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Did Lady Gaga really kill the sexy time, or is Camille Paglia stuck in another era?

Self-described “dissident feminist” and muck-raking pop culture critic, Camille Paglia, is known for her acerbic and offbeat critiques of the ivory tower and cultural icons. Not one to shy away from controversy, she has irritated everyone from second wave feminists, to post modern theorists, liberals, conservatives, babies, puppies, and anyone who inadvertently stumbles upon her column on Salon.com.

Even if you disagree with her or find her maddening or even offensive, there is usually an element of truth lurking in her scattershot amphetamine-fueled prose. However, her latest essay about the most talked-about pop culture phenomenon in recent history left me scratching my head. Has Paglia lost her mind, her edge, her calendar? Did she write it on an old laptop that never had the Y2K bug fixed, because it looks like she went to bed and woke up partying like it was 1999.

The Sunday Times gleefully touted an “explosive profile” of Lady Gaga by Paglia. Explosive indeed. Her excoriation of Gaga as an artist and icon is as explosive as an unfortunate meeting between Bangalore tap water and one’s colon. And it is just as messy. Paglia just doesn’t take well to Gaga, and that is fine. Many people aren’t fans of the glittered one, and that is perfectly acceptable. But Paglia is Paglia, and anyone who displeases Paglia must undergo the Paglia treatment. In her unintentionally hilarious screed to “demolish” Lady Gaga, Paglia claims, among other things, that Gaga “represents the exhausted end of the sexual revolution.” She even attempts to dismiss an entire generation, calling the tail end of Generation X on down to the Millennials, whom she dubs “Generation Gaga,” a population “marooned in a global technocracy of fancy gadgets but emotional poverty” and whose adoption of text messaging left them “not attuned to facial expressions” and consequently, they are perfectly ~~KEWLIEZ~~ with Gaga’s “flat affect.” (I thought the biggest enemy to ascertaining facial expressions was Botox, not text messaging, but that’s not something “Generation Gaga” is really concerned about at this time. Just sayin’.)

First, let’s talk about the assertion that Gaga single-handed stopped the sexual revolution in its tracks. After waxing poetic about various iconic sex symbols in the last 100 years, including Marlene Dietrich, Marilyn Monroe, and Madonna, Paglia writes:

“[T]he young Madonna was on fire. She was indeed the imperious Marlene [Dietrich]’s true heir. Madonna’s incandescence is still on view in videos like “Open Your Heart,” “Vogue” and “Express Yourself.” But [Lady Gaga]’s like a laminated piece of ersatz rococo furniture. Alarmingly, Generation Gaga can’t tell the difference. Is it the death of sex? Perhaps the symbolic status that sex had for a century has gone kaput; that blazing trajectory is over.”
Where’s the nearest ersatz rococo furniture store? Steampunk is on its way out; I need to redecorate.

Lady Gaga and her merry band of monster-tots killed the heart and soul of the sexual revolution and brought about the extinction of the great Hollywood sex symbol? Isn’t that giving Gaga and her fans way too much credit? Furthermore, Paglia charges that the kids these days are so clueless and technology-addled that they can’t even process basic emotions or comprehend the greatness of Her Majesty, Madonna. Oh noes! Sound the alarm!

Paglia sounds less like “America’s foremost cultural critic” and more like the crazy aunt who lives by herself, hoards tchotchkes, and screams at neighborhood kids from her decaying porch. “Oh you whippersnappers with your sexting and blinking gadgets! See, back in MY day, we had real sex symbols who meant something. Back then, our hearts beat faster, pounded harder — okay maybe that was the nose candy — but we had super authentic passionate sex to the soundtrack of real revolutionaries like David Bowie and Madonna. But then that cancerous Stefani Germanotta character had to come by and RUIN EVERYTHING. One hundred years of Hollywood sexytime has been extinguished FOREVER! DAMN YOU KIDS AND YOUR FALSE IDOLS!”

