Vamps & Tramps Read online

  Books by CAMILLE PAGLIA

  Vamps and Tramps: New Essays

  Sex, Art, and American Culture: Essays

  Sexual Personae:

  Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson

  A VINTAGE ORIGINAL, NOVEMBER 1994

  FIRST EDITION

  Copyright © 1994 by Camille Paglia

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  Paglia, Camille

  Vamps and tramps : new essays / Camille Paglia.— 1st ed.

  p. cm.

  “A Vintage original.”

  eISBN: 978-0-307-76556-7

  1. Popular culture—United States—History—20th century.

  2. Arts, American. 3. Arts, Modern—20th century—United States. 4. American literature—20th century—History and criticism. I. Title.

  E169.12.P334 1994

  306.4′0973—dc20 94-12191

  This page-this page constitute an extension of this copyright page.

  v3.1

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  INTRODUCTION

  THE YEAR OF THE PENIS

  The Penis Unsheathed

  NO LAW IN THE ARENA

  No Law in the Arena: a Pagan Theory of Sexuality 1. Introduction: The Horses of Passion

  2. Sex Crime: Rape

  3. Sex War: Abortion, Battering, Sexual Harassment

  4. Sex Power: Prostitution, Stripping, Pornography

  5. Rebel Love: Homosexuality

  6. Conclusion: Citizens of the Empire

  THE CULTURE WARS

  The Nursery-School Campus: The Corrupting of the Humanities in the U.S.

  Gay Stalinism

  The Return of Carry Nation: Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin

  The New Sexism: Liberating Art and Beauty

  An Open Letter to the Students of Harvard

  On Censorship

  POP THEATER

  Woody Allen Agonistes

  Our Tabloid Princess: Amy Fisher

  The Female Lenny Bruce: Sandra Bernhard

  Brooklyn Nefertiti: Barbra Streisand

  Lolita Unclothed

  MASTERS AND MISTRESSES

  Diana Regina

  Television and the Clintons

  Kind of a Bitch: Why I Like Hillary Clinton

  Hillary in the Spotlight

  Laying the Ghost of Anita Hill: Bill Clinton and Paula Jones

  Mona Lisa in Motion: Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis

  MEMOIRS AND ADVENTURES

  The Saint

  My Brothers in Crime: Benderson, Jarratt, Feld, Fessenden

  Dr. Paglia: Part 1 of Female Misbehavior, A Four-Part Documentary by Monika Treut

  Sex War: A Short Film by Luca Babini

  Glennda and Camille Do Downtown

  ON LITERATURE AND ART

  Gypsy Tigress: Carmen

  Alice as Epic Hero

  Love Poetry

  Tournament of Modern Personae: D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love

  Breviary of the Nude: Kenneth Clark’s The Nude

  The Artistic Dynamics of “Revival”

  Sontag, Bloody Sontag

  BOOK REVIEWS

  The Star as Sacred Monster

  David Shipman’s

  Judy Garland: The Secret Life of an American Legend

  Madonna in the Shallows

  Madonna’s

  Sex

  Madonna as Gauguin

  Mark Bego’s

  Madonna: Blonde Ambition

  Tyranny of the Technocrats

  John Ralston Saul’s

  Voltaire’s Bastards

  A Woman of the Century

  Germaine Greer’s

  The Change

  Scholar, Aesthete, Activist

  Edward Said’s

  Culture and Imperialism

  The Corpse of Fashion

  Fred Davis’s

  Fashion, Culture, and Identity

  Cry of the Invisible Men

  Warren Farrell’s

  The Myth of Male Power

  SATIRES AND SHORT TAKES

  Ask Camille Paglia: Advice for the Lovelorn, Among Others

  Feminist Fatale

  Bobbitt Versus Bobbitt

  Diary: Sex, Art, and Selling

  Extracts

  APPENDICES

  Cartoon Personae

  A Media Chronicle

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  INTRODUCTION

  The title of this book evokes the missing sexual personae of contemporary feminism. Vamps are queens of the night, the primeval realm excluded and repressed by today’s sedate middle-class professionals in their orderly, blazing bright offices. The prostitute, seductress, and high-glamour movie star wield woman’s ancient vampiric power over men. That power is neither rational nor measurable. The Apollonian rules we pass to govern the workplace will never fully control the demonic impulses of Dionysian night. Sexual equality before the law—the first great goal of modern feminism—cannot so easily be transferred to our emotional lives, where woman rules. Art and pornography, not politics, show us the real truth about sex.

