![\"51iorNOljBL._SY344_BO1,204,203,200_\"](\"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/01\/51iorNOljBL._SY344_BO1204203200_.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\n\nNEXT BOOK on the essays shelf<\/a>:<\/p>\n Sex, Art, and American Culture: Essays<\/a> \nI’ve got strong feelings about Camille Paglia. I suppose everyone does, pro or con. I’ve been seeking out this woman’s columns since my post-college years, her cultural stuff, music columns, book reviews, and then – also – her cultural broadsides. She has been banging on the same damn drum for almost 30 years now: but hell, if people aren’t listening, keep on banging. The problem with a lot of social commentary now (or at least the audience for social commentary) is that it eagerly dismisses those who don’t line up with their precious 21st century line of thinking. (Which then makes it almost impossible for these people to read books that pre-date the year 2000 without being outraged. I will not concede ground to people who want to limit their minds, and – worse – want to narrow what is deemed “acceptable” for everyone else. Meaning Jane Austen is written off as an example of internalized-patriarchy or whatever. Of course Ovid doesn’t HAVE to have trigger warnings, and that’s just an extreme example, but the mere REQUEST sets a dangerous precedent. If you are triggered by Ovid, see a doctor. I say that with no disrespect. We all have to take care of ourselves. I’ve got Triggers too, baby, and I talk about them and try to navigate around them as best I can. I don’t ask that everyone else tiptoe around my own personal issues – which are of no importance to anyone other than myself – and that’s as it should be. If you cut yourself off from the wellspring of artistic tradition that pre-dates your existence on the planet … well, just admit that you want to resurrect the “Know Nothing” political party of the 1800s and call it a day. <\/p>\n I think the problem I have is the inevitable reaction of dismissing someone totally if you disagree with some of their positions, or even one of their positions. “Christopher Hitchens wrote that horrible article about how women aren’t funny. Therefore, I don’t need to hear one other thing that that man has to say.” Everyone has their limits: if someone is a white supremacist or a homophobe, then I will ignore everything else that person says. However, there are exceptions, and that mainly has to do with time period. If you’re a white supremacist or a homophobe now, I will not listen to you. You are a Dinosaur and you are worthless. But some of my favorite writers from the past were misogynists to a practically hallucinatory degree. If you want to know how some men feel about you, ladies, Strindberg would be a good place to start. It’s excellent enemy-territory commentary. Or should I dismiss Shakespeare because his plays are littered with insulting comments about women’s emotionality and weak physicality? Shakespeare also wrote some of the greatest women characters of all time. And every actress I know wants to take a crack at “Miss Julie.”<\/p>\n Some of my favorite writers were jingoistic propagandists for the British Empire, including vicious hatred of the Irish. Some great writers in the 30s were willing to ignore the warning signs coming out of Stalin’s Russia. Or Hitler’s Germany. Some people don’t like John Wayne or Charlton Heston’s ACTING because of politics. They can’t and won’t separate. We all have to work out these disconnects for ourselves. You do you, I’ll do me. Where we will run into problems is if you want to tell ME what my limits should be. This is not how it goes. This is a free society and I believe in freedom of thought. Ezra Pound was a wack-job, and an anti-Semite, but he also did more to help struggling\/obscure artists find their light than almost anyone else in the 20th century. Some people find this both\/and attitude craven and disgusting. I just can’t help that. I also don’t care.<\/p>\n A lot of these social commentators have no interest in Art. They want Art to be social instruction. In many cases, bizarrely, right and left join hands in calls for censorship (the pornography wars in the 80s a perfect example, where right-wing Christians joined hands with radical feminists to condemn pornography. It was through the looking-glass. As a matter of fact, any time the hard-right and the hard-left join hands like that … my advice would be, do your best to claw your way to the middle, and stand your ground. Even if you don’t know why you’re doing it. By all means, choose a side, but when those sides align … something stinks to high hell in Denmark, and you’d best wash your hands of all of them.)<\/p>\n Camille Paglia comes at things from her cherished status as Total Outsider. Maybe she relates more to gay men and drag queens, because they revere pop culture and art like no other demographic. She’s working-class. To many women of color, her commentary is a welcome corrective to the “they just don’t get it” feminism of white girls who leave out minorities from their discussions, who don’t even realize their privileged status. Paglia sticks up for those who have no time for the “issues” that white mainstream feminism hold dear … and also sticks up for artists and sex workers and sexual outlaws and outsiders, her tribe, who also find no place in that establishment. <\/p>\n Paglia has her “pet” topics, her revered public figures, people she comes back to again and again. She’s like Lester Bangs, who wrote about four pieces on The Rolling Stones in one year<\/i>, and in each one he veered wildly from scorn to adoration, so much so that it feels like an ongoing nervous breakdown. Paglia LOVES Madonna, loves the Italian-ness, the Catholic-ness, the sexual provocateur-ness, the thumbing her nose at the prudes thing, the destruction (or partial destruction) of a rigid binary sexuality, plus the beats and grooves and the working-class-ness, and all that. But she is also willing to call Madonna on her bullshit, and willing to say, “Stop it, Madonna. Don’t go that route. PLEASE I BEG YOU.” <\/p>\n In “Madonna II: Venus of the Radio Waves”, a 1991 article that appeared in London’s Independent Sunday Review<\/i>, Paglia discusses Madonna’s music videos, how they changed everything, injected something new into the culture, but that something “new” was also connected to the past, a past that Paglia also reveres. (The past of 1930s movie goddesses, and the past of secret drag clubs, and the past of Dionysian iconography.) <\/p>\n I was in high school when Madonna exploded onto the scene, vaporizing Cyndi Lauper in what felt like a matter of months. I loved Cyndi. I didn’t want Madonna to take over. I WAS a virgin, and I felt like “Like a Virgin” was making fun of me. (Irony is not often a characteristic common to pudgy 15-year-old girls.) I felt threatened by the sexuality because I wasn’t playing around with my persona like that. (Give it 2 years, Sheila. You’ll get it then.) I basically dressed like Madonna in the “Vogue” performance in her Blond Ambition tour<\/a> for the entire time I was living in Chicago. It mixed perfectly with the kinder-whore thing I loved from the grunge world. Those “costumes” were perfectly representative of what I felt like inside … sometimes the Mask reveals rather than conceals. Camille Paglia gets that. That’s what Sexual Personae<\/i> is all about.<\/p>\n We NEED our contrarians. We need them desperately! Not to agree with 100%, but to push against conformity of thought, to provoke conversation (even outrage), to examine sacred cows rather than blindly worship them.<\/p>\n In the excerpt below, she discusses two Madonna videos, to “Open Your Heart” and “Justify My Love.” Here they are, for reference purposes. <\/p>\n \n