Motormouth in overdrive

Establishment into performance art? Anne Simpson meets the woman who

shoots from the lip in a verbal race against time.

LET us not mince words. Camille Paglia is a monster, slender and

diminutive but a monster none the less. She admits it, proclaims it:

''I'm a monster, a mean, evil bitch.'' The words are spoken routinely,

as if she were declaring credentials at a Jobcentre. Of course, there is

exaggeration here, but only just. No-one messes with Paglia and departs

unscathed. Yet who is she really beyond the woman who in three raucous

years has gatecrashed the American psyche to squat like a brawling

migraine inside its frontal lobe? What we know reaches us by word of

Paglia's own noisy mouth.

She is 46, an intrepid free thinker and troublesome scholar, the

self-elected executioner of contemporary feminism and saboteur of

political correctness. American by birth, European by inclination, she

is still rootedly and emotionally Italian by ancestry. Her heroes are

that late celebrant of sado-masochistic photography, Robert

Mapplethorpe, and Teresa of Avila, the great saint and mystic who

single-handedly reformed the Carmelite order in sixteenth-century Spain.

Paglia, then, is pitted with contradictions but she is worth heeding

because, not infrequently, her brazen encyclicals sound a discomforting

warning against our entitlement society.

Her magnum opus, Sexual Personae . . ., which first appeared in 1990,

is a formidable, idiosyncratic sweep of erudition on literature and art

from antiquity to the nineteenth century. The newer work, Sex, Art and

American Culture, a collection of rowdy essays, lectures, and reviews,

recently brought her to Britain, where she landed right in the middle of

the Back-to-Basics furore. The shriek of headlines might almost have

been stage-managed by the publisher: ''All this panic, cover-up, and

exposure is fascinating to me, fascinating,'' she exclaims. ''It proves

exactly what I have been saying for years. The false polarity between

liberals and conservatives is not serving us very well.''

Enmeshed in Paglia's notoriety, of course, is the stridency of her

ego. ''I'm a mad Amazon, a flashpoint, the most famous contemporary

woman intellectual in the world . . .'' Until the age of 14 she was an

only child and although that made her the focus of attention, it also

meant that in order to be heard she learned to shout against the

exuberance of Italian family get-togethers. ''My parents were always

telling me: 'Be nicer, be polite . . . you're too loud','' she says. ''I

was just a female born ahead of my time, a kind of pioneer, and decade

by decade I've acclimated myself to my sex role -- thanks to my

friendships with gay men and drag queens. Drag queens have influenced me

enormously.''

Paglia has always been loudly candid about her own bisexuality, and

her frank disclosures of penis-worship and her adoration of homo-erotic

nudity possess the kind of comic intensity we associate with Woody

Allen. Like Allen, too, her appearance gives no hint of the carnal

cravings writhing within. In her neat little navy suit and well-cut,

no-nonsense hairstyle, she could be a bank manager or a latter-day nun.

And indeed that image of someone just released from convent vows and now

wildly, vocally intoxicated by the notion of sexual freedoms keeps

occurring.

LIKE Madonna, her other hero, Paglia only seems to exist when

detonating taboos. Here is no time-serving academic, no blue-stocking,

although her physical demeanour is scholastic. But she has packed so

much uproar into her public voice you wonder if any interior life

remains. Is she satirist or genuine revolutionary? Brilliant polemicist,

or just one more spotlight junkie turning wrath against the

Establishment into performance art?

In fact she is all of these things but the first noteworthy quality

about her personality might be the one which finally causes her audience

to switch off. Paglia's speed of speech skids close to hysteria,

sentences, over-loaded with intellect, racing and colliding to such a

degree the listener feels atomised, too compressed by mental exhaustion

to fight back. ''I have a communication problem, I know. My father (a

French teacher in a Jesuit college), raised me to be independent and

that was fine until my views conflicted with his. At that point he

wanted me to keep silent. Harold Bloom, the esteemed thinker and my

professor at Yale -- I love him, a brooding insomniac, I adore him -- he

told me all this verbal race against time was because my father wouldn't

let me speak. And I know it's gone against me all my life.''

But it is a trick also born from Establishment neglect. Paglia resides

not in the lush groves of Harvard or Yale (although she graduated from

the latter), but in the potholes of academe. She is a teacher at the

modestly funded and largely unknown University of the Arts in

Philadelphia, having landed there because none of the grander colleges

knew how to handle her bawdy invectives and blistering indictment of

what she calls the no-sweat, pain-free, careerest education of the

American campus; a shallow scheme of learning, spawned by the junk-bond

era, which calls itself the New Historicism and which Paglia condemns

as: ''Joan Didion crossed with the National Geographic, glossy,

formulaic, unrigorous.'' She howls her hatred of its glib taming of

authentic sixties leftism, a contortion which now travels the old WASP

route where nothing is personally risked or exposed.

''My career has been a disaster -- a DISASTER,'' she yells unleashing

a tirade of angry reflections. ''Job problems, confrontation, the

isolation, and the poverty. Like for 20 years no-one would listen to me.