  I want a revamped feminism. Putting the vamp back means the lady must be a tramp. My generation of Sixties rebels wanted to smash the bourgeois codes that had become authoritarian totems of the Fifties. The “nice” girl, with her soft, sanitized speech and decorous manners, had to go. Thirty years later, we’re still stuck with her—in the official spokesmen and anointed heiresses of the feminist establishment. White middle-class personae have barely changed. Getting women out of the kitchen and into the office, we have simply put them into another bourgeois prison. The panoramic Sixties vision, inspired by Buddhism and Hinduism, called the entire Western career system into question. But that insight has been lost.

  The beatniks, the generation of dissenters before mine, went “on the road”—not just physically, like Jack Kerouac, but spiritually. Allen Ginsberg, the New York Walt Whitman, made wayfaring songs of an exile in his own land. Fusing Hindu and Hebrew chant with African-American jazz rhythms, Ginsberg reenergized the purist folk style of Bob Dylan, my generation’s hobo troubadour, who went on to make rock ’n’ roll an art form. In “Like a Rolling Stone,” Dylan forces his faithless heroine to confront the blank-eyed “mystery tramp,” who is both the artist and personified death, the reality of extinction that defines life itself. “Think for yourself,” said the Beatles, and let your mind roam “where it will go.” The tramp is a rover, exploring the wilderness outside the status quo.

  Until the end of the Fifties, a sexually free woman was called a “tramp,” that is, a vagrant or streetwalker, a whore. Joan Rivers’s gleefully insatiable Heidi Abromowitz, dashing to the dock to greet the fleet, was the dark alter ego of the chaste middle-class girl. We must reclaim the Whore of Babylon, the nature goddess of that complex city of arrogant male towers and hanging female gardens. Vamps and tramps are Babylonian personae, pagan outcasts. They live again in our bold drag queens and gay hustlers, midnight cowboys of the urban canyons. An episode of the Perry Mason television series, starring Raymond Burr, was called The Case of the Vagabond Vixen. Female sexuality, freed from Judeo-Christian sequestration, returns to animal nature. The woman “on the stroll” (streetwalking) is a prowler and predator, self-directed and no one’s victim.

  Equal opportunity feminism, which I espouse, demands the removal of all barriers to woman’s advance in the political and professional world—but not at the price o
f special protections for women, which are infantilizing and anti-democratic. As a Sixties libertarian, I also oppose overregulation of sexuality, which has risen to a totalitarian extreme over the past decade in America. The culture is at risk when civil liberties are sacrificed on the altar of career success. Professional functioning in the Apollonian capitalist machine—which I laud as the vehicle of woman’s modern liberation—must not be confused with full human identity. Nor can office politics dictate our understanding of sexuality, which begins as a force of nature outside the social realm.

  White middle-class style, despite the Sixties rebellion, still tyrannizes us, because corporate business, with the streamlined efficiency of the profit-based work ethic, was born in Protestant Northern Europe, before and after the industrial revolution. It has been puritanical and desensualized from the start. Bland on the surface and seething with Darwinian hostility below, office manners grind down and homogenize all ethnic and racial differences. The world is going WASP. We must scrutinize and monitor business operations when corporations corner monopolies or mushroom into faceless global mega-entities rivaling nation-states, but business style, fetishizing the white Protestant persona, may be beyond reform, because it is simply too effective.

