Franz von Stucks's Amazon. . . or an ever-invigorating antidote to the dead end of victimology, political sloganeering and puritanical know-nothingness.
Sex in our age has become gladiatorial, with male and female, gay and straight whipping and goading each other for position. This is our lot. We must accept it and devise a simple new rule book and training regime that puts combatants on equal footing. Neither women nor gays should plead for special protections or preferential treatment. The arena is the social realm, marked off from nature but ritually formalizing nature's aggressions. My libertarian position is that, in the absence of physical violence, sexual conduct cannot and must not be legislated from above, that all intrusion by authority figures into sex is totalitarian.
The ultimate law of the sexual arena is personal responsibility and self-defense. We must be prepared to go it alone, without the infantilizing assurances of external supports like trauma counselors, grievance committees, and law courts. I say to women: get down in the dirt, in the realm of the senses. Fight for your territory, hour by hour. Take your blows like men. I exalt the pagan personae of athlete and warrior . . . whose ethic is candor, discipline, vigilance and valor.
Camille Paglia, "No Law in the Arena: A Pagan Theory of Sexuality", in Vamps & Tramps: New Essays (London: Viking, 1995), pp. 23-24.
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