Madonna I: animality and artifice -- Madonna II: Venus of the radio waves -- Elizabeth Taylor: Hollywood's pagan queen -- Rock as art -- Homosexuality at the fin de siecle -- The joy of Presbyterian sex -- The beautiful decadence of Robert Mapplethorpe: a response to Rochelle Gurstein -- The strange case of Clarence Thomas and Anita Hill -- Rape and modern sex war -- The rape debate, continued -- Cleopatra sold down the river : Lucy Hughes-Hallett's Cleopatra: histories, dreams and distortions -- Alice in muscle land: Samuel Wilson Fussell's muscle: confessions of an unlikely bodybuilder -- The critic at graceful ease: Wendy Lesser's his other half: men looking at women through art -- The big udder: Suzanne Gordon's prisoners of men's dreams -- Brando flashing: Richard Schickel's Brando: a life in our times -- What a drag: Marjorie Garber's vested interests: cross-dressing and cultural anxiety -- Sexual personae: the cancelled preface -- Milton Kessler: a memoir -- East and west: an experiment in multiculturalism -- Junk bonds and corporate raiders: academe in the hour of the wolf -- The M.I.T. lecture: crisis in the American universities.