Philadelphia

A Small woman in high white pumps leans against the library wall while a photographer hovers with a light meter. She wears mauve eye shadow, a touch of blush and a hint of lipstick. She wants to strike the right pose. She seems eager to help, happy to please.

Until she opens her mouth.

A screaming peals through the halls and Camille Paglia -- warrior woman of academia -- is on the rampage. A torrent of words sweeps down the corridors of the University of the Arts. Students tiptoeing past the camera equipment smile indulgently. They are familiar with the now-famous humanities professor and her dramatic flourishes.

"Baltimore? Johns Hopkins University? They're the worst," cries Dr. Paglia, her glass-cracking voice shattering the silence. "That's where lacanderdafoucault (her shorthand slur for French theoreticians Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault) came in to the U.S. from. They're anti-woman, homophobic, cut off from the waist down. It's terrible, terrible.

"I'm not a crackpot, I am a crackpot. I need more clothes. I run out of everything and I don't want to wear the same thing twice for photographs. I liked the sword in the New York magazine photograph. That was a good touch. Don't show this spaghetti spot on my blouse. Can you see it? I was poor for 20 years, and I never went shopping. Should I look serene? Angry? What image do I want to project?

It only takes a few seconds of fast-flying, free associations to unwrap the unruly universe inhabited by Dr. Paglia. The Yale-educated author of "Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson," is angry, angry, angry. She is also smart, smart, smart. She is print-hot and broadcast cool. She is making the most of the ire raised by her 700-page opus on sex, history, art and culture ("If civilization had been left in female hands, we would still be living in grass huts") by sassing on the "Dick Cavett Show" and in the New York Times, New York magazine, Harper's and Rolling Stone.

Dr. Paglia's rap is academic, but the shtick is show biz. She believes in a thorough, classical education, which cleaves to standards, maintains discipline and encourages the individual voice. That in itself, flying against the current rage for free-for-alls, political correctness and groupthink, is striking.

But what really sells is her style. Dr. Paglia's words fly, sputter and spurt. At a time when people seek to "share" and "affirm," she zaps and zings. She grabs the tape recorder, faces off with the camera, picks words for shock value. She adores Madonna ("Madonna and I are always on the same track"), loathes multiculturalism ("You can't just add a book by Alice Walker or Toni Morrison to your reading list"), ridicules women's studies ("a scandal -- not one major contemporary achievement,") and lambastes the idea of date rape ("No does not always mean no -- that's stupid").

With her in-your-face, shotgun-style delivery and her '60s crusading arrogance, Dr. Paglia is equal parts Joan Rivers, Jett and Arc.

Her forte is "academic terrorism," decrying what she calls the inferior work of current luminaries -- including Helen Vendler of Harvard University, Frances Ferguson of Johns Hopkins and Stanley Fish of Duke.

"Part of my mission is to not just state ideas but, as an independent thinker, to prick balloons. There hasn't been anyone to do it for a long time . . . and in order to get my aims achieved one must punish people who have risen to the top by politics not by scholarship," she explains in her rambling, rambunctious style.

"What goes around comes around, that's my attitude. I believe in the old law -- an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. I believe that Old Testament thing. This New Testament thing, turn the other cheek, I don't believe that. Italians don't believe it, we really don't."

Dr. Paglia's latest mission sprang out of an 80-page take-no-prisoners book review in Arion, a Boston-based classics journal. Asked to write on two books by gay scholars, Dr. Paglia said she was shocked by "the lies" perpetrated by the books' shoddy scholarship and limp intellectual underpinnings. The review evolved into a rant (excerpted in the New York Times Book Review and the Chronicle of Higher Education) as Dr. Paglia ground out 20,000 words praising Motown, the 1960s and the United States; denouncing schmoozers, specialists and sycophants; and -- in summation -- calling for total academic reform.

"There's a lot of crap in the air and I'm going to expose it," she shrieks. (The "scandal" of academe is a favorite theme. Dr. Paglia repeatedly recalls how "narrow-minded' scholars locked her out of the club for 20 years.) "What I am calling for is a massive return to learning. Learning as the basis for academic life. Scholarship, not game-playing. Not grabbing onto a contemporary critic like Derrida and applying him to everything like a rubber stamp. I think every academic in the humanities should be responsible for the whole history of literature and art and that everything should be devoted to study. Everything. A life of study."

Easy for Dr. Paglia to say. Study is her life. She has clipped and cut, read and written since childhood. Every activity is grist for the myth-making mill. Dr. Paglia doesn't just watch television, she soaks up popular culture; she isn't reading the National Enquirer, she's probing the national psyche. She is obsessed with making connections, exploring contradictions, defying conventions. As a child she devoured everything she could on aviator Amelia Earhart and collected 599 photographs of Elizabeth Taylor.

But Dr. Paglia was no pearly-faced, pink-frocked child. She was born 44 years ago in upstate New York to Italian parents. Dr. Paglia's father, a professor of romance languages, encouraged what other parents might have dismissed as idiosyncratic behavior. When other little girls dressed up as brides and princesses on Halloween, Dr. Paglia played Hamlet and Napoleon. Captivated by the Egyptian collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, she yearned to be an archaeologist.

