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The Gay Inquisition
Gay men used to be ferocious exemplars of free thought. But an insidious totalitarianism has infected gay activism and witch hunts have become the norm.
On July 13, C-SPAN 2 aired a remarkable tape of a debate among open gays about gay ideology that took place at the New School in New York City on June 27. Unfortunately, the debate too often resembled an inquisition.
The miscreants summoned to answer for their sins were Andrew Sullivan, one of the most prolific and accomplished public intellectuals in the U.S. and U.K., and Norah Vincent, a courageous and outspoken libertarian whose columns appear in the Los Angeles Times, the Advocate, and the Jewish World Review.
No better evidence could be sought of the current deplorable state of gay activism, with its ranting, sanctimonious demagogues and reactionary insularity. The moderator, Joan Garry, the executive director of GLAAD (the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation), was well-intentioned but painfully out of her depth in managing the give and take of ideas. Though she trumpeted her neutrality, she repeatedly cut off discussion when her activist friends on the panel were closely questioned by other panelists or the audience.
The two avowed leftists on stage were Carmen Vasquez, director of public policy of the New York City Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Community Services Center, and Richard Goldstein, executive editor of the Village Voice, who has obsessively vilified Sullivan and Vincent (as well as me) for years. Vasquez, who was amiable in the peppy style of a high-school volleyball coach, appeared to be totally unprepared for the debate. She tried to conceal her lack of knowledge of the published writing of Sullivan and Vincent with canned, off-the-point stump speeches about corrupt corporations, global warming, and the Big Bad Republicans, all designed to elicit cheers from her claque. Her effusions were logically disconnected and baffling in syntax. At her daffiest, she seemed to be trapped in a Gilda Radner parody on Saturday Night Live.
The steady C-SPAN camera, coolly taking in the scene without cutting or close-ups, was mercilessly revealing of each person's character. Sullivan and Vincent, listening with stoicism or incredulity to the rubbish pouring from their opponents, seemed thoughtful, centered, anchored. No fair-minded person watching that broadcast could fail to empathize with them as, with dignity and passion, they patiently, systematically defended themselves against a hostile crowd that slowly seemed to turn in their favor. Their language was considered and their tones measured, except for one delightful moment (I cheered at the TV) when Sullivan thundered with righteous wrath at a Goldstein smear.
In contrast, Goldstein, alternately groveling and bullying toward the audience, exposed his own mendacity and lack of professionalism. It became embarrassingly clear that, though he is a career editor, he had never bothered to fact-check his garbled quotes from Sullivan's books (or from those of his other targets). Goldstein was all over the map, slipping and sliding, contradicting himself, smirking and sneering, squirming and sputtering, invoking the Holocaust when he was in trouble, and spitefully jabbing at Sullivan's private life in a way unheard of at public debates. The entire question of why Andrew Sullivan is a major figure in contemporary American discourse and Richard Goldstein is not was answered by Goldstein's juvenile, amateurish, and weasely behavior at this debate.
The larger issue is that gay life in the U.S. has increasingly become a cultural wasteland. I began attacking what I called "gay Stalinism" over a decade ago. In "Junk Bonds and Corporate Raiders", a 1991 expose in Arion (reprinted in my 1992 essay collection, Sex, Art, and American Culture), I rebuked "queer theorists" for their infatuation with poststructuralism and postmodernism. The glib, amoral Michel Foucault, I argued, was no role model for gays. Instead I celebrated the humanistic gay tradition extending from Walt Whitman and Oscar Wilde to Tennessee Williams and Allen Ginsberg, all of whom had profoundly influenced my thinking. (The muddled Goldstein has borrowed this among other things from me without attribution.) My in-depth study of Whitman and Wilde is contained in my 700-page book, Sexual Personae, published in 1990.
There was a time when gay men were known for their scathingly independent minds and their encyclopedic knowledge of culture. The welcome relaxation of legal and social sanctions against homosexuality over the past 30 years has paradoxically weakened the unsentimental powers of observation for which gays, as outsiders, were once renowned. Gay men used to be ferocious exemplars of free thought and free speech. But within 15 years of the 1969 Stonewall rebellion, an insidious totalitarianism infected gay activism, parallel to what was occurring in feminism in the Catharine MacKinnon/Andrea Dworkin era. Intolerance and witch hunts became the norm.
