(3 of 3)
Her seven-year stint there was a series of explosions. For one thing, she is, as she says in a rare understatement, "physical." Paglia throws punches. She kicks people twice her size. Once she even called the president of the college to inform her that she was about to kick an obnoxious male student. Fine, said the president, who was new on the job and probably thinking in metaphors. Paglia landed one that sent the fellow sprawling in the cafeteria. Says the woman warrior: "Committees were always convening over me." After leaving Bennington in 1979 -- one tiff too many -- she struggled for a decade to support herself.
Paglia usually refers to her private life as a disaster. Through the years she has had relationships with both women and men and for a while considered herself a lesbian. "But lesbians don't like me," she notes, in part because she insists that most women are bisexual, that the role of hormones accounts for an inevitable attraction between the sexes. Lately Paglia has been going out with men. But, she asks, "what man is going to take me seriously? I'm not a nurturer. Men have flashes of ego and confidence followed by relapses. They have to be stroked, and I don't have that patience." There is also the age problem. Recently she dated men around her age, 44, but found them over the hill sexually. She would prefer younger men, but her pride restrains her. "Like there's something faintly ridiculous about Cher with that young guy: she looks like a dowager with a gigolo." Some dowager.
Paglia will take next fall off from her academic and speechifying schedule to get the second volume of Personae into shape. The book promises to be a whopper, the author's thoughts on a lifetime of blustery enthusiasm for popular culture. The sport section, for instance, will deal with baseball vs. football: Paglia is passionately in favor of the latter. Baseball she considers an academic pastime: "Wasp, cerebral, Protestant." Football, on the other hand, she wishes she could have played: "The rhythms of my writing are high impact. Colleagues have seen my ability to look downfield and see pockets of trouble. And I hit them."
What she will say about her beloved rock idols is less clear. Megasuccess may be poisoning them. She finds Michael Jackson's current album "appalling," Prince a letdown, Madonna drifting. "She wants to cover all frontiers, but she has very little talent for acting," says one of the Material Girl's most vocal fans. "O.K.?"
O.K. But Paglia is determined to hit a few frontiers too. Kafka once said "a book must be the ax for the frozen sea inside us." Paglia wants to write that book -- "not the Band-Aid, not the comforter, not the down quilt." The ax.