Camille Paglia’s new collection, Sex, Art, and American Culture, shows the belligerent and pyrotechnical polymath in a number of poses, from sober critic to flamboyant celebrity spouting hyperbolic opinions.¹ There are tossed-off op-ed pieces, more or less traditional book reviews, autobiographical musings, and a memoir of an inter-cultural teaching experiment. Most substantive are the transcript of an MIT lecture (plus Q & A), and a long article called “Junk Bonds and Corporate Raiders” that, originating as a review for Arion of two books of classical gay studies, swells into an exposé of the methodologically and intellectually shaky foundations of all such “social constructionist” enterprises and winds up with high-minded suggestions for curricular reform in more or less traditional directions. MIT was the “home institution” of one of her Arion targets, and thus the long lecture given there four months after that issue of Arion appeared was in the nature of a pre-emptive strike into enemy country.

The Arion piece is Paglia at her best. Confronted with a half-baked and smugly dehumanizing ideology (here, the notion that sexual differences, and indeed sexuality, have no grounding in nature), she marshals formidable learning in art history and anthropology to expose its inaccuracies and absurdities. She is eager to show, for example, the fraudulence of John Winkler’s claim to have, in his Constraints of Desire, treated Sappho frankly at last. Victorian prudery or Wilhelmine stuffiness (I am thinking of the great Wilamowitz’s presentation of Sappho as a