Man is not merely the sum of his masks. Behind the shifting face of personality is a hard nugget of self, a genetic gift.... The self is malleable but elastic, snapping back to its original shape like a rubber band. 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.

The Bible has come under fire for making woman the fall guy in man's cosmic drama. But in casting a male conspirator, the serpent, as God's enemy, Genesis hedges and does not take its misogyny far enough. The Bible defensively swerves from God's true opponent, chthonian nature. The serpent is not outside Eve but in her. She is the garden and the serpent.

What feminism calls patriarchy is simply civilization , an abstract system designed by men but augmented and now co-owned by women.

Men who shrink from penetration of the female body are paralyzed by justifiable apprehension, since they are returning to our uncanny site of origin.

In sex, man is driven into the very abyss which he flees. He makes a voyage to non-being and back.

What I see is not a world of male oppression and female victimization, but an internation conspiracy by women to keep from men the knowledge of men's own frailty. A strange maternal protectiveness is at work.

Feminism, in all fields, has yet to produce a single scholar of the intellectual rank of scores of these learned men [e.g., Bruno Snell, Albin Lesky, Denys Page] in the German and British academic tradition.

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.

Promiscuity in men may cheapen love but sharpen thought. Promiscuity in women is illness, a leakage of identity.