Paglia then goes on to ridicule Gaga’s upbringing as too “comfortable” and “affluent,” thereby not allowing her to experience the essential depth and range of emotions as someone who was truly persecuted. “Although she presents herself as the clarion voice of all the freaks and misfits of life, there is little evidence that she ever was one. Her upbringing was comfortable and eventually affluent, and she attended the same upscale Manhattan private school as Paris and Nicky Hilton,” says Paglia. Yup. Having a wad of cash is a magic bullet against bullying, ridicule, and social isolation. Maybe this is a stretch, but even rich people can be a-holes. I guess she doesn’t watch Gossip Girl either.

Paglia reacts with a mix of disdain and disgust to Gaga’s toying with the macabre, both in her live shows and her music videos, labeling Gaga’s “grisly mix of sex and death” as “sick, symptomatic of Gaga’s alienation from her own body.” She continues, “Never has there been a breakthrough mainstream performer like Lady Gaga who obsessively traffics in twisted sexual scenarios and solipsistic psychodramas.” (No? Marilyn Manson ring a bell? How about Nine Inch Nails?) And this is coming from someone who wrote a 673-page book characterizing sex as a force of nature that is often brutal, visceral, dark, and twisted. Within the first three pages of Sexual Personae, Paglia sings the praises of Marquis de Sade and calls sex “daemonic.” About Emily Dickinson, whom she calls “the greatest of women poets,” Paglia writes, “Voyeurism, vampirism, necrophilia, lesbianism, sadomasochism, sexual surrealism: Amherst’s Madame de Sade still waits for her readers to know her.”

Knowing that a central theme of Paglia’s magnum opus is that sex is an uncontrollable and violent force of nature, it is hard to take her offense at Gaga’s sexually “barbaric” performances seriously, so here’s my suggestion: let’s not.

Paglia doesn’t really have an issue with performances portraying the intersection of sex and violence; she just thinks Gaga sucks and doesn’t get why the kids these days are into her – kind of like how your mother reacted when she first heard “Straight Outta Compton,” and kind of how your mother’s mother reacted when she first saw Elvis’ gyrating torso.

Even as she concedes Lady Gaga’s originality by stating that there has never been an A-list performer that has successfully touted over-the-top sexually twisted scenarios to a mainstream audience, she also dismisses Gaga as a poorly rendered copy of icons that came before her. (Come on, lady – make up your mind!) But worse yet, she isn’t sexy enough:

“Furthermore, despite showing acres of pallid flesh in the fetish-bondage garb of urban prostitution, Gaga isn’t sexy at all — she’s like a gangly marionette or plasticised android. How could a figure so calculated and artificial, so clinical and strangely antiseptic, so stripped of genuine eroticism have become the icon of her generation?”
Say what?

Apparently, one’s worth as an artist hangs on the amount of raw sex she oozes. So if Gaga is just C3PO in a wig and bondage gear, which sexpot should be crowned the next great pop icon? The third incarnation of Britney Spears? Ke$ha? Tila Tequila? What about the most glaring omission of all – did Paglia forget the crotch-grabbing yet desexualized — freakish and quite literally plastic — King of Pop, the late Michael Jackson, who became an icon for not just one – but several generations? He, too, was a fresh faced teenager during his early days as a performer, and transformed into something otherworldly and bizarre, and people all over the world lapped it up.

Or what about the entire decade of the 1980s – a period whose soundtrack was essentially an endless loop of android-like synth music bleeping and blooping in the background while vaguely sexual lyrics were belted out by sexless people with exaggerated hair and funny outfits?

Paglia takes issue with Gaga’s persona, which she calls “manufactured.” This is about as perceptive as saying that reality shows aren’t “real” at all and are instead edited mercilessly to portray a compelling narrative, even if the subjects of the show actually sit around and pick lint out of their bellybuttons 80% of the time. Well, duh! Every pop star’s image is manufactured to some extent – even that of her idol, Madonna. But hey, I’ll take the manufactured Gaga, who brings gay soldiers personally affected by Don’t Ask Don’t Tell to the white carpet of the VMAs.

