Feminist scholars, for instance, "have never opened a biology book," Paglia said.

For Paglia, the objective truth is the natural archetype.

Pagan naturalism consists of sex and violence, which Paglia said finds its most acute expression in modern television and printed tabloids.

"They are more truthful about the universe than...the major religions," she said. "Tabloids confront [sex and violence] head on without an apology."

Shunned by the mainstream academic establishment, Paglia does not shrink from shooting back.

Slyly referring to 33 specific Harvard professors in her staccato prose, Paglia also launched barbs at Harvard itself, calling some tenured females "affirmative-action babies...who have nothing to thank but their gonads."

Paglia even finds the pagan artistic tradition's expression in teen-aged girls' bacchanalian frenzies for Leonardo DiCaprio and the Hanson brothers.

Her "beautiful boy" hypothesis is perhaps the most controversial of the sexual personae she identified in her first tome on art and culture.

Girls and gay men like DiCaprio and the Hansons because "[t] he girlish boy is unthreatening. He's a play-thing. He poses no danger," she said.

But, she noted, "Leonardo DiCaprio looks like a 13 year-old lesbian to me."

Paglia's theatrics and scholarship have been labeled as "intellectual pornography" by some, but her fans turned out en masse from as far away as Vermont last night.

Said Will Devlin, clutching a Paglia book, "She's vital, she's intelligent and