Babylon Sister

David Link from the February 1995 issue

Vamps and Tramps, by Camille Paglia, New York: Vintage Books, 532 pages, $15.00

A sign on the street in Hollywood warns of construction ahead: "Vermont Ave. congested between 3rd St. and Hollywood Blvd. Seek alternate routes." That last phrase nicely sums up Camille Paglia's writing. Academics, like their poor relations in the increasingly incestuous media, are not immune from the general instinct to travel in packs. That instinct has led to some serious congestion in contemporary thought.

Paglia has sought to find a way around the herd. And like those drivers in Hollywood who are now seeking alternate routes, her new paths are not the easiest or most convenient; some are very bumpy indeed. But a girl's got to get where she's going....

Vamps & Tramps is Paglia's latest collection of essays, her second sop (after Sex, Art and American Culture) to those of us who have been waiting sleeplessly for the last half of Sexual Personae to be released. For the uninitiated, Sexual Personae is Paglia's magnum opus, the first part of which surveyed sexual imagery in art from the beginning of time up to Emily Dickinson. Its prickly contrarian energy, flashes of brilliance, and unrelenting wit made Paglia a star. The second half, still being updated, will show how movies, television, sports, and rock music continue to reveal the same recurring themes --that paganism's rich, sexual texture can't be kept down in our nominally Judeo-Christian culture. Jerusalem never conquered Babylon--Christianity and paganism are in eternal tension.

A book by Paglia is a lot like sex itself: When it's good, it's very, very good. And when it's bad, it's still pretty good. Vamps & Tramps is a step above pretty good, a medley of Paglia's writings, musings, and doings since Sex, Art and American Culture was released in 1992, consisting of essays, book reviews, transcripts of films and interviews, cartoons about Paglia, and an index of media references to her, with suitably withering editorial comments for those who unfairly malign our heroine. If these last two seem more than a trifle self-serving, well, Paglia has no problem with megalomania, hers in particular.

The book's title comes from the female personae Paglia sees missing from contemporary feminism: seductresses with "vampiric power over men," women who know how to make men helpless. It's not that these personae are missing from the culture--they can be found in such powerhouse movies as Basic Instinct and Fatal Attraction, they're scattered everywhere throughout music videos and country/western songs. People can't get enough of the trial of O.J. Simpson precisely because they need to find out if Nicole had O.J. so utterly in her thrall that he murdered her and Ron Goldman in an impotent rage. An accomplished athlete, a beautiful brute of a man, helpless in the face of his feelings for his ex-wife: Now that's female power.

But feminism doesn't know how to account for men who feel they're under women's spell because of feminism's consuming focus on women as victims. Paglia sees social victimization as only part of the picture. Raw nature--sex--has to be accounted for, too. And it is women's sexual power that Paglia sees in action again and again. Female power, not female victimization, captivates our attention. Paglia's analysis of why the Amy Fisher saga warranted three TV movies is typically pithy. That story wasn't about Joey Buttafuoco at all. It was about the women: "When long-haired Amy, spoiled only child, mall chick and part-time call-girl, mounted the Buttafuoco porch with a pistol in her pocket, every power play in the history of love was on red alert. It was high noon on a Tennessee Williams veranda....Amy vs. Mary Jo Buttafuoco on the porch was a trash tango, a clash of the female titans."

The same forces of nature make pornography eternal: "What feminists denounce as woman's humiliating total accessibility in porn is actually her elevation to high priestess of a pagan paradise garden....Modern middle-class women cannot bear the thought that their hard-won professional achievements can be outweighed in an instant by a young hussy flashing a little tits and ass. But the gods have given her power."

It annoys Paglia when feminists deny women's sexual power, since any idiot can see it everywhere. The problem is that feminist academics ignore what's right in front of their eyes. Paglia pays as much attention to tabloids and TV movies as she does to Homer, Wordsworth, and (one of her special favorites) Spenser. She sees a continuity in the great themes regardless of the context. And unlike just about any other feminist academic, Paglia doesn't have a sentimental bone in her body to distract her from the truth.

