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The Great Camille Paglia!!!


Guest Pud Whacker

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Guest Mauro

Oh, this bitter old witch again. She hates Madonna now. I guess that's what happens when M won't give you the time of day no matter how sycophantic you act. Camille will never get over not having been born without a dick. :lol: RIP, dear.

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  • 4 months later...
Guest Pud Whacker
On 7/21/2016 at 10:18 PM, erotica blu said:

She's a genuine cunt. I love her.

:lol:

i came looking for this thread ...(AND I FINALLY LEARNED HOW TO SEARCH 1,000,000 YEARS LATER!!!) to keep all the camille stuff here instead of madonna section and that made me laugh!!! xo

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ok, that Madonna rebuttal Camille did...this had me laughing hard!

'Instead, they got the geriatric novelist Norman Mailer, who knew nothing about Madonna or popular music, with predictably vapid results,' Camille recalled.

:rotfl:

shes a riot!

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I really like her interviews and from what I read, some of her thinking on feminism and gay issues/activism! Not so much on almost discarding Madonna after she embraced Kabbalah. Lol 

Feel like she's a very tough minded woman and has no time for the privileged feminist activists who come from the upper middle classes. She recognizes that they dominate the media, academia, and the arts.  She definitely calls out people who embrace victimhood while behaving like big hypocrites. 

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Just read the Paglia response now. Have to let it sink in because she really was nasty at Madonna, but at same time well known feminists have been notorious for being bitches toward each other. 

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Lady Gaga and the death of sex

An erotic breaker of taboos or an asexual copycat? Camille Paglia, America's foremost cultural critic, demolishes an icon

Published: 12 September 2010

Lady Gaga is the first major star of the digital age. Since her rise, she has remained almost continually on tour. Hence, she is a moving target who has escaped serious scrutiny. She is often pictured tottering down the street in some outlandish get-up and fright wig. Most of what she has said about herself has not been independently corroborated… “Music is a lie”, “Art is a lie”, “Gaga is a lie”, and “I profusely lie” have been among Gaga’s pronouncements, but her fans swallow her line whole…

She constantly touts her symbiotic bond with her fans, the “little monsters”, who she inspires to “love themselves” as if they are damaged goods in need of her therapeutic repair. “You’re a superstar, no matter who you are!” She earnestly tells them from the stage, while their cash ends up in her pockets. She told a magazine with messianic fervour: “I love my fans more than any artist who has ever lived.” She claims to have changed the lives of the disabled, thrilled by her jewelled parody crutches in the Paparazzi video.

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. There is a monumental disconnect between Gaga’s melodramatic self-portrayal as a lonely, rebellious, marginalised artist and the powerful corporate apparatus that bankrolled her makeover and has steamrollered her songs into heavy rotation on radio stations everywhere.

Lady Gaga is a manufactured personality, and a recent one at that. Photos of Stefani Germanotta just a few years ago show a bubbly brunette with a glowing complexion. The Gaga of world fame, however, with her heavy wigs and giant sunglasses (rudely worn during interviews) looks either simperingly doll-like or ghoulish, without a trace of spontaneity. Every public appearance, even absurdly at airports where most celebrities want to pass incognito, has been lavishly scripted in advance with a flamboyant outfit and bizarre hairdo assembled by an invisible company of elves.

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? Can it be that Gaga represents the exhausted end of the sexual revolution? In Gaga’s manic miming of persona after persona, over-conceptualised and claustrophobic, we may have reached the limit of an era…

Gaga has borrowed so heavily from Madonna (as in her latest video-Alejandro) that it must be asked, at what point does homage become theft? However, the main point is that the young Madonna was on fire. She was indeed the imperious Marlene Dietrich’s true heir. For Gaga, sex is mainly decor and surface; she’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…

Gaga seems comet-like, a stimulating burst of novelty, even though she is a ruthless recycler of other people’s work. She is the diva of déjà vu. Gaga has glibly appropriated from performers like Cher, Jane Fonda as Barbarella, Gwen Stefani and Pink, as well as from fashion muses like Isabella Blow and Daphne Guinness. Drag queens, whom Gaga professes to admire, are usually far sexier in many of her over-the-top outfits than she is.

Peeping dourly through all that tat is Gaga’s limited range of facial expressions. Her videos repeatedly thrust that blank, lugubrious face at the camera and us; it’s creepy and coercive. Marlene and Madonna gave the impression, true or false, of being pansexual. Gaga, for all her writhing and posturing, is asexual. Going off to the gym in broad daylight, as Gaga recently did, dressed in a black bustier, fishnet stockings and stiletto heels isn’t sexy – it’s sexually dysfunctional.

