'I came in like a scud,' declares Camille Paglia with iconoclastic fervour, ' I create total disorder.

I just undermine authority.'1 Laced with arsenic, her collection of essays called Vamps and Tramps written in the mid nineties is a polemical foray into feminism, sexuality and academic freedom. Rereading the essays after a span of nearly a decade is quite an experience as her writings still retain that strange quality of pumping adrenaline through your veins. This is especially so when the recent works on feminism are vapid and theoretically vacuous. Paglia's bete noire is the orthodox feminist establishment, which she attacks with a gusto that would shame the efforts of a Doberman tearing a slab of red meat. An enlightened feminism of the 21st century, she says, 'will embrace all sexuality and will turn away from the delusionalism, sanctimony, prudery and male- bashing of the MacKinnon-Dworkin brigade. Women will never know who they are until they let men be men. Let's get rid of Infirmary Feminism, with its bedlam of bellyachers, anorexics, bulimics, depressives, rape victims and incest survivors. Feminism has become a catch-all vegetable drawer where bunches of clingy sob sisters share their moldy neurosis.' She earned the ire of the sisterhood by coining an interesting word "whuffle" which she defined as the annoying, scratchy sound made by weepy feminists as they lament the sufferings of women and, hound like, sniff out evidence of male oppression in literature, art and the media. Paglia is especially severe on feminist divas, Catherine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin whose views on pornography resulted in the Minneapolis and Indianapolis ordinances against pornography that were subsequently declared as unconstitutional by the courts. Paglia and other pro-sex feminists challenged the campaign of Catherine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin that 'pornography degrades women' or 'Pornography is the subordination of women as being totally idiotic'. According to pro-sex feminists the notion that women are subordinate to men was downright misleading as most pornography shows women in as many dominant as subordinate roles in sex play. Moreover, Feminist anti- porn discourse ignores the gigantic gay porn industry, which deals with man-man, and woman-woman relationship, which has nothing to do with the subjugation of woman by man. Commenting on the controversial debates initiated by the duo MacKinnon- Dworkin to abolish porn she thundered 'They are fanatics of the new feminist religion. Their alliance with the reactionary, anti- porn far right is no coincidence.' Pouring scorn on spurious feminist studies which purport to show the nexus between porn and rape, she said, 'Pornography does not cause rape or violence, which predate pornography by thousands of years. Rape and violence occur not because of patriarchal conditioning but because of the opposite, a breakdown of social controls.' Paglia is at her polemical best when she declares, 'In this mechanized technological world of steel and glass, the fires of sex have to be stoked. Pornography is a pagan arena of beauty, vitality, and brutality, of the archaic vigor of nature. It should break every rule, offend all morality.' Paglia, a self confessed libertine, like Nietzsche seeks a vitalism, a liberation of desire, a return of libidinal energy which offers a respite from a dull urbanized life of conformity. She caused intense dismay in orthodox feminist circles when she supported prostitution, suicide, abortion and consensual sexual acts such as S&M and homosexuality. Her credo could be expressed pithily as 'Life is dangerous- get out and feel it.' Her contempt for most feminists stemmed from the perception that they lacked a general knowledge of criminology or psychopathology and hence no perspective on, or insight into the bloody lurid human record. Paglia favors the tough cookie feminism of Ida Lupino and the film noir heroines to the simpering, desexed white middle class women obsessed with rape fantasies. On man/woman relationships she sent the feminists in a tizzy when she tartly said 'Men are never free from women. First, it's their mothers and then it's their wives. For years, I've seen middleaged women dragging their husbands around saying, "No! You can't have that hot dog. Men are on the leash.' Paglia had withering contempt for American Academia obsessed with political correctness. She felt that the academic establishment had paralyzed itself with cronyism, greed and moral cowardice making it difficult to reform itself. Political correctness carried the baggage of repressive speech code and puritanical sexual regulations which were inimical to the

progressive values of the sixties generation. In an interview with Paglia someone asked her as to where she got her demoniac energy. The answer was vintage Paglia. "From watching football," she said simply. C R Sridhar