Hurricane Camille Blows Again

By RICHARD CORLISS

Academics ought to have a longer shelf life than pop stars. So maybe Madonna wasn't such a swell role model for Camille Paglia, a humanities professor at Philadelphia's University of the Arts. Sexual Personae, a rambunctious survey of gender identities published in 1990, made Paglia into feminism's Material Girl. In a whiny time that sanctified women as victims, she celebrated woman's erotic and emotional majesty. Just like that, she was the hot intellectual starlet of the '90s.

Alas, she loved notoriety even more than it loved her. The huffy reception being given Vamps & Tramps (Vintage; 532 pages; $15), her paperback volume of new and recent essays, journalism, TV interviews and effluvia, suggests that Paglia is in her 16th minute of fame -- like Madonna at her current ebb with an exasperated public. This is a shame, since it discounts Paglia's rangy, roguish intelligence and genius for mischiefmaking.

Vamps & Tramps is an apt title, and not just because, as the author writes, it "evokes the missing sexual personae of contemporary feminism" -- the drag queens and prostitutes who are the stars of her cosmology. The title also summarizes Paglia's method. Toss her a pop-cultural subject (Amy Fisher, Lorena Bobbitt), and she'll vamp on it, often brilliantly. Invoke her prim sisters in "the feminist establishment" (Anita Hill, Catharine MacKinnon), and she'll tramp on them with the Cuban heels of her rhetoric. Into any fray she bursts, a media Medusa, a Valkyrie for hire, Penthesilea fighting for Amazon rights. Is she fair? Nah -- fair is for wimps. But she is always entertaining, offering vigorous ideas for the open mind to entertain.

Paglia sees a sexual wasteland populated by Sandra Dee girl-women who cry wolf at the first wolf whistle, and clueless men emasculated by feminism's stern dictates. The longest new essay, "No Law in the Arena," is a panorama of hot-button topics: rape, harassment, pornography, abortion. What makes Paglia infuriating and invaluable is her willingness to find, in these victimological issues, shades of male anxiety and female responsibility. There are also quieter pieces, notably a loving memoir of four homosexual friends who helped shape her sensibility. But it's silly to ask this brainy pipshriek to calm down; shouting is her form of conversation.

The question for Paglia now is where she should go from here. Print can hardly contain her, though she'd be fun as Anna Quindlen's successor on the New York Times op-ed page. TV typecasts her as a furious motormouth, though she could make the cool medium hot again as a talk-show host. Perhaps an answer can be found on the cover of Vamps & Tramps; there is Paglia, in her Pussy Galore regalia, striking a doo-wop pose. So maybe it's time for her to hit Broadway and take over the Rizzo role in Grease. Wherever Paglia goes, she will make sure she's the leader of the pack.