Provocations

by Camille Paglia

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  Paglia, “Camille Paglia: Taylor Swift, Katy Perry and Hollywood Are Ruining Women,” The Hollywood Reporter, December 6, 2012, commissioned for the annual Women in Entertainment issue: “The influential female academic, writing for THR, calls out their ‘insipid, bleached-out personas.’ ” “When Forbes released its annual list of Hollywood’s highest-paid women in October, it was no surprise that Oprah Winfrey passed everyone else by a mile….It’s staggering that 22-year-old Taylor Swift earned $57 million and Katy Perry $45 million. How is it possible that such monumental fortunes could be accumulated by performers whose songs have barely escaped the hackneyed teenybopper genre? But more importantly, what do the rise and triumph of Swift and Perry tell us about the current image of women in entertainment? Despite the passage of time since second-wave feminism erupted in the late 1960s, we’ve somehow been thrown back to the demure girly-girl days of the white-bread 1950s. It feels positively nightmarish to survivors like me of that rigidly conformist and man-pleasing era, when girls had to be simple, peppy, cheerful, and modest. Doris Day, Debbie Reynolds, and Sandra Dee formed the national template—that trinity of blonde oppressors!

  “As if flashed forward by some terrifying time machine, there’s Taylor Swift, America’s latest sweetheart, beaming beatifically in all her winsome 1950s glory from the cover of Parade magazine in the Thanksgiving weekend newspapers. In TV interviews, Swift affects a ‘golly, gee whiz’ persona of cultivated blandness and self-deprecation, which is completely at odds with her shrewd glam dress sense. Indeed, without her mannequin posturing at industry events, it’s doubtful that Swift could have attained her high profile.

  “Beyond that, Swift has a monotonous vocal style, pitched in a characterless keening soprano and tarted up with snarky spin that is evidently taken for hip by vast multitudes of impressionable young women worldwide. Her themes are mainly complaints about boyfriends, faceless louts who blur in her mind as well as ours. Swift’s meandering, snippy songs make 16-year-old Lesley Gore’s 1963 hit ‘It’s My Party (And I’ll Cry if Want to)’ seem like a towering masterpiece of social commentary, psychological drama, and shapeless concision.

  “Although now 28, Katy Perry is still stuck in wide-eyed teen-queen mode. Especially after the train wreck of her brief marriage to epicene roué Russell Brand, her dazzling smiles are starting to look as artificial as those of the aging, hard-bitten Joan Crawford. Perry’s proflic hit songs, saturating mainstream radio, hammer and yammer mercilessly. She’s like a manic cyborg cheerleader, obliviously whooping it up while her team gets pounded into the mud.

  “Most striking about Perry, however, is the yawning chasm between her fresh, flawless 1950s girliness, bedecked in cartoonish floral colors, and the overt raunch of her lyrics, with their dissipated party scenes. Perry’s enormous commercial success actually reflects the tensions and anxieties that are afflicting her base audience—nice white girls from comfortable bourgeois homes. The sexual revolution launched by my baby-boom generation has been a mixed blessing for those who came after us. Katy Perry’s schizophrenia—good-girl mask over trash and flash—is a symptom of what has gone wrong….Whatever sex represents to this generation of affluent white girls, it doesn’t mean rebellion or leaving the protective umbrella of hovering parents….

  “The insipid, bleached-out personas of Taylor Swift and Katy Perry cannot be blamed on some eternal law of ‘bubblegum’ music. Connie Francis, with her powerhouse blend of country music and operatic Italian belting, was between 19 and 21 when she made her mammoth hits like “Lipstick on Your Collar” and “Stupid Cupid.” Movie ingénues once had far more sophistication and complexity than they do today: Leslie Caron was 20 at her debut in An American in Paris; Elizabeth Taylor was 19 in A Place in the Sun; Kim Novak was 22 in Picnic; Natalie Wood was 17 in Rebel Without a Cause.

  “Paradoxically, a key problem with the current youth cult, which is devouring both entertainment and fashion, is that aging women have become progressively invisible. If girls are helplessly stalled at the ingénue phase, it’s partly because women in their 40s and 50s are, via Botox, fillers and cosmetic surgery, still trying to look like they’re 20. Few roles are being written these days for character actresses—parts once regularly taken by Marie Dressler, Marjorie Main, Thelma Ritter, or Maureen Stapleton….Middle-class white girls will never escape the cookie-cutter tyranny of their airless ghettos until the entertainment industry looks into its soul and starts giving them powerful models of mature womanliness.”