Social and political conditions in the U.S. drastically changed when a law-and-order Republican, Richard Nixon, was elected president in 1968 by an electorate made jittery by a half decade of riots, assassinations, burning cities, and mass murders. It's now a third of a century later. Sensible people connected to the wider world have evolved in their thinking. Yet hardcore gay activists, such as Goldstein, Vasquez, and their smug coterie, are still stuck in the '60s, with a nostalgia that has become delusional. They are earnest but naive, displaced social workers masquerading as political analysts.
As a lapsed Catholic, I despise dogma in all its forms. Those who oppress the free exercise of thought do not understand democracy. I too uphold the best of '60s values (I'm a registered Democrat who voted for Ralph Nader in 2000), but theory must be tested against reality. Hence I have written and lectured about my vision of enlightened capitalism, where vigorous entrepreneurship and free markets are balanced by social responsibility and a safety net for the poor and weak. For years, I condemned the looting of corporations by top executives.
As a libertarian, I have warned about the dangers to civil rights in a bureaucratic expansion of government authority--the intrusive octopus that gay leftists dream of in their nanny-care utopia of cradle-to-grave socialism. I have also criticized the splintering of liberal politics into special-interest groups clamoring for government boondoggles. The truly progressive stance, in my view, is to argue for legal protection of all consensual, nonconformist behavior, thus allying gays and the transgendered with bohemian heterosexuals. My libertarian philosophy is detailed in an 85-page manifesto, "No Law in the Arena", in my 1994 essay collection, Vamps & Tramps.
There have been seismic shifts in feminism and gay politics over the past decade. My wing of pro-sex feminism has triumphed, and gay life in general has become more integrated with mainstream America. The fire has gone out of activism, since we are in a period of negotiation rather than confrontationalism in social-policy issues. Communication lines between gay and straight have opened dramatically, except in the most retrograde patches of religious fundamentalism. Hence the small cells still stoking their fury in feminism and gay activism are mostly fanatics--those who are still nursing childhood wounds and who cling to "the movement" as a consoling foster family. They are harmless, except when impressionable young people fall under their spell: their parochial jargon and unresolved resentments stunt the mind.
Serious problems arise when scientific inquiry is obstructed, as in the inflated myth of the "gay gene", by an excessive concern for gay sensitivities. The self-policing by the indulgent major media on these matters has come perilously close to censorship. True gay intellectuals should encourage open discussion of the genesis of homosexuality, a complex subject that has been in limbo, a political blackout, for 20 years. We must demand equality before the law, but that does not excuse us from the philosophic obligation of self-knowledge. Heterosexuality and homosexuality need to be objectively studied by psychologists and historians as interrelated dynamic systems that change from culture to culture.
The C-SPAN broadcast of the gay debate unveiled the vicious animosities that gay activists have been directing against dissidents for years. It is a recipe for cultural suicide. The shameless tactic of the Stalinist big lie can be seen in Goldstein's grotesque distortion of Sullivan's illustrious, transatlantic career as a writer (or in Goldstein's devious suppression of my public support of drag queens and identification with the transgendered). When the gay movement has shriveled down to unscrupulous, incoherent, mewling philistines who don't read books and resent those that do, American culture is the big loser.
The miscreants summoned to answer for their sins were Andrew Sullivan, one of the most prolific and accomplished public intellectuals in the U.S. and U.K., and Norah Vincent, a courageous and outspoken libertarian whose columns appear in the Los Angeles Times, the Advocate, and the Jewish World Review.
No better evidence could be sought of the current deplorable state of gay activism, with its ranting, sanctimonious demagogues and reactionary insularity. The moderator, Joan Garry, the executive director of GLAAD (the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation), was well-intentioned but painfully out of her depth in managing the give and take of ideas. Though she trumpeted her neutrality, she repeatedly cut off discussion when her activist friends on the panel were closely questioned by other panelists or the audience.
The two avowed leftists on stage were Carmen Vasquez, director of public policy of the New York City Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Community Services Center, and Richard Goldstein, executive editor of the Village Voice, who has obsessively vilified Sullivan and Vincent (as well as me) for years. Vasquez, who was amiable in the peppy style of a high-school volleyball coach, appeared to be totally unprepared for the debate. She tried to conceal her lack of knowledge of the published writing of Sullivan and Vincent with canned, off-the-point stump speeches about corrupt corporations, global warming, and the Big Bad Republicans, all designed to elicit cheers from her claque. Her effusions were logically disconnected and baffling in syntax. At her daffiest, she seemed to be trapped in a Gilda Radner parody on Saturday Night Live.
