Everything great in western culture has come from the quarrel with nature. - Camille Paglia

I have found few lesbians with whom I can discourse for more than five minutes without hitting some tiresome barrier of resentment or ideology. … Again and again over the decades, as I did my time, in frustrated boredom, in lesbian bars, trying with spectacular lack of success to make friends or just converse, I would end up gabbing for hours with some stray gay man. He might have dropped out of school at fourteen, but he had opinions, tastes, energy, wit. Is there something innately different about the gay male brain?

Women have ironically enjoyed a greater symbolic, if not practical freedom. Thus it is that male and not female homosexuality has been harshly punished by law. A debater in Lucian declares, “Far better that a women, in the madness of her lust, should usurp the nature of man, than that man’s noble nature should be so degraded as to play the woman.” Similarly today, lesbian interludes are a staple of heterosexual pornography. Ever since man emerged from the dominance of nature, masculinity has been the most fragile and problematic of psychic states.

Contemporary feminists, who are generally poor or narrowly trained scholars, insist on viewing history as a weepy scenario of male oppression and female victimization. But it is more accurate to see men, driven by sexual anxiety away from their mothers, forming group alliances by male bonding to create complex structures of society, art, science and technology.