Before Sexual Personae was finally published by Yale it was rejected by

seven major New York publishers. I was completely poor and I just hit

the wall. No-one heard what I was saying. No-one understood anything

about what my book was doing. People just looked with blank faces. But

now . . .'' The voice screeches to a crescendo. ''Now something is

changing.'' Where once Paglia was accused of being defamatory about

everything, her own noise is being heightened by outbursts of support.

On issues like date rape and what she insists is modern feminism's

control technique of employing a victim mentality to deform women's

thinking, the public is increasingly rebelling and biting against the

muzzle of political correctness.

''My anti-liberal position should not be mistaken for conservatism.

I'm radically pro-pornography, pro-prostitution, pro-abortion, and

pro-legalisation of drugs. But the leftist attack on the traditional

Western canon has primarily come from politically weak thinkers. Of

course rape, is a crime but I consider the propaganda and hysteria about

date rape equally outrageous from a sixties point of view, and I will

continue to attack the well-meaning people who think they're protecting

women when in fact they are infantilising them . . .''

Paglia's scorn is limitless for those females who, in her view, float

into a student party and say dippily: ''Okay, what happens now?'' She

wants women to take control and decide: ''Oh please, if a woman meets a

guy in a bar and goes home with him and then shouts rape, she has

already consented to sex by the very act of going home with him, and I'm

sorry, that's it. These are white, middle-class yuppies who are getting

into trouble right now. We of the sixties said to the colleges: 'Get out

of our sex lives and let us take the risks.' Now these women are

pampered. They don't understand that with freedom comes responsibility.

I want them to decide: what do you want? Do you want sex or not? If you

don't want it, stay at home and do your nails.''

What Paglia refuses to acknowledge is that such preaching offers

little besides purdah or excess and is indeed an example of the

intellectual polarity she so despises in other contexts. Her brutal lack

of reserve thunders directly from the anarchic freedom of the sixties

and she regards herself now as the only remaining apologist of that

turbulent decade.''The feminist author Susan Faludi says of me: 'Oh

she's so angry because no-one influential has hired her yet.' Okay, so I

teach in an unimportant art school but in Europe that would be proof of

my intellectual authenticity. And anyway although I'm famous now I

wouldn't quit my school. I could triple my salary by going elsewhere but

Philadelphia discovered me and it's good to be loyal.''

Her feminism, which pre-dates the eighties, upholds principles of

equality but deplores today's man-hating ideology and the mindless creed

of entitlement. ''I deplore all dogma. I deplore gay activism when it

gets out of control when its rhetoric intrudes on the education of two,

three and four-year-olds. It's a tragedy how the progressive values of

the sixties have been rigidified into this thing called political

correctness. Now we have a new dogma which is injuring the principles of

free thought and free speech in an unthinking way.''

One of the byproducts of PC, she believes, is that it has given the

right the chance to re-coalesce and present itself as the truth-telling

movement. Traditionally this was the role of the left in America but she

accuses the East Coast Democratic establishment of suppressing any

discussion or news which, over the years, has not been on the liberal

agenda. ''And I speak as a liberal. I'm a Clinton Democrat but, through

a mixture of naivete and arrogance, Clinton has made one blunder after

another, including the handling of the Little Rock land deals and, until

the roar of scandal became too loud to ignore, the Democratic media said

nothing. Their silence has been a disaster for the left.''

She is sceptical, too, of all this transatlantic clamour over family

values. Popular culture, in Paglia's view, is far more important to

people, the only potent religion left in the West. ''The nuclear family,

contained within a genteel frame and seething with tensions, has never

worked except in a pioneering context when people were too busy working

for survival out in the open to get on each other's nerves. But two

adults simply cannot give you all the wisdom you need to know about

life. What was far more effective was the extended family of uncles,

aunts, and cousins where a child was able to identify with a clan.''

AS FOR herself, she is at pains to be seen always as a loner. For a

moment she muses on the seminal figures of her generation. . . then WHAM

. . . ''Germaine Greer, Susan Sontag . . . what happened? Two major

women self-destructed . . . Both these women had the attention of the

world, and they lost it. Through their own failings. Sometimes women

have failings. Sometimes everything is not because of male conspiracy .

. .'' And what are these weaknesses that Paglia cannot forgive? Greer

and Sontag's progression to a mellower, more reflective tone. This

rubbishing of rivals leaves very few intact. She describes Gloria

Steinem's Marilyn Monroe book as mawkish, silly and cheap, believes her

thinking on sexual equality was far in advance of Betty Friedan's, and

assaults Kate Millett by calling her an ''imploding bean bag of

poisonous self-pity''.

But just as Madonna has turned into some sort of combustible cliche,

so Paglia might end up cindered by self-parody. She will risk that,

however, because she is smart enough to know that the last thing her

public persona needs is balance. The warpath is her workplace. At home,

though, she gives herself at least some respite, surrounded by monastic

quiet as she explores the harder, lonely disciplines of learning. Is

this the real Camille Paglia, the one who's kind to her mother? Not a

monster but a committed outsider, a critic flawed with contradictions,

even when the Motormouth is turned to mute?

* Sex, Art, and American Culture by Camille Paglia. Penguin: #9.99.