The steady C-SPAN camera, coolly taking in the scene without cutting or close-ups, was mercilessly revealing of each person's character. Sullivan and Vincent, listening with stoicism or incredulity to the rubbish pouring from their opponents, seemed thoughtful, centered, anchored. No fair-minded person watching that broadcast could fail to empathize with them as, with dignity and passion, they patiently, systematically defended themselves against a hostile crowd that slowly seemed to turn in their favor. Their language was considered and their tones measured, except for one delightful moment (I cheered at the TV) when Sullivan thundered with righteous wrath at a Goldstein smear.
In contrast, Goldstein, alternately groveling and bullying toward the audience, exposed his own mendacity and lack of professionalism. It became embarrassingly clear that, though he is a career editor, he had never bothered to fact-check his garbled quotes from Sullivan's books (or from those of his other targets). Goldstein was all over the map, slipping and sliding, contradicting himself, smirking and sneering, squirming and sputtering, invoking the Holocaust when he was in trouble, and spitefully jabbing at Sullivan's private life in a way unheard of at public debates. The entire question of why Andrew Sullivan is a major figure in contemporary American discourse and Richard Goldstein is not was answered by Goldstein's juvenile, amateurish, and weasely behavior at this debate.
The larger issue is that gay life in the U.S. has increasingly become a cultural wasteland. I began attacking what I called "gay Stalinism" over a decade ago. In "Junk Bonds and Corporate Raiders", a 1991 expose in Arion (reprinted in my 1992 essay collection, Sex, Art, and American Culture), I rebuked "queer theorists" for their infatuation with poststructuralism and postmodernism. The glib, amoral Michel Foucault, I argued, was no role model for gays. Instead I celebrated the humanistic gay tradition extending from Walt Whitman and Oscar Wilde to Tennessee Williams and Allen Ginsberg, all of whom had profoundly influenced my thinking. (The muddled Goldstein has borrowed this among other things from me without attribution.) My in-depth study of Whitman and Wilde is contained in my 700-page book, Sexual Personae, published in 1990.
There was a time when gay men were known for their scathingly independent minds and their encyclopedic knowledge of culture. The welcome relaxation of legal and social sanctions against homosexuality over the past 30 years has paradoxically weakened the unsentimental powers of observation for which gays, as outsiders, were once renowned. Gay men used to be ferocious exemplars of free thought and free speech. But within 15 years of the 1969 Stonewall rebellion, an insidious totalitarianism infected gay activism, parallel to what was occurring in feminism in the Catharine MacKinnon/Andrea Dworkin era. Intolerance and witch hunts became the norm.
Social and political conditions in the U.S. drastically changed when a law-and-order Republican, Richard Nixon, was elected president in 1968 by an electorate made jittery by a half decade of riots, assassinations, burning cities, and mass murders. It's now a third of a century later. Sensible people connected to the wider world have evolved in their thinking. Yet hardcore gay activists, such as Goldstein, Vasquez, and their smug coterie, are still stuck in the '60s, with a nostalgia that has become delusional. They are earnest but naive, displaced social workers masquerading as political analysts.
As a lapsed Catholic, I despise dogma in all its forms. Those who oppress the free exercise of thought do not understand democracy. I too uphold the best of '60s values (I'm a registered Democrat who voted for Ralph Nader in 2000), but theory must be tested against reality. Hence I have written and lectured about my vision of enlightened capitalism, where vigorous entrepreneurship and free markets are balanced by social responsibility and a safety net for the poor and weak. For years, I condemned the looting of corporations by top executives.
As a libertarian, I have warned about the dangers to civil rights in a bureaucratic expansion of government authority--the intrusive octopus that gay leftists dream of in their nanny-care utopia of cradle-to-grave socialism. I have also criticized the splintering of liberal politics into special-interest groups clamoring for government boondoggles. The truly progressive stance, in my view, is to argue for legal protection of all consensual, nonconformist behavior, thus allying gays and the transgendered with bohemian heterosexuals. My libertarian philosophy is detailed in an 85-page manifesto, "No Law in the Arena", in my 1994 essay collection, Vamps & Tramps.
There have been seismic shifts in feminism and gay politics over the past decade. My wing of pro-sex feminism has triumphed, and gay life in general has become more integrated with mainstream America. The fire has gone out of activism, since we are in a period of negotiation rather than confrontationalism in social-policy issues. Communication lines between gay and straight have opened dramatically, except in the most retrograde patches of religious fundamentalism. Hence the small cells still stoking their fury in feminism and gay activism are mostly fanatics--those who are still nursing childhood wounds and who cling to "the movement" as a consoling foster family. They are harmless, except when impressionable young people fall under their spell: their parochial jargon and unresolved resentments stunt the mind.
