The stigma of the prostitute is the badge of her identity. That is why the client goes to her. If he wanted someone without a stigma, he'd go and screw the lady next door.

Madonna is the true feminist. She exposes the puritanism and suffocating ideology of American feminism, which is stuck in an adolescent whining mode. Madonna has taught young women to be fully female and sexual while still exercising control over their lives.

Freud says, "Man fears that his strength will be taken from him by woman, dreads becoming infected with her femininity and then proving himself a weakling." Masculinity must fight off effeminacy day by day. Woman and nature stand ever ready to reduce the male to boy and infant.

It's patriarchal society that has freed me as a woman.

The visual is sorely undervalued in modern scholarship. Art history has attained only a fraction of the conceptual sophistication of literary criticism. Drunk with self-love, criticism has hugely overestimated the centrality of language to western culture. It has failed to see the electrifying sign language of images.

Gloria Steinem's marriage is proof positive of the emotional desperation of ageing feminists who for over 30 years worshiped the steely career woman and callously trashed stay-at-home moms.

Are we like late Rome, infatuated with past glories, ruled by a complacent, greedy elite, and hopelessly powerless to respond to changing conditions?