Camille Paglia usually strikes me (in interviews and articles; I've never quite felt up to tackling her books) as a kind of split personality. She's very good at knocking down poseurs and pretentiousness, and at transcending gay self-imposed stereotypes. Yet in her own way she too seems constantly winking and nudging and showing you how much cleverer she is than the average brainworker.

To wit, from this interview: "I loved Cruising — while everyone else was furiously condemning it." She didn't need to add the second bit; it's just one-upmanship. (Any other commenter would have said "one-up-personship," but you notice how I didn't.)

Paglia sasses the sensitivity-contest adoration of Brokeback Mountain: "I was steadily annoyed by the over-stylish, absurdly clean and unwrinkled clothes of the two leads (they looked like Ralph Lauren catalog models) and by the sexist stereotyping of their betrayed and increasingly unattractive wives." Funny and probably accurate — "probably" because I am among the benighted who chose to avoid the movie.

But then she can turn around and write gender studies twaddle like: "My theory is that gay men, unlike lesbians, have an innate, hyper-acute visual sense. It’s related to what I have speculated to be the genesis of much (but not all) male homosexuality: an artistic gene that ends up isolating sensitive young boys and interfering at a crucial moment with the harsh dynamics of schoolyard male bonding."

I think Paglia wants to have her fun lampooning the Intellectual Pseuds Association, but she's not about to tear up her membership card.

Posted by: Rick Darby on November 14, 2006 4:51 PM