Camille Paglia - Vamps and Tramps: New Essays

Excerpt

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.