A woman simply is, but a man must become.

If you don't embrace the consensus, your career stops in its tracks. I had a woman call me from the literature department at Harvard. She said no one can speak out because if you do, you don't get the courses you want, the hours you want, you don't get graduate assistants. It's pathetic. It's authoritarian, a regime of terror. Anyone opposed has either left the university or is totally underground.

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 cliché. 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.

The more woman aims for personal identity and autonomy ... the fiercer will be her struggle with nature - that is, with the intractable physical laws of her own body. And the more nature will punish her: 'Do not dare to be free! For your body does not belong to you.'

Every man must define his identity against his mother. If he does not, he just falls back into her and is swallowed up.

Woman is the dominant sex. Men have to do all sorts of stuff to prove that they are worthy of woman's attention.