Vamps & Tramps: New Essays (Paperback)

~ (Editor)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Either you like the polysexual, pagan Paglia, or you don't-and this collection by the author of Sexual Personae isn't going to change that. Perfectly aware of her image, Paglia early on compares herself to Ross Perot, Rush Limbaugh and Howard Stern, in her "raging egomania and volatile comic personae tending toward the loopy." On this outing, Paglia revisits the same fire hydrants, sniffs the competition and then marks them once more as her own. Pornography continues to be great; Lacanians, bad; Freud, underrated; feminists, undersexed. Although her main essay "No Law in the Arena," is not as solid as "Junk Bonds and Corporate Raiders," the analysis of academe that anchored Sex, Art, and American Culture, many of her essays expand on her gritty common-sense understanding of the nasty realities of sex. Particularly good are "Rebel Love: Homosexuality"; "Lolita Unclothed" and "Woody Allen Agonistes." Paglia is at her bilious ad feminem best skewering one-time idol Susan Sontag in "Sontag, Bloody Sontag," or Catharine MacKinnon ("the dull instincts and tastes of a bureaucrat") and Andrea Dworkin ("The Girl with the Eternal Cold") in "The Return of Carry Nation." As usual, there's much about tabloid icons-Amy Fisher, Lorena Bobbit, Jackie O-but Paglia herself has become just such an icon, appearing in movies and TV specials whose transcripts she rather tediously includes. Still, when Paglia is good, she is palatable; when Paglia is bad, she's terrific. Author tour.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

Only five "new essays" appear in this second collection from Paglia (Sex, Art, and American Culture, LJ 10/1/92), a hodgepodge of book reviews, television and film scripts, previously published articles, excerpted transcripts to television talk shows and interviews, and other bits and pieces, accompanied by an inventory of press mentions and cartoons offered to document her celebrity. Paglia's overheated expostulations against censorship, "Stalinist feminists," and other bugbears of political correctness are interspersed with fierce arguments in favor of sexual license. Commenting on pop culture, she expounds her libertarian view, rejecting state regulation of abortion, prostitution, sodomy, drug use, and pornography, disdaining state "social-welfare meddling in public education" and "rigid antimale feminist ideology." For Paglia fans.
Cynthia Harrison, Federal Judicial Ctr., Washington, D.C.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 560 pages
• Publisher: Vintage; 1 edition (October 11, 1994)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0679751203
• ISBN-13: 978-0679751205
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.2 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (28 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #140,183 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

22 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars This review is actually rated at 2 1/2 stars, August 14, 1999

By A Customer

In other words, below average but not a complete waste of time. When I read Camille Paglia's first book, I felt a sense of intellectual and sexual liberation and excitement, as if she were speaking to a part of myself that had lain undiscovered and unexpressed. This book is a huge disappointment: a lame collection of celebrity-worshipping essays, followed by an entire section dedicated to cartoons and media references to her name. I was embarrassed for her after reading this book. Camille Paglia is a woman of formidable intellect, but for all she decries white-tower academia, she is and will always be a product of its privilege and exclusivity. She obviously longs to be a Keith Richards-esque outsider and continuously points out how her various employers have censored and blacklisted her, and I think her books (except for the first, which is a minor masterpiece) are an effort to enforce that image. However, being pro-pornography and pro-abortion aren't exactly revolutionary stages to take, no matter how much our Puritan culture would like people to believe that; rather, they seem a relapse into a very solipsistic, male-oriented world that Paglia is very much a part of--a Testosterone Valhalla in which all that is non-corporeal can be visualized and fetishized (a futile undertaking, if ever there was one!) I am still hopeful that Camille Paglia's next work will put this one to shame.

15 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The world won't listen, June 2, 2003

By	Tyro (Brooklyn, New York USA) - See all my reviews

Camille Paglia's image is a blessing and a curse. Like Chris Rock, she can get away with telling the truth about our repressed, hypersensitive culture. Unfortunately, her audience expects her to say shocking things, therefore her broadsides have lost some of their impact. Her enemies, the Mackinnons and Dworkins, won the culture wars long ago. Their beliefs are now written into law, taught in college and inscribed in police procedure manuals. Critics like Paglia are a recognized but ineffectual voice, easily dismissed by the establishment. For these reasons, Ms. Paglia's essays and journalistic pieces may be slightly disappointing. The interviews and transcripts, however, are the real pleasure; they recreate the "dissident feminist" at her fearless, truth-telling best.

21 of 26 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Paglia as performance artist; worthy addition, August 8, 2001

By	Samuel Chell (Kenosha,, WI United States) - See all my reviews (TOP 50 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

Quite simply, Paglia is one of the best literary/cultural critics of the past two decades. Her prose is jargon-free and perpetually potent; her subject range reveals perhaps the singlemost interdisciplinary mind of our generation. Unfortunately, her political "incorrectness" gives those unwilling to be challenged by her insights an excuse not to read her. The mere mention of her name in academic or women's studies circles is enough to insure condemnation of the offender--merely adding substance to her critique of the present state of these two institutions. She is both a shibboleth and a pariah. (I was publicly spanked for invoking her name at a national symposium; then later congratulated privately by several younger women.)

Paglia has many personae. "Vamps and Tramps" may be a suitable introduction for some but it is actually more appropriate for the initiated Paglia-ite. "Vamps" is the "rap-music," "performance-artist" Paglia; "Sex, Art, and Decadence" is the frequently provocative and compelling popular essayist; "Sexual Personae" is the prolix, Nietzschean original thinker; her study of Hitchcock's "The Birds" is the disciplined yet passionate and provocative scholar. Any of these latter three volumes would be preferable as a starter for the reader wishing to discover why Camille can credibly claim the top position among current literary scholars and cultural critics.