Compare Gaga’s insipid songs, with their nursery-rhyme nonsense syllables, to the title and hypnotic refrain of the first Madonna song and video to bring her attention on MTV, Burning Up, with its elemental fire imagery and its then-shocking offer of fellatio. In place of Madonna’s valiant life force, what we find in Gaga is a disturbing trend towards mutilation and death…

Gaga is in way over her head with her avant-garde pretensions… She wants to have it both ways – to be hip and avant-garde and yet popular and universal, a practitioner of gung-ho “show biz”. Most of her worshippers seem to have had little or no contact with such powerful performers as Tina Turner or Janis Joplin, with their huge personalities and deep wells of passion.

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.

Gaga's fans are marooned in a global technocracy of fancy gadgets but emotional poverty. Borderlines have been blurred between public and private: reality TV shows multiply, cell phone conversations blare everywhere; secrets are heedlessly blabbed on Facebook and Twitter. Hence, Gaga gratuitously natters on about her vagina…

To read the rest of this explosive profile, including Paglia's debunking of comparisons to Madonna, David Bowie, Elton John and Andy Warhol, and to view a slideshow of photographs, visit the thesundaytimes.co.uk/magazine now

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She seems to attach herself to whatever is popular and give her opinion. "Loose Women"  with a degree... So happy Madonna didnt get involved with her in any shape or form. When she talks she sounds as if she is on drugs specifically speed :lmao:

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Guest Pud Whacker
2 hours ago, MeakMaker said:

She seems to attach herself to whatever is popular and give her opinion. "Loose Women"  with a degree... So happy Madonna didnt get involved with her in any shape or form. When she talks she sounds as if she is on drugs specifically speed :lmao:

She is a social critic. 

And that speed is passion in a world of sheepish zombies on anti-depressants. 

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2 hours ago, Pud Whacker said:

She is a social critic. 

And that speed is passion in a world of sheepish zombies on anti-depressants. 

Yes Pud I get it but I can also understand why M didn't want to do interviews with her. I think Madonna was kind of scared of her...

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1 hour ago, MeakMaker said:

Yes Pud I get it but I can also understand why M didn't want to do interviews with her. I think Madonna was kind of scared of her...

Agreed! 100%. X

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  • 2 weeks later...

@ 18:00 "they lack the power of obsession".  I totally agree with her, and I feel I still have that obsession too.  I see women the way same way heterosexual males see them too.  Try telling that to another woman, most don't get it.

@21:50....I agree, agree, agree....but most women don't know what they're communicating and that's why they're offended at the gawks of men.  

@25:20, yes, women must take responsibility.  This is what Chrissy Hynde was saying as well. It's about keeping our sexual freedom, and using it any way we please. 

Love this, Pud.  Thanks for posting.  You're right...it's something sheep won't understand. I'm only 30 minutes in...need to finish later. 

 

 

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Guest Pud Whacker
13 minutes ago, WeboGirl said:

@ 18:00 "they lack the power of obsession".  I totally agree with her, and I feel I still have that obsession too.  I see women the way same way heterosexual males see them too.  Try telling that to another woman, most don't get it.

@19:50....I agree, agree, agree....but most women don't know what they're communicating and that's why they're offended at the gawks of men.  

@25:20, yes, women must take responsibility.  This is what Chrissy Hynde was saying as well. It's about keeping our sexual freedom, and using it any way we please. 

Love this, Pud.  Thanks for posting.  You're right...it's something sheep won't understand. I'm only 30 minutes in...need to finish later. 

 

 

oh yeah, shes absolutely tremendous.  in the comments, i have put just a few time markers for future reference.  check them out when you have a moment. 

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On 14/12/2016 at 4:01 AM, billiejean said:

Lady Gaga and the death of sex

 

Published: 2010

She constantly touts her symbiotic bond with her fans, the “little monsters”, who she inspires to “love themselves” as if they are damaged goods in need of her therapeutic repair. “You’re a superstar, no matter who you are!” She earnestly tells them from the stage, while their cash ends up in her pockets. She told a magazine with messianic fervour: “I love my fans more than any artist who has ever lived.”

There is a monumental disconnect between Gaga’s melodramatic self-portrayal as a lonely, rebellious, marginalised artist and the powerful corporate apparatus that bankrolled her makeover and has steamrollered her songs into heavy rotation on radio stations everywhere.

Lady Gaga is a manufactured personality, and a recent one at that.

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? Can it be that Gaga represents the exhausted end of the sexual revolution?

Gaga has borrowed so heavily from Madonna (as in her latest video-Alejandro) that it must be asked, at what point does homage become theft? However, the main point is that the young Madonna was on fire. She was indeed the imperious Marlene Dietrich’s true heir. For Gaga, sex is mainly decor and surface; she’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…

Gaga is in way over her head with her avant-garde pretensions… She wants to have it both ways – to be hip and avant-garde and yet popular and universal, a practitioner of gung-ho “show biz”. Most of her worshippers seem to have had little or no contact with such powerful performers as Tina Turner or Janis Joplin, with their huge personalities and deep wells of passion.