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  Paglia, “Return to the Valley of the Dolls: Peppy, demure, and insipid,” The Sunday Times Magazine (U.K.), January 13, 2013. Expanded version of article on Taylor Swift and Katy Perry in The Hollywood Reporter, December 6, 2012. Asked for a blurb for the Contributors’ Page, Paglia said: “Worshipping European art films in college in the 1960s, I dreamed the revolutionary new woman would be modeled on Jeanne Moreau, Catherine Deneuve, and Julie Christie. How wrong I was!”

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  Paglia, “The Princess and the Showgirl: Why Rihanna is the new Diana,” cover story, The Sunday Times Magazine (U.K.), February 17, 2013. Below the masthead on the Sunday Times newspaper front page: “Camille Paglia on the startling similarities between the singer and the late princess.” Starts: “Rihanna is in love with the camera, and the camera is in love with her. Not since Diana rocketed from a shy kindergarten aide to a lean, mean fashion machine has there been such a ravishingly seductive flirtation with the world press. Like Diana, Rihanna has worryingly drifted into using photo ops to send messages of allure, defiance, or revenge in a turbulent relationship with an errant partner.” Paglia wrote another cover story appreciatively surveying Rihanna’s career for D, the weekend style magazine of the Italian newspaper, La Repubblica, November 23, 2013.

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  Roundtable, “The Revolution is 50: Read what some women think of the iconic The Feminine Mystique book,” Elle magazine, March 2013. Commissioned for the golden jubilee re-release of Betty Friedan’s book. Paglia calls The Feminine Mystique “one of the most influential books ever written by a woman” but says Friedan’s sample was “heavily skewed toward affluent housewives in suburban New York.” The book is “a catalog of misery” that resembles “a horror film” with women called “walking corpses.” Friedan was “ungenerous to men, who are portrayed as infantile and exploitative.” The book is “hostile to popular culture and contemporary art”: Friedan attacks the Beats, abstract expressionism, Tennessee Williams, and Fellini’s La Dolce Vita. Homosexuality is portrayed as “a murky smog,” a blight of “shallow unreality and immaturity.” Despite Friedan’s major status in feminist history, “she did not, as is commonly claimed, liberate my baby-boom generation, which was already in a ferment of rebellion against social constraints” after John F. Kennedy’s presidency as well as the late 1950s civil rights movement.

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  Paglia, “Let’s Dance: How David Bowie kick-started a sexual revolution,” cover story, The Sunday Times Magazine (U.K.), March 10, 2013. Marking the opening of a retrospective show of Bowie’s costumes at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London. Adapted from Paglia’s essay on Bowie in the V&A catalog.

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  Emily Nussbaum, “Difficult Women: How Sex and the City lost its good name,” The New Yorker, July 29, 2013. “When Carrie sleeps with a dreamy French architect and he leaves a thousand dollars by her bed, she consults her friends. ‘Money is power. Sex is power,’ Samantha argues. ‘Therefore, getting money for sex is simply an exchange of power.’ ‘Don’t listen to the dime-store Camille Paglia,’ Miranda shoots back.’ ” [“The Power of Female Sex,” Sex and the City, Season 1, Episode 5. Directed by Susan Seidelman and aired on HBO, July 5, 1998.]

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  Katie Glass, “The Naked Truth: Was porn’s first superstar vamp or victim? Amanda Seyfried brings Linda Lovelace’s story to life,” cover story, The Sunday Times Magazine (U.K.), August
11, 2013. Paglia: “Deep Throat was an epochal moment in the history of modern sexuality. It was an exciting period, when young, middle-class women raised during the stiflingly respectable 1950s were boldly forging the new frontier. Enjoying porn films alongside men was a radical gesture in the sexual revolution. I thought it was terrific.”

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  Tracy Clark-Flory, interview with Paglia, “It remains baffling how anyone would think that Hillary Clinton is our party’s best chance,” Salon.com, August 21, 2013. TC-F: “Any hopes, fears or predictions for the presidential elections in 2016?” CP: “As a registered Democrat, I am praying for a credible presidential candidate to emerge from the younger tier of politicians in their late 40s. A governor with executive experience would be ideal. It’s time to put my baby-boom generation out to pasture! We’ve had our day and managed to muck up a hell of a lot. It remains baffling how anyone would think that Hillary Clinton (born the same year as me) is our party’s best chance. She has more sooty baggage than a 90-car freight train. And what exactly has she ever accomplished—beyond bullishly covering for her philandering husband? She’s certainly busy, busy and ever on the move—with the tunnel-vision workaholism of someone trying to blot out uncomfortable private thoughts.

