Vamps & Tramps: New Essays.

THIRTY years ago, Tom Wolfe noted that journalists and intellectuals were missing the biggest story of the Sixties: that ordinary Americans finally had enough money to ignore traditional restraints and live out their individual primordial urges. The commentators missed the story because they couldn't see beyond their 1950s conceptual framework (McCarthyism! Conformity!). Today, Americans are running still looser and wilder, scandalizing even aficionados of human nature in the raw. Yet the media continue to explain our hormone-deranged national circus according to threadbare social-environmentalist rubrics (Media stereotypes! Discrimination!). But say you're not quite satisfied, for instance, that the only lesson of the O. J. Simpson saga concerns the need for domestic-violence awareness. Maybe you can't help wondering why our American Othello gets sacks of love-letters. ("Ooh, O.J., you're so passionate, so dangerous yet endangered, and, lately, so single!") Well, uh--Socialization! Victimization!

This unilateral intellectual disarmament widens the gap between the mainstream media's words (increasingly sanctimonious) and pictures (increasingly lurid). Text now serves as a kind of disinfectant: so, for example, fashion magazines interlard their supermodel photospreads with prim feminists denouncing America's beauty obsession. To understand what fascinates us, watch what we watch, not what we say we read. Why do we find these sweltering, pagan images so compelling?

It was to this question and another one--"If society conditions individuals, what conditions societies?'--that Camille Paglia addressed herself in her first book, Sexual Personae (1990) with her theory about why we watch what we watch, which finally did justice to the "fantastically complex interpenetration" of nature and nurture. Miss Paglia traced the disturbing but indelible imprint of nature on classic Western art and literature, noting how biology recurrently surfaces in charismatic "sexual archetypes" such as the femme fatale.

Although a sociobiologist like Edward O. Wilson might begin with the queen bee, while Miss Paglia started with Queen Nefertiti, she reached some oddly congruent conclusions, which made her Public Enemy Number One of orthodox feminists. "Despite my deviant and rebellious beginnings," she wrote, "I have been led by my studies to reaffirm the most archaic myths about male and female."

Notwithstanding the NC-17-rated subject matter and her nostalgia for the Rousseauvean Sixties, Miss Paglia's logic often leads her toward a version of Hobbesian conservatism: e.g., "Society is not the criminal but the force which keeps crime in check. . . the rapist is a man with too little socialization rather than too much."

Her sudden notoriety is due in part to her extraordinary powers of pattern recognition (she resembles a stand-up comic who's been channel-surfing for stereotypes since Sumer). But at a time when "multiculturalists" insist that only members of a given group should discuss that group's creative heritage, Miss Paglia reconfirms the value of the outsider's perspective. An outsider among outsiders, she's a lesbian who identifies with men rather than resents them (her idol is Rolling Stone Keith Richards). As an odd duck, she can scrutinize masculinity with detached lucidity, while most men are fish who don't know they're wet.

Miss Paglia's new book, Vamps and Tramps, is not Volume 2 of Sexual Personae, which was to extend her analysis to pop culture. This collection of recent journalism does, however, frequently follow that book's promised theme: "The commercial media . . . sidestep the liberal censors who have enjoyed such long control over book culture. In film, popular music, and commercials we contemplate all the daemonic myths and sexual stereotypes of paganism that reform movements from Christianity to feminism have never been able to eradicate." Her tardiness in completing her masterwork is disappointing to her admirers but not surprising; as this straight-to-paperback 560-page compendium exhaustively chronicles, she's been busy. After having only two articles published in the Seventies and Eighties, she has grabbed the Nineties by the lapels and won't let go until she has had her say.

Miss Paglia now writes extensively on both current controversies and the latest month's Scandal of the Century. Although I prefer her as analyst rather than advocate, even her manifestoes are uniquely frank. She blasts gay activists as "Stalinists" for their campaigns of intimidation and sophistry. She also explains how the Bobbitts, the Windsors, Amy Fisher and Joey Buttafuoco, Woody and Mia and Soon-Yi, and Bill and Hillary and Paula fit into her grand scheme. Frustratingly for her critics--and for admirers who wish she'd get back to scholarship--by focusing on the enduring allure of sexual archetypes, Miss Paglia explains the appeal of our tabloid divinities more successfully than normal news pundits, who can recognize only their supposed novelty. The crazier the world seems, the saner Camille Paglia sounds.

Unfortunately Vamps & Tramps suffers from the mixing of its author's three discordant personae: scholar, polemicist, and celebrity role model. While never dull, this unabridged compilation can be repetitious. Because Miss Paglia ties every topic into The Theory, most of her op-eds include a rushed recap of the tragicomic world view she elucidated with supreme clarity in Sexual Personae's first chapter.

But Miss Paglia also wants to be an icon, the model for the woman of the future. Although her "street-wise feminism" is a bracing antidote to the naivete of conventional feminism, does Miss Paglia really expect many women to identify with her deeply? Or is her natural audience mostly male? From Rush Limbaugh (who shared a convivial cigar with her) to Hollywood heman Oliver Stone (whose Natural Born Killers is a repulsively literal rendering of a few of Miss Paglia's gorier views about the human animal), guys can relate to Miss Paglia man to man.

Finally, turbocharging her Amazon side for maximum media impact aggravates a weakness in a thinker who is heroically ambitious to comprehend human nature: she can't emotionally identify with mothers. "I have no talent for motherhood," she admits in a rare understatement. (That's why she doesn't notice that the most overwhelming evidence for the appeal of sexual archetypes is not in museums but in toy stores.) Reproduction is of course central to Miss Paglia's theory, but while she respects maternal women more than orthodox feminists do, she connects with childbirth only intellectually. Since superstardom requires emotion more than intellect, she forgets the centrality of motherhood and exhorts women to follow her in vamping and tramping fearlessly. She must guard against becoming further absorbed in her own singular personality. Otherwise, her edicts could become as unrealistic for women searching for the security that motherhood demands as that Michael Jordan advertising slogan "Be like Mike" was impracticable for gravity-challenged white boys.

Mr. Sailer is a Chicago businessman and writer. His article Why Lesbians Aren't Gay" appeared in NR (May 30).