Vamps and Tramps: New Essays.

When Camille Paglia first bellied up to the mass-cult bar with the publication of Sexual Personae, in 1990, one of her most appealing features was the nakedness and innocence of her desire to be cool. As most of us who have passed through adolescence know, this is a poignant and inherently self-defeating state of mind, and to watch her bravely soldiering on, dressed in the intellectual equivalent of an unbuttoned polyester shirt and gold zodiac pendant, was to wish, in the more charitable part of oneself, to accord her the dignity she was so blithely squandering. On the other hand, Sexual Personae and most of the essays that followed in its wake were ugly, ignorant pieces of work, and the less charitable part of oneself ached to point out that she was wearing the intellectual equivalent of a toupee.

It could be that one has simply grown more charitable, but for some reason Vamps & Tramps, Paglia's most recent collection of essays, is her most enjoyable work to date. She's a one-trick pony, to be sure, but perhaps owing to the success and validation she has enjoyed over the last several years, her joie de vivre is now more evident, and hence a more effective counterbalance to her excesses. Her overall effect is therefore more Howard Stern than Rush Limbaugh.

The most irritating thing about Paglia remains her insistence on speaking as an authority on pop culture, and as the quotations below indicate, this is more irritating to pop culture than to anyone else. In the interests of absolute scruple, it should be pointed out that Madonna has often been the subject of Ms. Paglia's (usually favorable) commentary, and that Courtney Love-Cobain recently expressed some admiration for Vamps & Tramps, although this was before its author described Kurt Cobain, in a Playboy q-and-a, as self-pitying, whiny, and suffering by comparison with the great rock figures of Paglia's generation. Love-Cobain is, as if it needed to be pointed out, a fierce partisan of her late husband's work. With those caveats in mind, herewith, three members of the milieu Ms. Paglia has claimed as her subject express themselves. The interviews from which these statements are excerpted all took place within the last year:

Madonna (performer, icon, genius): "I hate her. Please. I hate the way she goes around making all these pronouncements as if she knows everything and she's discovered what feminism really is. Who gave her a soapbox to stand on anyway? That date rape doesn't exist, that's a bunch of fucking bullshit, I totally don't agree with her. She's just a dirty old man dressed as a woman, proclaiming herself to be a feminist. And she's a shitty writer, I mean, no shit. I've got nothing to say about her that's good so I'd better just shut up now."

Me'Shell N'dege'Ocello (bass player, roots rocker, gender rebel): "Okay, she wrote that Sexual Personae? Women can't play guitar as well as men and they never will? That's sick. Lita Ford is a guitar-playing mother-fucker, are you crazy? And the date-rape stuff, I mean, I've been raped, so I find her very offensive. I've been raped by somebody I know. And what's funny is they ask you, Do you know the assailant? And I'm like, yes. And then they look at you like, Oh, you're going to have a really hard time. And you know you're bleeding and need 14 stitches in a private part and still, it's a joke. I'm sorry. Unless you've been laying on that table in stirrups bleeding with a speculum in you, you have no right to say shit."

Courtney Love-Cobain (singer, guitarist, Miss World): "Somebody said I was the Camille Paglia of rock once, and I was like so insulted. The only thing that was more insulting was somebody who wrote a letter to Vanity Fair that said, Compared to Demi Moore I was a lowbrow. That killed me. Demi Moore of General Hospital, and I'm lowbrow? It just made me die. But the Camille thing was really lame, it was like: What? I mean that woman is just so in her fame that fame is like the only thing that matters to her. I staged to write her a letter once, because I was like: What? You're an idiot, and you don't understand anything, and then I started to draw her this map of like our ascent in rock from Goldie and the Gingerbreads to Isis to Fanny to Suzi Quatro, and to tell her, you know, this is a forty-year-old art form, and you don't understand it for shit. And then I realized, Well, I have a pretty good knowledge of this stuff and I'm not sending it to her. So then I spent the day with Susan Faludi, and I told it to her instead. I think that was a better investment, to be honest."

Mim Udovitch is a New York-based free-lance writer.