexual Personae (1990)

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“If civilization had been left in female hands, we would still be living in grass huts.”

from Sexual Personae (1990)

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“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.”

from Sexual Personae (1990)

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“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 hierarch 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.”

from Sexual Personae (1990)

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“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.”

from Sex, Art and American Culture : New Essays (1992)​

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“A woman simply is, but a man must become. Masculinity is risky and elusive. It is achieved by a revolt from woman, and is confirmed only by other men. Feminist fantasies about the ideal 'sensitive' male have failed. Manhood coerced into sensitivity is no manhood at all.”

from Sex, Art and American Culture : New Essays (1992)​

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“I'm absolutely a feminist [but] feminism has betrayed women, alienated men and women, replaced dialogue with political correctness.
PC feminism has boxed women in. The idea that feminism — that liberation from domestic prison — is going to bring happiness is just wrong. Women have advanced a great deal, but they are no happier. The happiest women I know are not those who are balancing their careers and families, like a lot of my friends are. The happiest people I know are the women — like my cousins — who have a high school education, got married immediately graduating and never went to college. They are very religious and they never question their Catholicism. They do not regard the house as a prison. … I look at my friends who are on the fast track. They are desperate, frenzied and frazzled, the most unhappy women who have ever existed. They work nights and weekends and have no lives. Some of them have children who are raised by nannies. … The entire feminist culture says that the most important woman is the woman with an attache case. I want to empower the woman who wants to say, 'I'm tired of this and I want to go home.'”

from Playboy Interview, 1995:

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“...The problem is that feminists have taken over with their attempts to inhibit sex. We have a serious testosterone problem in this country. … It's a mess out there. Men are suspicious of women's intentions. Feminism has crippled them. They don't know when to make a pass. If they do make a pass, they don't know if they're going to end up in court.”

from Playboy Interview, 1995:

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“The book of Genesis is a male declaration of independence from the ancient mother-cults. Its challenge to nature, so sexist to modern ears, marks one of the crucial moments in western history.”

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“The book of Genesis is a male declaration of independence from the ancient mother-cults. Its challenge to nature, so sexist to modern ears, marks one of the crucial moments in western history.”

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“Because of the nature of the penis, men have performance anxiety, whereas no woman ever has to prove herself in this way. So men's egos are totally involved in performance, in doing, achieving... It's ironic that feminism looks at the penis as power and violence when in fact it is very weak.”

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“The Sixties attempted a return to nature that ended in disaster [but] The spiritual history of the Sixties has yet to be written.... The Seventies theory explosion was a panic reaction by head-locked pedants unable to cope with the emotional and sensory flux of the Sixties. It was a desperate search for new authority, new dogma.”

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“When in doubt, I read Oscar Wilde.”

from Sex, Art and American Culture : New Essays (1992)​

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“Incompetent amateurs have given prostitution a bad name... the feminist analysis of prostitution says that men are using money as power over women. I'd say, yes, that's all that men have. 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.”

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“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...”

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“There is one area in which I think Paglia and I would agree, that politically correct feminism has produced a noticeable inequity. Nowadays, when a woman behaves in a hysterical and disagreeable fashion, we say, 'Poor dear, it's probably PMS.' Whereas, if a man behaves in a hysterical and disagreeable fashion, we say, 'What an asshole.' Let me leap to correct this unfairness by saying of Paglia, Sheesh, what an asshole.”

— Molly Ivins 1944 – 2007 CE via Mother Jones (1991)
Biting but humorous social commentator
from I am the Cosmos

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