  “I for one think it was a very big deal that our ambassador was murdered in Benghazi. In saying ‘I take responsibility’ for it as secretary of state, Hillary should have resigned immediately. The weak response by the Obama administration to that tragedy has given a huge opening to Republicans in the next presidential election. The impression has been amply given that Benghazi was treated as a public relations matter to massage rather than as the major and outrageous attack on the U.S. that it was. Throughout history, ambassadors have always been symbolic incarnations of the sovereignty of their nations and the dignity of their leaders. It’s even a key motif in King Lear….”

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  TC-F: “You’re such a beloved and divisive figure, I had to solicit questions from folks on Twitter. Here’s a funny one: ‘Why do you come down so hard on skinny white girls? Your views on sexuality leave so much room for individuality, so why is it so bad if I am attracted to Meg Ryan or Gwyneth Paltrow?’ ”

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  CP: “When have I ever criticized anyone’s fetish? I am a libertarian. Go right ahead—set up plastic figurines of 1950s-era moppets to bow down to in the privacy of your boudoir. No one will scold! Then whip down to the kitchen to heat up those foil-wrapped TV dinners. I still gaze back fondly at Swanson’s fried-chicken entrée. The twinkly green peas! The moist apple fritter! Meg Ryan—the spitting image of all those perky counselors at my Girl Scout camp in the Adirondacks. Gwyneth Paltrow—a simpering sorority queen with field-hockey-stick legs. I will leave you to your retro pursuits while I dash off to moon over multiracial Brazilian divas.”

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  Paglia, “Miley, Go Back to School: Cyrus’ derivative stunt reveals an artistically bankrupt music culture,” Time magazine, August 27, 2013. Paglia denounces Miley Cyrus’ lewdly tongue-wagging and crotch-tickling performance at the MTV Video Music Awards. “The real scandal” was how artistically “atrocious” it was, “clumsy, flat-footed and cringingly unsexy”: “How could American pop have gotten this bad?”

  “The Cyrus fiasco” demonstrates “the still heavy influence of Madonna,” whose videos of the 1980s were “suffused with a daring European art film eroticism”: “Madonna’s provocations were smolderingly sexy because she had a good Catholic girl’s keen sense of transgression. Subversion requires limits to violate.”

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  Bari Weiss, interview, “The Weekend Interview with Camille Paglia: A feminist defense of masculine virtues,” The Wall Street Journal, December 28–29, 2013.

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  Tricia Barr, interview, “The Art of Star Wars,” Star Wars Insider magazine, Issue 147, released January 2014. Paglia discusses the chapter on Star Wars closing her art book, Glittering Images. Pull quote: “Revenge of the Sith will remain a classic beloved by worldwide audiences long after most of today’s over-praised leading novelists, poets, and painters are forgotten.”

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  Paglia, “Philosopher King: The art of Eminem,” cover story, The Sunday Times Magazine (U.K.), February 16, 2014: “Portrait of the Artist.” Starts: “Lady Gaga never saw it coming.” The upstaging of Gaga’s heavily promoted but poorly selling album Artpop by Eminem’s eighth album, The Marshall Mathers LP2. “Eminem, now 41, did few interviews and personal appearances for this formidable double album. As with Adele sweeping the Grammys two years ago, his instant commercial triumph demonstrates the readiness of a discerning world public to respond to power and passion of voice, rather than to manipulative gimmicks or exhibitionistic stunts….

  “Eminem’s rap saga is its own House of Atreus. As in the Greek myth cycle, with its cannibalism, treachery, sexual delusion, and blood sacrifice, he seems to be battling an inherited curse. Like Orestes, who killed his mother, Clytemnestra, for murdering his father, Agamemnon, Eminem is beset by vengeful furies, whose punishing voices penetrate his brain and pour out in his convulsive rapping….If Eminem has a weakness, it is his dependence on spontaneous allusions to a currently thin pop culture of celebutante gossip, video games, sci-fi, and action-adventure films. He does see its mediocrity: ‘So what’s left?’ he asks about his rivals….

