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.

In the theory of gender I began from zero. There is no masculine power or privilege I did not covet. But slowly, step by step, decade by decade, I was forced to acknowledge that even a woman of abnormal will cannot escape her hormonal identity.

Education has become a prisoner of contemporaneity. It is the past, not the dizzy present, that is the best door to the future.

My political philosophy as a libertarian says that government has no business intervening in any consensual private behavior. My professional ethic as a thinker and writer, however, says that self-knowledge is our ultimate responsibility

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.

America is still a frontier country of wide open spaces. Our closeness to nature is one reason why our problem is not repression but regression; our notorious violence is the constant eruption of primi-tiveness, of anarchic individualism.

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.