Articles - International News

Legendary dissident feminist Camille Paglia demolished the marketing behind manufactured pop icon Lady Gaga, this week, in a devastating critique comparing her to some of the original pop stars she’s closely modeled on.

“In the 1980s, commercial music boasted a beguiling host of sexy pop chicks like Deborah Harry, Belinda Carlisle, Pat Benatar, and a charmingly ripe Madonna. Late Madonna, in contrast, went bourgeois and turned scrawny,” she noted.

“Madonna’s dance-track acolyte, Lady Gaga, with her compulsive overkill, is a high-concept fabrication without an ounce of genuine eroticism,” she added. (New York Times)

Her comment provoked Texas news portal Victoria Advocate to offer timely advice to Gaga, urging her to ‘stop working so heard and to ‘stop beefing (arguing) with the paparazzi.’

“(And) stop paying homage to Madonna,” Glenn Gamboa recommended, “Of course, the Material Girl influenced you, but so did lots of others. Focusing on them would take some air out of the Madonna knockoff argument.”

Susan Paglia’s assessment carries particular weight given her own towering reputation for being one of America’s most controversial and respected commentators, both for challenging mainstream feminism and promoting civil liberties. Rising to prominence following the publication of her book Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson’ in 1990 she summed up her philosophy in a widely circulated statement some years later.

“My thinking tends to be libertarian,’ she explained. “That is, I oppose intrusions of the state into the private realm - as in abortion, sodomy, prostitution, pornography, drug use, or suicide, all of which I would strongly defend as matters of free choice in a representative democracy.”

“Out with stereotypes, feminism proclaims. But stereotypes are the west's stunning sexual personae, the vehicles of art's assault against nature,” she argued in another think piece, “The moment there is imagination, there is myth.”




Article by Jonty Skrufff (http://skrufff.com): Follow Jonty on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/jontyskrufff