Serious problems arise when scientific inquiry is obstructed, as in the inflated myth of the "gay gene", by an excessive concern for gay sensitivities. The self-policing by the indulgent major media on these matters has come perilously close to censorship. True gay intellectuals should encourage open discussion of the genesis of homosexuality, a complex subject that has been in limbo, a political blackout, for 20 years. We must demand equality before the law, but that does not excuse us from the philosophic obligation of self-knowledge. Heterosexuality and homosexuality need to be objectively studied by psychologists and historians as interrelated dynamic systems that change from culture to culture.
The C-SPAN broadcast of the gay debate unveiled the vicious animosities that gay activists have been directing against dissidents for years. It is a recipe for cultural suicide. The shameless tactic of the Stalinist big lie can be seen in Goldstein's grotesque distortion of Sullivan's illustrious, transatlantic career as a writer (or in Goldstein's devious suppression of my public support of drag queens and identification with the transgendered). When the gay movement has shriveled down to unscrupulous, incoherent, mewling philistines who don't read books and resent those that do, American culture is the big loser.
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Woman as Goddess
Because most of my life I was openly lesbian, I totally understand men's passion for women. Women are beautiful and remote and unreachable. You feel desperate. There's nothing you can do to win their favor. The only thing men want is women's attention, and in nude dance clubs, they can get it for a moment.
The feminist line is, strippers and topless dancers are degraded, subordinated, and enslaved; they are victims, turned into objects by the display of their anatomy. But women are far from being victims -- women rule; they are in total control.
My whole life I've been gaga about beautiful women. That's why I have this angle on it -- I can see the way men see. White middle-class feminist rhetoric has been produced by professional women, lawyers, bookworms, and paper pushers who can't stand the fact -- it's unbearable to them -- that most men will still turn their heads and gasp when a beautiful women walks into the room and exposes a little tit and ass. It's a white, bourgeois prejudice to find the seductive wiggling of a butt degrading.
Even though I'm one of those supersmart white middle-class women, I don't have this jealousy. I'm strong enough as a woman to say that it's natural for a beautiful young girl walking into a room to capture the attention of all the men and women. That's an eternal human principle. It'snot white male hetero-sexism. It's universal. All people admire youth and beauty. In the Greco-Roman tradition, youth and beauty are divine and worthy of worship. That's my theory. I'm saying that people go to strip clubs to see beauty and it's fucking elitist for people who go to museums to look at paintings and statues of beautiful bodies to denigrate strip clubs. These museumgoers are staring at beautiful nude bodies for pleasure, and it's supposedly high art. The educated and rich get their kicks in museums. Most people who come to these mid-level or sleaze-level clubs are usually not highly educated literati. It's perfectly legitimate for them to want to look at beautiful female bodies.
I don't want a culture that says that a woman exposing her breasts is degrading. That's white middle-class bullshit. Men are fascinated and terrified by women's seuxality. That's why they pay prostitutes. 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 moeny 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.
At Flash Dancers, a middle-of-the-road topless bar, a blonde with slightly sagging breasts is onstage, acrobatically simulating sex against a fire pole. Her fluourescent yellow bikini top is draped over the head of one patron, a young man wearing a flannel shirt, who watches the dancer thrash against the pole, then clasp it between her legs. Simultaneoulsy, several feet away, a dark-haired woman wearing a skimpy red bikini inches from the faces of two male customers. Smiling coquettishly, the dancer slides her bikini top aside, exposes her small breasts, and massages her nipples
Look! The men don't know what to do! The money they're stuffing into the dancers' garters is a ritual offering, and the women are wearing their booty around their thighs. They're displaying dollars as trophies, just as the great women in history -- the great queens and courtesans -- have worn diamonds and emeralds.
The dancers are flirtatious but removed. Even when they approach the men, even when they're dancing at the men's tables, there is something removed or detached about them. The men know it. The men value it. The men all know they can never fully penetrate the dancers and their lives. This is a point I made in Sexual Personae: Feminists are wrong to think that when women expose their breasts -- or even their genitals in a beaver shot -- they are totally exposed. No woman is ever totally exposed; you can never fully penetrate her womb, the heart of her sexual nature. Every woman we're seeing tonight is still mysterious. No man ever thinks, even when he is putting money in her garter belt, that he has her secret.
