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Camille Paglia (2 Apr 1947 - ) American author and critic.

Camille Paglia - Modern bodybuilding…awash in Western chemistry…Defying nature, it surpasses it.

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“Modern bodybuilding is ritual, religion, sport, art, and science, awash in Western chemistry and mathematics. Defying nature, it surpasses it.”

— Camille Paglia

'Alice in Muscle Land,' Boston Globe (27 Jan 1991)

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When Camille Paglia wrote a book review on Muscle: Confessions of an Unlikely Bodybuilder by Samuel Wilson Fussell, she began by stating that after Sam had immersed himself in the sport, he described his experience in a book that she wrote “is the vivid, lively record of his four sweaty years in the strange underworld of gyms, trainers, dumb-bells, and steroids.”

“It’s a kind of beefcake Alice in Wonderland.”

He began with a gargantuan feeding regimen and a daily dose of 108 vitamin tablets. His peronality changed, he lost his job, but was obsessed with muscle-building. He is propelled into a “Faustian bargain” seeking competitive success, confessing, “I was my own alchemist,” launched on a relentless intake of chemical strength enhancers and growth hormones, risking serious side-effects or possible death. He witnessed the testosterone-induced “Roid rage” among lifters who injected—“shotgunned”—steroids into their scarred buttocks.

After a few years, never reaching the first place in competition that he craved, he managed to break himself free from his self-abusive “addiction” to the “iron disease.” Paglia began to summarize with:

“Again and again, this book confirmed my theories about masculinity and Western culture. A woman simply is, but a man must become. Masculinity is risky and elusive.”

Bodybuilders, reports Fussell, imitate onstage the Farnese Hercules and Michelangelo David in a quest for “The Apollonian Ideal” for their own sculpted outline. To Paglia, it is a “protest against nature. The quest for masculinity recapitulates the birth of civilization and the history of high art. Modern bodybuilding is ritual, religion, sport, art, and science, awash in Western chemistry and mathematics. Defying nature, it surpasses it.” Paglia's final verdict on the book is that:

“Muscle sympathetically read as an archetypal hero saga of embattled masculinity, exposes the parochialism, preachiness, and bourgeois assumptions in contemporary academe, psychotherapy, and feminism.”

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Camille Paglia quote on Science and a Single Thunderbolt >>

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Nature bears long with those who wrong her. She is patient under abuse. But when abuse has gone too far, when the time of reckoning finally comes, she is equally slow to be appeased and to turn away her wrath. (1882) -- Nathaniel Egleston, who was writing then about deforestation, but speaks equally well about the danger of climate change today.

Carl Sagan: In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion. (1987) ...(more by Sagan)

Albert Einstein: I used to wonder how it comes about that the electron is negative. Negative-positive—these are perfectly symmetric in physics. There is no reason whatever to prefer one to the other. Then why is the electron negative? I thought about this for a long time and at last all I could think was “It won the fight!” ...(more by Einstein)

Richard Feynman: It is the facts that matter, not the proofs. Physics can progress without the proofs, but we can't go on without the facts ... if the facts are right, then the proofs are a matter of playing around with the algebra correctly. ...(more by Feynman)

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