All was well until puberty, when the reality of WASP blond bubbleheads (three categories Dr. Paglia still reviles) brought her up short. Then, said Dr. Paglia (before Betty Friedan or Gloria Steinem were blips on the cultural screen, she added), she became a crusader for women.

"This was the period of the '50s -- Doris Day, Debbie Reynolds, Sandra Dee. This was a time when women were thought to be bubbleheads, only fit for marriage. Never mind about careers," says Dr. Paglia, whose office decorations -- posters of femmes fatales -- are a self-styled shrine to the "Whores of Babylon." "I was indignant, flamingly indignant. I was passionate. I wanted to do something which would be so fantastic for women, which would just show what women can do.

"That was my ambition. Not to convince women, because women have confidence about themselves. I wanted to show men. I wanted to silence men. I wanted to show them up. Smash them. Intimidate them. I wanted them to say 'Wow.' "

Wow, yes, but whether her work vindicates women and intimidates men is debatable. "Sexual Personae," which began as Dr. Paglia's doctoral thesis for Harold Bloom -- her mentor at Yale -- took almost 20 years and several rewrites before it was accepted by Yale University Press.

Rejected by several New York publishers, Dr. Paglia decided "Sexual Personae" would be heralded posthumously as one of the definitive intellectual works of the 20th century. Beginning with Nefertiti and ending with the Rolling Stones, Dr. Paglia weaves the history of Western culture into one seething narrative. The first half, which ends with "Amherst's Madame de Sade: Emily Dickinson," appeared in 1990. The conclusion is forthcoming, Dr. Paglia said.

The book -- repeatedly punctuated by Dr. Paglia's persistent persona: 'I contend,' 'I maintain,' 'I will argue' -- hit academe's arid landscape with gale force -- ga-ga-ing critics who described it as "wacky," "brilliant" and "a bit like being mugged." The book's punch owes as much to style as substance. While many && scholars debate narrow theses in obscure jargon, Dr. Paglia dTC writes clear, if lurid, prose ("I will argue that it is not menstrual blood per se which disturbs the imagination -- unstanchable as that red blood may be -- but rather the albumen in the blood, the uterine shreds, the placental jellyfish of the female sea.")

The book's contents are provocative, too. A Freudian, Dr. Paglia analyzes culture as a struggle to the death between the Dionysian forces of nature, chaos and sex and the Apollonian urge for order, rationality and art. Great art orders and controls the primal chaos of sexuality, which is why Dr. Paglia prefers the violent but methodical imaginings of the Marquis de Sade to the "benevolent" nature-worship of Rousseau.

Man creates culture and civilization as a defense against woman's sexual and procreative powers. Men are responsible for art and technology, but it is a devil's bargain. Dr. Paglia says it is "the arc of transcendence," the stream of urine from the penis, which has taught men to look outside themselves for the creative process, a process innate to women.

Much of Dr. Paglia's work, as well as her life, explores these yin/yang opposites. A feminist who disparages date rape? A scholar who checks her weekly horoscope? A so-called " '60s person" whose patriotic, individualistic ideology sounds lifted from the GOP?

Playing with the contradictions, Dr. Paglia creates drama. She calls it sizzle, a favorite word.

"Feminism's hope of sexual sameness was false," she says. "My conclusion after 30 years of thinking and watching this is that the sexes are like different species. They cannot understand each other ultimately. That's the sizzle. That's why men and women fall in love with each other. That's why the sex is hot."

The sizzle for Dr. Paglia seems self-contained. She enjoys creating a panoply of sexual personae, but the masks work best for tweaking the masses. One-to-one relationships are not her strong suit. That's why she studies.

She leaves the real thing to Madonna, her alter ego.

"My personal life has been a total shambles. There's a terrible conflict in me between my physical attraction and my total independence as a woman. I won't submit as the independent person that I am," says Dr. Paglia, who -- not surprisingly -- is crazy about cars -- Mustangs, in fact. "My sexuality has been here, been here. Been there, been there. It's been everywhere. I've never got it all together.

"But because I am so strong a woman I can think about this. I can think about this idea that nature may require the female to be briefly submissive in the sex act. Briefly. But then the male, who needs him? Madonna is acting this out. Madonna is showing how powerful she is as an individual and at the same time she can accept fully the idea of the eroticism of sexual submission to a strong man. Madonna is into this by intuition. She is healing the split."

Dr. Paglia, hellcat scholar, she's healing the mind.

THE PAGLIA FILE

Born: April 2, 1947.

Sign: Aries (sun), Libra (rising), Virgo (moon).

Residence: Swarthmore, Pa.

Education: B.A., State University of New York at Binghamton, 1968; PhD., Yale University, 1974.

Work experience: Instructor at Bennington College, 1972-1980; taught at Yale University and Wesleyan University 1980-1984; University of the Arts, 1984-present.

Pet hates: WASPs, Susan Sontag, academic feminists, hand-holding therapists.

Pet likes: "Knot's Landing," Madonna, cars, pornography.

Most influenced by: Sigmund Freud; the Marquis de Sade; Harold Bloom, her mentor at Yale; and Jane Harrison, early 20th century British intellectual.