On the whole, Vamps & Tramps is a carnival. We see Paglia here in all her guises, from the highly serious to the completely loopy. She shines in her analysis of the competing personae of Bill Clinton and Hillary, suggesting that Hillary's persona is probably more suited to being commander-in-chief than Bill's. After that, Paglia is on to a film with drag queen Glennda Orgasm ("Glennda and Camille Do Downtown") in which the two of them encounter a group of dour-faced feminists, Women Against Pornography. It is a moment of sheer comic perfection that comes through even in the transcript. The comedy is matched a little later by Paglia's advice for the lovelorn columns from Spy magazine. Self-described as a "short, fast-talking comedienne with dimples, who imitates Keith Richards to avoid looking like Sally Field," Paglia dispenses her wisdom like Dear Abby on speed.

In fact, her prose is consistently among the most colorful and effective today. No one in the chattering classes can match her when it comes to the punishing reproach. Andrea Dworkin, one of Paglia's demons, "has turned a garish history of mental instability into feminist grand opera." Even Paglia's praise comes with barbs attached. One essay is titled, "Kind of a Bitch: Why I Like Hillary Clinton."

But Vamps & Tramps shows a personal side of Paglia that I don't recall having seen before, and it's a welcome departure. In a lengthy essay on four of the gay men who have been central to her life, Paglia writes with deep respect and affection about friends who have touched her thinking and being in important ways. For once, the writing is not self-centered. In giving the spotlight to others, Paglia demonstrates a grace and generosity few might suspect her of. Similarly, underneath the tirades against academic corruption, we see Paglia's fury is animated by a genuine concern for students, whose struggles with the classics she understands. She wants them to wrestle with the big books as she did, unhampered by the political preconceptions that litter academia. Her lectures end with a mantra for students that stands out as uncharacteristically sweet and hopeful in Paglia's otherwise bitchy writings: "Hate dogma. Love learning. Love art."

The meat of Vamps & Tramps is an essay titled, "No Law in the Arena: A Pagan Theory of Sexuality," which serves as a good overview of Paglia's controversial politics. In the sexual arena, Paglia argues, "sexual conduct cannot and must not be legislated from above...all intrusion by authority figures into sex is totalitarian." In the absence of physical violence, sex is a force of nature, and legal tinkering is as effective as making gravity a punishable offense.

Her criticism of abortion laws is typical. She refuses to get bogged down in the nit-picking over when life begins. Accept that it begins at conception, she says, and that abortion is killing. To Paglia, it's a primal form of self-defense. To the woman involved, such killing is, or should
be, ethically troubling. But government, which guarantees freedom of religion, has no right to interfere with a woman's personal argument against nature. "Under the carnal constitution that precedes social citizenship, women have the right to bear arms. The battlefield is internal, and it belongs to us."

This probably won't get very far as a political argument in what is now the most sentimental nation in history, but it's exemplary of Paglia's straightforward style. She demolishes the "hostile workplace" theory of sexual harassment, noting that "every workplace is hostile... head-on crashes are the rule." Innovation comes from competition, aggression, opposition--it is those qualities that keep corporations, and personalities, from becoming stagnant. By trying to protect themselves from sexually explicit (or implicit) speech, women lose out by keeping themselves disengaged from the surging poetry of rough language: "Middle-class white women have got to get over their superiority complex and learn to talk trash with the rest of the human race." Paglia's models are strong, tough-talking women who knew how to answer cheeky men: her two Italian grandmothers, Rosalind Russell, Tallulah Bankhead. You have to willfully ignore massive parts of the culture to suggest women's role models in the 20th century are confined to the Debbie Reynolds/Doris Day school of blonde, perky submission. Why do women think they can't be like Katharine Hepburn?

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