  We need to recast the daily dramas of our public theater. Meditating on vamps and tramps makes us see the decorous borders of professional life. In calling for a “room of one’s own,” Virginia Woolf created a central metaphor of twentieth-century feminism. Emily Dickinson, by a turn of the key, had achieved that secure mental space, but she was the daughter and sister of successful lawyers. A perquisite of privilege and prosperity, the “room of one’s own” was already too bourgeois for my subversive generation, whose brash rock spirit counsels: Get out of the house, and keep on running. A car of one’s own, the great equalizer, is more the mode of American Amazonism. On the open highway, battling stormy nature and dodging mammoth eighteen-wheelers (today’s piratical tramp freighters), woman has never been more mobile, more capable of the archetypal journey of the heroic quest, a traditionally masculine myth.

  The new tramp is not a displaced person, except insofar as he or she is a refugee from the prison of the nuclear family. Life is a condition of searching for meaning—an active and affirmative process, unlike the bunkered defeatism of modernism and postmodernism. The multicultural twenty-first century will also require research, as we drift further and further from our ethnic origins. By the principle of what I call creative duality, we must recover and celebrate our ethnic roots, while at the same time identifying ourselves with the spiritual homelessness of the tramp. The task is to balance philosophical detachment, the isolated consciousness, with a sense of community and engagement with social issues.

  Overprotected in the paternalistic past, women have a special obligation to liberate their personae. Male adventurism has always been a costly, painful privilege. When the office—by which I mean the whole complex of word-based, smoothly cooperative white-collar work, in business or academe—becomes the primary paradigm of new female achievement, women have cut themselves off from the risk-taking, rough-and-tumble experiences that have always toughened men. Women will never succeed at the level or in the numbers they deserve until they get over their genteel reluctance to take abuse in the attack and counterattack of territorial warfare. The recent trend in feminism, notably in sexual harassment policy, has been to overrely on regulation and legislation rather than to promote personal responsibility. Women must not become wards and suppliants of authority figures. Freedom means rejecting dependency.

  Creative duality also applies to female self-definition. Hyper-development of the Apollonian office persona during the day—crucial if women are to advance to leadership—necessitates contrary measures for psychic health. Vamp and tramp, as vivid mental states, must be given nocturnal Dionysian license. My brand of streetwise feminism demands aggressive guerrilla tactics of speed, subterfuge, and surprise. The street walk and street talk, big and brassy, are polar opposites of the reserved, compressed body language and modest, subdued voices required by the professional world in its contained spaces. The street is nature, the open savanna with its long sightlines and the raw, exuberant energies of hunt and pursuit. Communication is African call-and-response, loud because it must cover great distances. I am acutely aware of the difficult transition from working class to middle class, since I have identified, to my career detriment, with the assertive, theatrical style of my grandparents’ generation (my maternal grandfather worked in a shoe factory) rather than with the discreet good manners of my parents’ generation, who sought social assimilation in America.

  Vamps and tramps are the seasoned symbols of tough-cookie feminism, my answer to the smug self-satisfaction and crass materialism of yuppie feminism. I admire the hard-bitten, wisecracking realism of Ida Lupino and the film noir heroines. I’m sick of simpering white girls with their princess fantasies. The twenty-first hexagram of the I Ching is Shih Ho, “Biting Through,” which represents the forcible overcoming of obstacles. No more sweets. No more placebos or false assurances. The eating disorders that plague bourgeois feminism are the regressive rituals of docile daughters who, on some level, refuse to fend for themselves. As an Italian-American child, I was fed wild black mushrooms, tart dandelion greens, spiny artichokes, and tangy olives flecked with red pepper flakes. These were life lessons in the sour and prickly, the bitter herbs eaten in the tramp’s clothes of leavetaking. Auntie Mame, my campy guru, liked to say, “Life is a banquet, and most poor suckers are starving to death.” The theme of Vamps and Tramps is wanderlust, the erotic, appetitive mind in free movement.

  The word “vamp,” in the sense of a sexual seductress, is Slavic in origin and descends from the Serbo-Croatian vampire legends of the bloody Balkans. Our language has a second, less glamourous “vamp,” this one with French roots, by way of Middle English. Derived from shoemaking (the ancestral trade of my mother’s region in Italy), it describes the leather instep of a boot, the thing that is “in the front,” “avant,” as in the military and later artistic term, “avant-garde” or vanguard. Eventually, to “vamp” meant saving or repairing something old by patching it with a new piece—that is, using ingenuity, cleverness, and commonplace practicality to achieve your aims. From there it entered vaudeville and jazz: in musical accompaniment, “vamping” means improvising, ornamenting, pumping up the excitement.

