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Loquacious is too impoverished a word to describe Paglia's speaking style. She talks at triple speed, rarely even using contractions, hurtling along in a grating pitch that comes perilously close to a cackle. Her aural punctuation is hilarious. A recent SRO lecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology was typical. Yuh? Yuh? O.K.? O.K.? peppered her speech, and the audience answered right back.
Someone recently compared Paglia with Phyllis Schlafly, and she was appalled. Despite all the brickbats, Paglia considers herself a lifelong feminist; Personae took shape when she read Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex and resolved "to do something massive for women." But Paglia believes the current movement has declined into smug formulas and codes of political correctness. "What began as a movement of eccentric individualists has turned into an ideology that attracts weak personalities who are looking for something to believe in." Or, she adds, someone to blame: to her, rape is a dreadful crime, but women who make their accusations years later -- not to mention those who complain of date rape and sexual harassment -- are deluded. Anita Hill should have stepped forward at once when Clarence Thomas was offensive to her, she argues. "My feminism is, like, deal with it!" says Paglia. "Not ten years later."
Paglia's ideal women are independent, like Amelia Earhart or Katharine Hepburn. She became obsessed with Earhart as a teenager and even wrote a book- length manuscript about her. Little Camille's enthusiasms were something her Italian immigrant parents fostered. Her father, a French professor at Le Moyne College in Syracuse, taught her to pursue goals aggressively. Today the daughter says ruefully, "He created a monster he couldn't control."
She can't remember a time when she was not scuffling with boys to be first in line. When she devoured books on ancient Egypt, her father was gratified. But movies also held her in thrall. Paglia's love affair with popular culture, which forms the forthcoming second volume of Personae, was already blossoming when she was a child. "Egypt and Hollywood were equivalent phenomena to me, equally rich and fabulous," she says. Her father demurred. "He lectured me on Voltaire's disapproval of actors," Camille recalls, "and this was the time when I was making my collection of 599 Elizabeth Taylor pictures."
In 10th grade Paglia got her first taste of social ostracism and its consequences. Some of the pretty blonds in her class suddenly turned into bland, cliquish sorority queens. She was left behind as a tomboy with a serious case of ambition. The lesson was not lost on her; to this day she sides fiercely with the outsider.
She was class valedictorian at the State University of New York, Binghamton, in 1968, "when it was full of radicals." The students were throwing off '50s shackles and looking to other cultures for solutions. The Doors' battle cry, "We want the world, We want it now," exhilarated Paglia. After four restless years at Yale getting her Ph.D. in English, she found herself teaching at Bennington.