But men are totally exposed sexually. Their penis and scrotum are externalized and vulnerable. Men have no secrets that they're hiding. Men in strip clubs are completely cowed. They are dazzled. The only time the men feel remotely superior is when they're young, 19 or 20 years old, and in a pack. They'll come in very giddy, drink a lot, and try to get their spirits up. Even then, if there are six of them, one woman coming over to them totally throws them off. My theory is that woman rules the universe; woman is the dominant sex. Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct was a great example of woman's power. Stone uncrosses her legs, shows a little pussy, and it turns the men to jelly.
The idea that exposure of nudity is degrading to women or anyone else is absolutely nonsense. It's one of the biggest lies of the feminist establishment. If they would just open their eyes and visit these strip clubs, they'll find the exact opposite of what they've been complaining about. The more a woman takes off her clothes, the more power she has.
The feminists who claim that woman are violated and diminished by this kind of format don't know what they're talking about. Current feminist rhetoric has gotten parched and bleached and sanitized and distorted. It doesn't allow for passion, for instinct, for lust, for beauty, for the awesomeness of nature. It's not sufficient to explain sex. So, bizarrely, the more antiporn that bourgeois feminist rhetoric gets, the more these clubs will arise, because they are fulfilling a deep need.
Strip clubs are pagan temples, pagan shrines. It goes all the way back to Babylon, which has a very bad reputation in the Bible, where it's a synonym for sin and decadence. Why? Because apparently there was ritual prostitution in the great temples. Women offered themselves to random strangers in honor of the great goddesses of the ancient Near East and Asia Minor -- modern Turkey.
In these pagan cults, the goddess was omnipotent. What we call striptease -- that is, erotic dancing -- was central. Contemporary strip dancing is in the mainline of this kind of ritual dancing. Belly dancing, where you clearly see the sexual undulations of the hips and pelvis, was designed to incite the lust of aging sultans. That's exactly the kind of dancing that was forbidden by Judeo-Christianity, which has always been opposed to dance. Christianity wants us to rise above nature, above our sexuality. All activation of the body is pagan -- it's never degrading. Instead, it's filling a hole, the vacuum in our religion. Judeo-Christianity is not enough. It cannot explain sexuality. It suppresses the organic rhythms of the body.
In other words, the more something is forced underground, the more intense it gets because it becomes taboo, forbidden. This makes it dangerous and very alluring. So you have these women letting us look at them. The areas of the body they're exposing are the ones we're not allowed to look at.
College women are being trained in women's studies courses to say that when men focus on a woman's breasts and buttocks, they are reducing women to dead parts. This is absolute bullshit. I'm radical on this. I'm militant. I know I'm really extreme, and most women probably can't feel what I feel. I say there is nothing degrading in the exhibit of any naked form, in whole or in part, male or female. In India you've got copulating nude bodies -- three- and foursomes -- depicted on the temples. In Hinduism the body is part of nature and the cosmos; sexuality is seen as the life force of the universe. In Judeo-Christianity we have a problem. We feel we always have to surmount nature, to contain and control it.
Our best women students are being taught that pornography and strip clubs lead directly to rape, that there is no space between men going to see this and then attacking women. This is absolute nonsense. The truth is, the minute you have a complex, advanced, urbanized society, throughout history, you get prostitution, stripping, and homosexuality. Immediately.
What does that mean? It means that as soon as people cluster together, the reality of sex erupts. What you see in pornography and postititution is the reality of sex. It is not a patriarchal distortion. It is the ultimate physical reality. So a feminist who claims to understand sexuality but cannot deal with pornography or topless clubs is no expert. She is a censor. She is a prude.
Stripping is not about sexual freedom; it's about freedom of sexual imagination. Stripping, erotic dancing, is an art form, and the artistic level of the scene in American has increased enormously. It's obvious that it's a new vocation. Dance itself has gained in stature recently. I think Madonna, with her sensational dance routines, has helped bolster the pride and self-confidence of these women. They are professionals, and they know they are in control. They aren't apologetic or defensive. These girls know their power.
At the Paradise Club, the beer is cheap, but a private viewing of two women making love will set you back several hundred dollars. It's a hard-core strip joint in a quiet neighborhood off Broadway. Chairs rima room-length platform on which two women stalk naked.
A curvaceous black woman stoops in front of patrons and allows them to peer between her heavy thighs. By regulation, they can't touch her, so she massages herself absentmindedly. Porno movies run on televisions suspended at both ends of the platform, but they are largely ignored. The main attraction tonight is a lithe, long-haired woman with one tattoo and a penchant for bending over in fron of pairs of sheepish male patrons and exposing her hairless genitalia.