  I take vamping in this second sense to describe my interpretative style, in classroom teaching, public lectures, and cultural criticism. Improvisation in the modern performing arts is ultimately a product of Romanticism’s stress on energy, originality, spontaneity, and emotional truth, as opposed to the gleaming technical perfection, architectural symmetry, and cerebral didacticism of neoclassicism. I don’t want to throw out the old songs; I want to update, customize, and supercharge them. I want to put the bomp back into the bomp-de-domp. Improv, analogous to Freudian free association, takes you by startling leaps and pulses to the heart of the matter. It is Dionysian logic, sensory and surreal. Vision comes in psychedelic flashes. “Hot tramp!” David Bowie says to a pagan rogue in “Rebel, Rebel.” The guardians of culture must return to homage and ecstasy. Riffing and jamming on the classics, we can both corrupt and redeem them.

  Vamps and Tramps began a year ago as a proposal by my editor for a second collection of essays. My first, Sex, Art, and American Culture (1992), documented the period following the release of my 700-page scholarly study, Sexual Personae (1990), when I was drawn into national controversies over date rape, sexual harassment, censorship, political correctness, poststructuralism, the literary canon, women’s studies, gay studies, multiculturalism, the role of television, and, last but not least, Madonna. The second volume of Sexual Personae, on modern popular culture, was completed in 1981 but is currently being revised to incorporate the thousands of note cards that have accumulated over the intervening decade and a half. That volume, like the first, will be released in hardcover by Yale University
Press.

  I was asked to write an essay, to serve as the centerpiece of Vamps and Tramps, about the newly contentious debate over homosexuality and biology, on which I had begun to speak out. I felt I should produce instead a more general statement of my sexual philosophy, in which homosexuality would have its place. Hence the main essay here, “No Law in the Arena: A Pagan Theory of Sexuality,” which systematically presents my libertarian views of rape, abortion, battering, sexual harassment, prostitution, stripping, pornography, homosexuality, pedophilia, and transvestism. My guiding principle is a strict separation between the public and private spheres. The sanctity of the latter must be preserved and defended. The state should have no power to oversee or regulate solitary or consensual activities, such as suicide or sodomy. Hence I strongly support the legalization of drugs and prostitution, and I am an extreme advocate of the most lurid forms of pornography.

  In the four years since I arrived on the scene (after an ill-starred career that included job problems, poverty, and the rejection of Sexual Personae by seven major publishers), there has been a dramatic shift in thought in America. The fascist rigidity of political correctness, in academe and the media, has begun to melt. Heretical ideas that, when I expressed them in essays and lectures in 1991 and 1992, got me pilloried and picketed, in a torrent of abuse and defamation, have now become common coin. My terminology and frame of analysis have passed into general usage. These are matters for the historical record, always clearer from a distance than in the chaotic present. My strategy has been to change the climate of ideas around the academic and feminist establishment, in order to shrink its power base. I have used aggressive “strikes,” based on war and (my favorite sport) football, to damage and punish false leaders. My favorite weapon has been satire, which I studied in Horace, Juvenal, Rabelais, Pope, Swift, Oscar Wilde, Bob Dylan, and Mad magazine.

  My meteoric rise—actually, this was the axiomatic “overnight success that took twenty years”—was partly due to a restlessness in America, a fatigue with dated ideology and an impatience with establishment insularity and impotence. These forces contributed to the 1992 presidential election of Bill Clinton, a relatively unknown governor of a provincial agricultural state (whom I continue to support, despite my public criticism of his managerial errors). As an ornery outsider of prickly eccentricity and raw populist humor, I was a parallel phenomenon to businessman-turned-politician Ross Perot and radio personalities Rush Limbaugh and Howard Stern, with their gigantic nationwide following. We have widely different political views, but all four of us, with our raging egomania and volatile comic personae tending toward the loopy, helped restore free speech to America.