Word: priestess
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...priestess Salammbo danced to the seductive warbling of a flute, her long white dress slowly fell to the ground, and she stood naked before the sacred python. Taking the serpent in her arms, she "wound it round her waist, under her arms, between her knees . . . Salammbo gasped beneath this weight . . . her back bent, she felt she was dying; and with the tip of its tail it gently flicked her thigh...
...Bram Dijkstra, an erudite and passionately indignant professor of comparative literature at the University of California at San Diego, the only answer is c. In case anyone thinks he is making too much of Salammbo's gyrations, Dijkstra wants us to know that a painting of the priestess by Charles Allen Winter was exhibited at the Paris Salon of 1898 and a sculpted version by Jean-Antoine-Marie Idrac won a place of honor at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893. It was, in other words, a scene that appealed all too strongly to the roving Victorian...
...misunderstanding and misogyny reach such deplorable heights? Dijkstra offers conflicting scapegoats. One is the rise of industrial capitalism, which made such physical and moral demands that men fled, exhausted, to the image of woman as "priestess of virtuous inanity." The other, which explains the failure of such canonization, is the spread of Darwinism and the quack argument that women remained at a more primitive stage of evolution. As Darwin himself put it, "Man has ultimately become superior to woman...
...shrewd Washington Post column, Novelist Erica Jong (Fear of Flying), formerly a high priestess of sexual abandon, put the dilemma succinctly: "It's hard enough to find attractive single men without having to quiz them on their history of bisexuality and drug use, demand blood-test results and thrust condoms into their hands. Wouldn't it be easier to give up sex altogether and join some religious order?" With a little emendation the same plaint can be made by men. "You think twice," observes a 28-year-old male / patron of Lucy's, a crowded singles bar on Manhattan...
...columnist, who then proceeded to binge compulsively on bagels. "Instead of eating one, I ate three." An understandable lapse for mere mortals summoned into the presence of the U.S. Goddess of Fitness. But the nervous nosher was a no less exalted figure: Jane Brody, the nation's High Priestess of Health. At the meeting of the two unrestrained Janes, though, it all worked out true to form. Brody, after politely complimenting Fonda on her latest exercise tape ("It's not boring"), quickly got down to business. "How come you always put such gorgeous women in your videotapes?" she asked...