Look at those two young men! They don't know what the fuck to do. The girl is dancing right at their table. She's flirting with one of them, touching him, flaunting her rear end in his face. The men are desparately looking at each other for support. They're embarrassed. She is in total control. They're paying her a tribute. They're offering her money for her momentary attention. They are as abashed as they would be with their mothers.
There's nothing humiliating in this. Look, she's totally self-assured. He's nervous, insecure. She's helping him feel confident. That is part of her skill -- to make him feel relaxed. He is admiring her. She's lifting up her breasts for him to see. Now she's leaning over and shoving her tits within inches of his face. He loves it! He's purchased a close encounter with beautiful female breasts. And why shouldn't he? I think it's wonderful.
These women have great asses. Twenty-five years ago in America, only breasts mattered. Assas were not important. Now we've gotten much more sophisticated, in the European way.
I first became interested in topless dancing when I was teaching at Bennington College in the 1970's. Some of my students were moonlighting as topless dancers. They made a lot of money, but they and their coworkers always drew a very firm line between themselves and prostitutes. Many of the dancers are single or divorced mothers who rightly regard what they do as a profession. They know it's an art form, a craft with demanding skills.
Strip clubs today are far less squalid than the clubs I saw 20 years ago, before feminism improved the status of women. These women are very secure about themselves. I'm very happy with what I'm seeing here, because I think it's showing a kind of European cosmopolitanism. For more than a century in Paris, there have been all kinds of sophisticated displays of sexuality, such as as the shows at the Moulin Rouge. In Europe it's accepted. European television has a tremendous amount of nudity. Men and straight women over there like to look at beautiful female bodies. In London, one of the most popular family newspapers has a topless "Page 3" girl every day.
I don't want a culture that says a woman exposing her breasts is degrading. That's just puritanism. We are so fucking parochial about this. The feminist establishment believes the stripclub scene is chaos, all debauchery and decadence. It's not It's as strictly organized as a faculty meeting at Princeton University.
At Stingfellows Pure Platinum, patrons wear Armani suits and can enjoy an expensive full-course dinner while watching gorgeous "entertainers" dance and drop the tops of their full-length gowns. During individual dance routines, the women shed everything but skimpy thong bikinis and invisible patches of latex covering their nipples. When they're not performing, the women mingle among their guests as if they were hosting an intimate cocktail party.
Twenty dollars buys you a provocative table dance, where a woman of your choosing sheds her dress and dances suggestively over your lap. Hard work? The best dancers take home from $700 to $1,000 a night.
Men Don't just want to see women taking their clothes off. They want to see beautiful women. Period. Some women here are in various stages of undress, but others arefully clothed, promenading around in fabulous glittering evening gowns. We are being treated to the full range of women's sexuality. This is theater, a mesmerizing sexual theater. There's an energetic, improvisatory quality. It's very sexy. It's almost as if the women sauntering around were creating their own plays, their own little dramas. There's a classy, high-fashion element that I think is a real step forward in American eroticism.
Strip clubs are an art form for the masses. It's the highest paternalistic condescension when people attack and dismiss them. We haven't seen a single man cross the line anywhere tonight. What we have seen is men understanding that women rule the world.
I issue a challenge to all those prudes and puritans who are carrying on from the oh-so-safe precincts of the Ivy League to come to one of these clubs and actually watch the men's behavior. The reality totally contradicts the bullshit feminist ideology. All sexual entertainment is pagan; that is, it's oriented around the supreme fact of woman as goddess.
You can sense the awe in men's attitudes to each of these women as an incarnation of the goddess figure. I'm radically pro-pornography. The dominance of woman's image in pornography is not abou the subordination of woman -- it's the opposite. It's about male anxiety. It's about the male mind trying to confront and take control of this enormous, mysterious power of female sexuality.
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.
Everything we've seen tonight shows women in control and trying to be patient and nurturing with the men. You see that so clearly with prostitutes and strippers. Very powerful sexual women always know that men need to be led and guided. Men need help.
The sex industry exists as a rebuke to the philosophical inadequacies of Judeo-Christianity. Our religious system is simply incomplete. Unlike Hinduism, it has never fully dealt with the power of woman's sexuality. Until our culture does, we'll continue to get it in these underground ways. That's what strip clubs are about: not women as victim ... not woman as slave ... but woman as goddess.