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.

Gaga's fans are marooned in a global technocracy of fancy gadgets but emotional poverty. Borderlines have been blurred between public and private: reality TV shows multiply, cell phone conversations blare everywhere; secrets are heedlessly blabbed on Facebook and Twitter. Hence, Gaga gratuitously natters on about her vagina…

So on point! And this was written 6 years ago...

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  • 2 weeks later...

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/camille-paglia-how-age-disgracefully-hollywood-guest-column-960794

Camille Paglia: How to Age Disgracefully in Hollywood (Guest Column)

madonna_met_gala.jpg

 
Getty Images
Madonna played up her sex appeal at the Metropolitan Museum of Art Gala in May with an outfit featuring duct-taped nipples and strapped-up bare buttocks.

The social critic and academic blames 1960s disruptions of gender roles (and not the entertainment industry) for Madonna's and J. Lo's difficulty letting go of their youth as she chastises them to "stop cannibalizing the young."

In December, at the Billboard Women in Music Awards in New York City, Madonna was given the trophy for Woman of the Year. In a rambling, tearful acceptance speech that ran more than 16 minutes, she claimed to be a victim of "blatant misogyny, sexism, constant bullying and relentless abuse."

It was a startling appropriation of stereotypical feminist rhetoric by a superstar whose major achievement in cultural history was to overthrow the puritanical old guard of second-wave feminism and to liberate the long-silenced pro-sex, pro-beauty wing of feminism, which (thanks to her) swept to victory in the 1990s.

Madonna's opening line at the awards gala was edited out of the shortened official video: "I stand before you as a doormat — oh, I mean a female entertainer." Merciful Minerva! Can there be any woman on Earth less like a doormat than Madonna Louise Ciccone? Madonna sped on with shaky assertions ("There are no rules if you're a boy") and bafflingly portrayed the huge commercial success of her 1992 book, Sex, as a chapter of the Spanish Inquisition, in which she was persecuted as "a whore and a witch."

I was singled out by name as having accused her of "objectifying" herself sexually (prudish feminist jargon that I always have rejected), when in fact I was Madonna's first major defender, celebrating her revival of pagan eroticism and prophesying in a highly controversial 1990 New York Times op-ed that she was "the future of feminism."

But I want to focus here on the charge of ageism that Madonna, now 58, leveled against the entertainment industry and that received heavy, sympathetic coverage in the mainstream media. Her grievances about the treatment of women performers climaxed with this: "And finally, do not age, because to age is a sin. You will be criticized, you will be vilified and you will definitely not be played on the radio."

First of all, lack of radio airplay may indeed hamper new or indie groups, but in this digital age, when songs go viral in a flash, rich and famous performers of Madonna's level fail to get airplay not because of their age, but because their current music no longer is attracting a broad audience. When was the last time Madonna released hit songs of the brilliant quality of her golden era of the 1980s and '90s? Lavish, lucrative touring rather than sustained creative work in the studio has been her priority for decades.

 

Crawford exhibits "crazed willpower and misery in her facial muscles," says Paglia.
Getty Images
Crawford exhibits "crazed willpower and misery in her facial muscles," says Paglia.

 

 

Swanson in <em>Sunset Boulevard</em>, in which her character &quot;has gone bonkers and thinks she&#39;s the sexy Salome of her youth.&quot;
Getty Images
Swanson in Sunset Boulevard, in which her character "has gone bonkers and thinks she's the sexy Salome of her youth."

 

The truth, if Madonna can dare face it, is that she is having a prolonged midlife crisis like that of many great stars of the past. It is particularly painful for her as a dancer whose disciplined body always was her primary expressive instrument. The agony of the aging star has been an archetypal theme of Hollywood since Dinner at Eight (1933) and the first A Star Is Born (1937), in which John Barrymore and Fredric March played celebrated actors in suicidal decline. But it was Billy Wilder's film noir masterpiece Sunset Boulevard (1950) that first highlighted the special sufferings of the female sex symbol, whose glamorous aura was created and then cruelly withdrawn by a ruthless industry. The aging Norma Desmond, powerfully played by Gloria Swanson, is surrounded by photos and souvenirs from Swanson's own dazzling stardom in the 1920s, when she was an international symbol of high fashion and chic.

From Joan Crawford — the first major studio-era star to hit the humiliating wall of aging — to Marilyn Monroe, who died at age 36 of a barbiturate overdose in 1962, aging has been a curse for Hollywood megastars. Dynamically verbal performers such as Bette Davis and Katharine Hepburn, who won fame for bold roles as abrasive individualists rather than beauty queens, were able to shift into a richly varied, late-phase career as weathered character actresses — although Davis' signature role would remain the temperamental actress Margo Channing, who is obsessed with aging in Joseph L. Mankiewicz's 1950 film All About Eve.