  “While Gaga panders to fans, inviting their symbiotic attachment to her as ‘Mother Monster,’ Eminem takes the courageous route of the true artist: he dares the audience to hate him. He breaks every shibboleth, every rule of decorum. He raves with the defiant, repellent spirit of Baudelaire and Rimbaud, the poète maudit, cursed and exiled. ‘I want to dig my way to Hell!’ thunders the majestic chorus of ‘Wicked Ways,’ the final song on the new album. ‘Imagination’s dangerous,’ he says elsewhere here. Gaga, with her constant costume tat, fatigues the eye. Eminem, in his simple hoodie, looks like an ascetic monk, fed on apparitions and devoted to art.”

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  Interview, “Camille Paglia Pays Tribute to Joan Rivers: From ‘scorching candor’ to populist appeal,” The Hollywood Reporter, September 5, 2014 (the day after Rivers’ death). “Joan had a huge influence on me for over four decades. She was one of my primary models as a public figure. Not since Dorothy Parker had an American woman been so shockingly fearless in her aggressive speech and gleeful violation of taboos….I was a guest on her TV show in the early 1990s and on her radio show in the late 1990s….She held herself to the highest standard. There was never anything slack or careless about her. On the contrary, she focused the laser beam of her energy and attention on every detail—to give the audience maximum value.”

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  Paglia, “Tina’s Turning Point,” Roundtable on the pivotal year 1984, Billboard, November 1, 2014. Contributors included Annie Lennox and Jon Bon Jovi. Paglia lauds Tina Turner’s brilliant comeback album, Private Dancer, released May 29, 1984. “Showing off her lion’s mane wig, runner’s legs and dominatrix high heels on the album cover, the 44-year-old Turner stunned the world with her ferocious, mature sexuality. Released at the puritanical height of the feminist anti-pornography crusade, the album daringly invoked prostitution in its title. But ‘What’s Love Got to Do with It’ makes a feminist statement, as Turner embraces a radical freedom of sexual choice. The five-times-platinum album projects her as a hybrid superwoman, her Amazonian militance melting into bluesy yearning. She is both hard and soft, raw and smooth, a truly modern woman for all seasons.”

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  Paglia, “Vanished Aviator Remains a Magnet for Hype,” letter to the editor, The Philadelphia Inquirer, November 1, 2014. Criticizes the Inquirer for having fallen victim to “the tabloid- and TV-driven hype doggedly generated by Ric Gillespie about the fate of Amelia Earhart (‘A key piece found in Earhart puzzle?’ October 31). A cursory fact check would have revealed the widespread debunking of Gillespie’s absurd, self-aggrandizing clai
ms over the past 25 years. The typhoon-swept tidal bays and atolls of the North and South Pacific are littered with debris and wrecks from a century of commercial shipping, as well as World War Two.”

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  Paglia, “Do Cover Up, Madonna—You’re Lady Bracknell Now,” The Sunday Times (U.K.), December 7, 2014. On Madonna’s nipple-baring photo shoot by Mert Alas and Marcus Piggott for the December issue of Interview magazine. “The muddy, slack-jawed cover image makes Madonna look as paralytically congealed and mummified as a Celtic bog body. What is shocking in these ugly photographs is not their tiny nudity but their mediocrity and monotony.”

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  Linda Stein, “Feminism and The Philadelphia Story: High society topic of Cabrini talk,” Main Line Suburban News, April 5, 2015. Reports on Paglia’s illustrated lecture, “Three Modern Women: Katharine Hepburn, Hope Montgomery Scott, and Tracy Lord,” co-sponsored by the Radnor Historical Society and the Radnor Memorial Library at Cabrini University in Radnor, PA. In this public lecture, Paglia was the first to argue that the role of Tracy Lord’s prankish sister Dinah was based on Hope Scott’s tomboyish younger sister, Charlotte Ives, and that both Philip Barry’s play and Donald Ogden Stewart’s screenplay contain numerous in-jokes about the family swimming pool and the devotion to dance and music of Hope’s other sister, Mary Binney, as well as the latter’s rumored alliance with conductor Leopold Stokowski. Paglia also found that the renowned London-based artist Philip de László, who painted Charlotte Ives’ portrait, noted in his diary that he saw her and Hope “riding like man-fine wild girls” at Ardrossan, the family estate. Both Hope and Charlotte Ives were champion equestrians throughout their lives. Paglia has acquired (via eBay) old newsroom photos of Charlotte Ives jumping fences in competition and considers her lost story crucial to full understanding of The Philadelphia Story.