"Camille Paglia is one of the most controversial feminists of all time, and also one of the most compelling. This mammoth book, put very shortly, examines the representation of sexuality in Western art. But it also goes into fierce discussion about religion, literature, art history, psychology, the brutal forces of sex and nature, and the amorality and pornography present in great art. As someone who personally writes a lot about sex work, one of my favorite lines in the book is, “The prostitute is not, as feminists claim, the victim of men, but rather their conqueror, an outlaw, who controls the sexual channels between nature and culture.”"

"In which Peter Falk and John Cassavetes play two broken goons who bond, bicker, and ultimately level each other during one rough night in Philadelphia. May made this just a few years after The Heartbreak Kid—a perfect movie, and one that I hope Criterion can add to its catalog someday!—and while the two films couldn’t be more different in terms of tone, they both zero in on a kind of self-defeating, self-aggrandizing male psychology that’s a little too relatable at times. And Falk and Cassavetes are so remarkable here that you can’t help but wonder which two modern actors would play these roles today."

"Bad Behavior is largely about sex, but it’s not cheesy or cheap. In this book of short stories, Gaitskill writes about women in the sex industry, people in power play relationships, S&M, and the general psychology of people who engage in so-called “bad behaviors” in a way that’s honest, sometimes brutal, and always beautiful. (For example, the darkly erotic film Secretary was adapted from a story in the book.) I first read this book around the time that I started Slutever, my blog about sexuality that still exists today, and it gave me confidence that writing about sex was a legitimate pursuit, and could be seen as intelligent, meaningful, and maybe even poetic."