Whereas the last major pop star to be a contender for the title of Princess of Pop, Britney Spears, burbled demurely in 2003 that we should “trust our President in every decision,” Gaga swaggered onto the podium at the 2009 National Equity March and challenged the President to take notice of the gay rights movement, howling “Are you listening?” Whoever is behind the Gaga brand, can you make some more? Even if an artist’s persona is as least partially cobbled together by marketing types, the most diligent of corporate elves still cannot create something out of nothing. You cannot deliver a finished product without the proper set of raw materials, and Gaga the pop star could only be created if Germanotta the person was the right person to pull it off — and she is. Can you imagine Katy Perry emitting a feral shriek to demand that our chief executive honor his promises to defend the rights of gay Americans? What about Britney Spears? Miley Cyrus? Can you imagine Taylor Swift wearing a strap-on on the front cover of a magazine?

Lady Gaga thrives in her outrageous larger-than-life persona, has an endless well of energy and a sense of humor, and she has pipes to boot. She has that special something that has the world watching her, and she uses her powers for good. These are the ingredients of a global pop sensation. What is Paglia’s beef with Gaga anyway?

Here’s the deal. Paglia doesn’t have an issue with Gaga. Much of what she wrote were red herrings to distract us from her real concern: The world is evolving, becoming unfamiliar and foreign, and there isn’t a damn thing she can do about it. Her article isn’t about Lady Gaga — it is about her concern that the world, thanks in part to technology and instant self-publishing tools, is becoming increasingly non-linear, fragmented, decentralized, and dare I say it, post-modern, which could quite possibly be her worst nightmare.

A concept that she’s trashed in the ivory tower for decades has seeped outside and become a reality for the world’s youth. The last page of her article is nothing more than a ridiculous laundry list reflecting her alarmist perception of youth culture and the breakdown of the social fabric in general:

“Generation Gaga doesn’t identify with powerful vocal styles because their own voices have atrophied: they communicate mutely via a constant stream of atomised, telegraphic text messages.”
“Gaga’s flat affect doesn’t bother them because they’re not attuned to facial expressions. They don’t notice her awkwardness because they’ve abandoned body language in daily interactions. They’re not repelled by the choppy cutting of her videos (in febrile one-second bursts) because that’s how they process reality – as a cluttered, de-centred environment of floating bits.”
“Gaga’s fans are marooned in a global technocracy of fancy gadgets but emotional poverty. Everything is refracted for them through the media. They have been raised in a relativistic cultural vacuum where chronology and sequence as well as distinctions of value have been lost or jettisoned by politically correct educators.”
“Old family hierarchies have broken down.”
“There are blurred borderlines between the sexes: gender is now alleged to be fabricated rather than biological; so everything is a pose.”
“Casual ‘hooking up’ blends friends and lovers, with sex becoming merely an excuse for filial hugging.”
“Borderlines have blurred too between public and private: reality-TV shows multiply; cell-phone conversations blare everywhere; secrets are heedlessly blabbed on Facebook and Twitter.”
“In the sprawling anarchy of the web, the borderline between fact and fiction has melted away.”
Was this ripped from a Fox News special characterizing the social and moral condition of America’s youth as hopeless and bleak, or is this an article about Lady Gaga? Right now, I can’t tell.

In the early 1990s, Paglia wrote a couple of essays about Madonna, calling her “the future of feminism” in The New York Times, and criticized “old-guard establishment feminists” for loathing her in The Independent Sunday Review. Although possibly written as an excuse to aim more jabs at second wave feminists, (her favorite punching bags) both articles were fresh and cutting edge. Now alternating between nostalgia and alarmism in her recent Sunday Times’ Lady Gaga article, Paglia comes across as one of the dowdy, finger-wagging and unfun relics she criticized in her Madonna essays.

‘Tis a shame. So while sex may be dead for Paglia, the rest of the world will continue to feel, we will continue to f-ck, we will continue to sing, we will continue to screw, we will continue to laugh, we will continue to live, and we will continue dancing to the beats at the Monster’s Ball.

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