Vamps & Tramps: New Essays

Overview
Camille Paglia’s Vamps & Tramps: New Essays gathers the surge of polemics, reviews, lectures, and interviews she produced in the wake of Sexual Personae. Written amid the early 1990s culture wars, the collection consolidates her public persona as a maverick feminist and cultural critic, arguing for a bold, pagan-inflected view of sexuality and art against the reigning orthodoxies of academia and activist politics. It is both a snapshot of a heated moment and a reassertion of her long campaign to connect high art to popular culture and to root aesthetics in the unruly energies of nature and the body.

Scope and Form
The book’s range is deliberately unruly. Short newspaper columns sit beside extended essays, public talks, and Q&A exchanges; there are also diary-like chronicles from her speaking tours. Subjects move from ancient myth and Renaissance art to Hollywood star personas, rock music, the fashion industry, and contemporary film. Paglia treats pop celebrities and canonical authors as participants in the same civilizational drama, collapsing the divide between “serious” and “mass” culture to show recurring archetypes, most centrally the vamp and the tramp, reappearing in new guises.

Core Arguments
Paglia advances a pro-sex, libertarian strain of feminism that emphasizes biological realities, sexual dimorphism, and the amoral force of eros. Against what she calls victim-centered or puritanical currents in second-wave and campus feminism, she insists that sexuality is perilous and ecstatic, not a solvable social problem. Art and civilization, in her view, are sublimations of chthonic nature; culture’s achievements are bought at the price of repression, which can never be fully erased. She defends pornography, S&M, drag, and glamour as expressive laboratories of desire and style, warning that moralistic regulation or speech codes stunt both personal freedom and artistic innovation. The classroom, she argues, should be a place of passionate debate, not ideological policing; literature and art criticism should be comparative, historical, and sensuous rather than theory-bound.

Cultural Criticism and Case Studies
Her case studies map these themes onto live controversies and media icons of the day. Essays on star imagery and fashion parse the construction of feminine power in celebrity culture, with special attention to the charisma of performers who manipulate archetype and costume. Film reviews track how contemporary cinema revives ancient motifs of the fatal woman, the huntress, and the androgyne. Political flashpoints, sexual harassment debates, campus date-rape discourse, obscenity trials, and public-funding battles over art, are read as modern iterations of the perennial conflict between Apollonian order and Dionysian tumult. The through-line is a defense of candor about desire, spectacle, and aggression, paired with an admonition that modern egalitarian ideals cannot erase the darker substrata of human nature.

Voice and Method
The writing is flamboyant, aphoristic, and combative, moving quickly from close description to sweeping cultural genealogy. Paglia’s erudition roves across classical literature, theology, anthropology, and pop ephemera, producing sharp juxtapositions that aim to shock readers out of received opinion. Autobiographical fragments, her Italian American background, bisexual identity, and early encounters with art, function as touchstones for a sensibility that prizes resilience, humor, and self-reliance.

Position in Paglia’s Project
Vamps & Tramps operates as a companion to Sexual Personae and Sex, Art, and American Culture, translating their theses into topical engagements and media-age portraits. It records the pressures and exhilarations of public argument in a polarized era while restating a program: revive comparative, historically grounded criticism; honor beauty and performance across the cultural spectrum; and face the realities of sex without utopian evasions. The result is a volatile, propulsive book that fuses manifesto, scrapbook, and travelogue into a single, insistent argument about art, power, and the persistence of myth.