I can't resist pointing you to this swipe at Paglia over her new book.  It's
tremendous for schadenfreud.  (Or is that schadenfreude, Martin?)

I never got through Sexual Personae because I hurled it across the room in
the middle of the introduction.  But that's just me.

Here's the beginning:

Look at Me

by LEE SIEGEL

"When Camille Paglia first strutted onto the scene in 1991 with her
polemical tome Sexual Personae , her smart, audacious duels with orthodoxy
and militancy on both the left and the right were a tonic. Against highly
theoretical academic feminists comfortable in their privileged aeries, she
cited the experience of working-class women, and also just plain, ordinary
struggling women who were unprotected by tenure and by the sealed borders of
a campus. In response to the conservatives who sought to woo her, she
flaunted her bisexuality and her love of gay style and camp. In response to
the multiculturalists who dreamed of bringing into the "canon" comic books
and television sitcoms--thus making it possible for comic books and
television to also bear the stigma of "homework"--she defended the virtues
of classic literature. But when the conservatives came calling again with
their Great Books boosterism, she blasted them with her ardor for rock and
roll.

Feminist martinets? Paglia zapped them with paeans to pornography,
prostitution and the thrill of raw, heterosexual sex. Conservative prigs?
She zinged them with hymns to Robert Mapplethorpe and to gay male porn, and
to the superiority of gay male sex. Lesbians? Well, she didn't really like
them, but she loved having sex with women, just in case you underestimated
her antagonism toward the idea of "normalcy." And so it went.

Like all styles of radical will, it eventually got tiresome. "Attacking the
stale orthodoxies of both left and right" has itself become a stale
intellectual franchise, a contrarian orthodoxy. You can be left, and you can
be (I guess) right without being stalely orthodox. The "issues" Paglia was
railing against were a lot less well defined beyond the parochial realm in
which she debated them. Campus campaigns against free speech, a university's
attempts to police the nebulous zone of sex and dating--such trends seemed
sensationally oppressive inside the claustrophobic space of the university,
and in the hungry eyes of op-ed page editors, book publishers and television
producers.

But standing outside the university and looking in yielded a different
perspective. People, especially young people, really were feeling more
vulnerable. Self-esteem really was a vital psychic quality worth talking
about. Society was changing. Commercially fabricated permissiveness was not
the same thing as genuine human freedom, and people hadn't yet developed--we
still haven't--new defenses against new types of injury created by the
marketplace. So younger people were looking for new ideas and new sentiments
that would help them become persons, or simply to help them survive.
Naturally there were going to be outrageous excesses, careerist hangers-on,
charismatic charlatans along the way. That's the price of progress.

Considered in this broader social context, Paglia's Emersonian
pronouncements on the inestimable value of the individual began to sound as
adolescent as Emerson at his most solipsistic. And celebrity started
exacting its usual toll on Paglia in the form of self-exaggeration and
self-parody. The thoughtful gadfly became a performing gabfly; her
provocations declined into insults; her once-gratifying affirmations of
individuality, imagination and incalculable experience began to sound like
playground shouts of Look at Me. Paglia's vituperative ranting against
hate-speech laws now seemed like arguments for why they should exist. She
seemed to be precisely the kind of old-fashioned bully who had given rise to
the new fragility and its search for protection, and for its own sources of
power.

Worst of all was Paglia's self-consciousness as a media personality. After a
while, she was no longer taking positions in response to principles or
ideas, but in response to her own positions. Her extreme rhetoric concealed
a cautious tailoring of her image. For every step leftward, she had to take
a step rightward; for every transgressive gesture she had to make a
concession to middle-class mores, for every step down to pop culture, she
had to step up to some exaltation of artistic greatness. It was like doing
the last tango in Paris all by yourself, on The Charlie Rose Show . Shaped
by the issues, Paglia reached the point where she could only express herself
in the categorical language of the issues. As the issues that launched her
career as a public intellectual gave way to different ones that were outside
her arena of expertise, she receded from public view.

Until now. With her new book, Paglia has found a new emergency in American
life. As if an unnecessary war, a sinking economy, a widening gulf between
classes, a rampant commercialism like acid on the brain weren't bad enough,
America is now experiencing a crisis in...poetry. Resurrecting the patented
alarmist language of Allan Bloom and all those culture warriors who marched
across our television screens in the late 1980s and '90s--and in doing so
created a cultural distraction while the right wing stole American
politics--Paglia has exhumed a dead herring. She declares that "poetry was
at the height of prestige in the 1960s. American college students were
listening to rock music but also writing poetry." She attended lots of
poetry readings back then. However, "over the following decades, poetry and
poetry study were steadily marginalized by pretentious 'theory.'"

The rest at

http://www.thenation.com/docprint.mhtml?i=20050613&s=siegel

Best

A

Alison Croggon

Blog: http://theatrenotes.blogspot.com
Editor, Masthead:  http://masthead.net.au
Home page: http://alisoncroggon.com