Hollywood, from its birth a century ago, has glorified beauty because sex appeal is big box office, attuned to the dreams and desires of the mass audience, both male and female. That the cult of beauty is not based on misogyny is proved by the centrality of beauty to the cultural code of sophisticated gay men from ancient Athens and Renaissance Florence to Oscar Wilde's London and Andy Warhol's New York.

 

The main problem facing today's aging women is not sexism but the lingering youth cult of the 1960s. Traditional mating patterns have been disrupted: Marriage is postponed by extended education and early career demands. Because of easy divorce, middle-aged women are now competing with younger women for both men and jobs — and thus are resorting to costly interventions to look 20 years younger than they are.

If aging stars want to be taken seriously, they must find or recover a mature persona. Stop cannibalizing the young! Scrambling to stay relevant, Madonna is addicted to pointless provocations like her juvenile Instagrams or her trashy outfit with strapped-up bare buttocks and duct-taped nipples at the Metropolitan Museum of Art Gala in May. She has forgotten the legacy of her great precursor, Marlene Dietrich, who retained her class and style to the end of her public life.

In her Billboard Awards speech, Madonna oddly cited David Bowie as her "real muse." But Bowie did not cling to his revolutionary, gender-bending Ziggy Stardust in the way that Madonna doggedly regresses to the sassy street urchin of her 1980s debut. Bowie retired Ziggy after a single sensational year and evolved into other personae, such as the suave, enigmatic Thin White Duke. Neither Dietrich nor Bowie would have begun an event as Madonna did after Anderson Cooper handed her the Billboard trophy: "We already had sex with a banana" and (about her microphone) "I always feel better with something hard between my legs."

Two years ago, Jennifer Lopez (then 45) made a similar misstep with her crudely repetitious, faux-porn "Booty" video with Iggy Azalea. At ABC's recent New Year's Rockin' Eve show, Mariah Carey bungled more than her singing: In her needlessly risque nude bodysuit, she looked like a splitting sack of over-ripe cantaloupes.

 

Lopez (left, with Azalea) in the &quot;Booty&quot; single.
Courtesy of Capitol Records
Lopez (left, with Azalea) in the "Booty" single.

 

All women performers should study the magnificent precedent of Lena Horne, a fiercely outspoken civil rights activist who maintained total dignity and gorgeous elegance over her 60-plus-year singing career. Today, graceful aging by veteran stars is wonderfully modeled by Jane Fonda, Sharon Stone and Tippi Hedren, as well as the British actresses Judi Dench, Helen Mirren and Charlotte Rampling. Lucy Liu, at 48, displays luminous self-possession and impeccable taste.

 

If any performer can provide a future blueprint for Hollywood aging, it may be that master of social media, Rihanna. No young star since the early Madonna years has such a gift for the camera — via intimate moody Instagrams or paparazzi shots in midnight streets. With her Chris Brown fiasco long receded, Rihanna has become her own studio, designing a profusion of cutting-edge fashions and adroitly shaping her public image as an irresistible combination of affability and mysterious reserve.

Most disappointing about Madonna's speech was her collapse into rote male-bashing, which has escalated in Hollywood and surely will increase its cultural isolation from the national audience. The young Madonna was refreshingly sane in her teasing affection for men. Top movie actresses once projected an emotional depth, composure and adult authority that can only be called womanliness. Ingrid Bergman, Susan Hayward, Elizabeth Taylor, Deborah Kerr and Sophia Loren were no victims: They're strong-willed personalities — onscreen and off. But all of them liked men, and it showed.

Women in or out of Hollywood who dress like girls and erase all signs of aging are disempowering themselves and aggressing into territory that belongs to the young. They are surrendering their right of self-definition to others. Men are not the enemy: They, too, are subject to nature's iron laws. For the sake of its own art, Hollywood needs less sex war, not more.

Paglia's seventh book, Free Women, Free Men: Sex, Gender, Feminism, will be published by Pantheon in March.

 

Horne embodied dignified elegance, says Paglia.
Getty Images
Horne embodied dignified elegance, says Paglia.

 

 

Dietrich retained her sophisticated glamour into her mature years, wearing gowns by costume designer Jean Louis at her live shows.
Getty Images
Dietrich retained her sophisticated glamour into her mature years, wearing gowns by costume designer Jean Louis at her live shows.

 

 

Fonda makes terrific fashion choices.
Getty Images
Fonda makes terrific fashion choices.

 

 

Stone at 2014&#39;s Cannes still looks fabulous.
Getty Images
Stone at 2014's Cannes still looks fabulous.
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