Opinion

Pop goes the Paglia

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Camille Paglia hasn’t been relevant since 1990, when she published her highly controversial work “Sexual Personae,” which seemed to be more of a jumping-off point for her to discuss Madonna for the next five years rather than the state of third-wave feminism, or the lack of women in politics or boardrooms or, in fact, the reasons why so many feminists and intellectuals rejected the book as a muddled, shallow fame grab by an academic who longed, more than anything, to be a celebrity herself.

That doesn’t mean a girl can’t stop trying.

On Friday, the Hollywood Reporter — itself attempting transformation from trade publication to buzzy, water-cooler agenda setter — ran an essay by Paglia, in which she attacks several of the performers on Forbes magazine’s annual list of the highest-paid women in Hollywood.

And, as usual, it’s impossible to tell what Paglia really believes versus what she’ll say for attention — but still, when you say offensive and racially insensitive things, when you make dangerous proclamations about what does and does not constitute a healthy attitude towards sex among young women — these things should be challenged.

So, among the cultural threats to young American women, says Paglia, are Taylor Swift (No. 3 on the Forbes list, at $57 million) and Katy Perry (No. 9, at $45 million). Both, she writes, are emblematic of cultural recidivism, a pre-feminist throwback “to the demure girly-girl days of the white-bread 1950s . . . that rigidly conformist and man-pleasing era, when girls had to be simple, peppy, cheerful and modest.”

Consider, Paglia argues, some of the other pop idols who have made the list: J.Lo and Beyoncé and Rihanna, all of whom embody “authentic sizzling eroticism” that challenges all those suburban middle-class white teenage girls, stuck in their “airless ghettos,” unaware of how much they’re in need of “powerful models of mature womanliness.”

J.Lo, she writes, “will go down in history” — not because she became the highest paid Latin actress in Hollywood (in 1997, for “Out of Sight”) or because she became the first Latin multi-hyphenate to achieve mainstream success on a global scale. No, Lopez will go down in history, Paglia writes, for a magazine shoot in which “she fetchingly turned her ample, lingerie-clad buttocks to the camera.”

Beyoncé, says Paglia, can credit her female power to “her multicultural roots (a Bahamian father and a Louisiana Creole mother)” — that her father bred her for pop stardom from the time she was a child apparently has nothing to do with it. Rihanna, Paglia says, possesses “a sensuality inspired by the beauty of the Caribbean sun and sea,” and it’s this island influence that amplifies and validates her drunken escapades, her random hookups.

“She is the pleasure principle incarnate,” Paglia writes.

Even if we’re to be generous and assume the casual racism of these statements — the patronizing ethnic fetishism on display is little more than the ramblings of an aging white academic — her next argument is reprehensible in its irresponsibility.

“Urban rappers’ notorious sexism,” Paglia writes, “seems to have made black female performers stronger and more defiant.”

So not only should these female performers be grateful for the sexism and misogyny they suffered through and fought against, but it would seem that Rihanna — beaten by boyfriend Chris Brown, who she has since gone back to — is a more valid role model for these “nice white girls from comfortable bourgeois homes” than Katy Perry or Taylor Swift. In Paglia’s view, there’s only one right way for a performer to sing about sex and love — and if you’re a fresh-scrubbed white girl, you’re probably doing it wrong.

Setting aside Paglia’s stereotypes, are Swift and Perry really as conservative and naive as Paglia claims?

Katy Perry looks like an anime character, yes, but she also rejected her rigid, fundamentalist upbringing and broke through with a single called “I Kissed a Girl.”

Perry, like her peers, is highly sophisticated when it comes to the relationship between art and image. Appealing to little kids and tweens and teens and their moms — that’s a deft accomplishment from a performer not to be underestimated.

As for Swift, Paglia finds her success “staggering,” running, as she is, a long con “on impressionable young women worldwide.”

Yet Swift, despite her grating aw-shucks persona, is a preternaturally smart businesswoman, signed by RCA as a songwriter at the age of 14. Now 22, she has won six Grammys and sold more than 26 million albums. She has dated and discarded a substantial number of teen idols — some of whom she may even have slept with! — then villainizes them in song while making millions.

That’s not such a nice girl, is it?

Swift, in fact, is as careful a custodian of her public image as Madonna ever was, and for this she should be lauded, not patronized. She’s nobody’s victim, in charge, like her peers, of her own sexuality and her public portrayal of same, and for all Paglia knows, the two could be vastly different.

After all, Paglia’s vaunted Rihanna has cultivated an image of the toughest girl on the scene, the one no man should think about ever messing with, the one with tattoos of a gun and a skull and a goddess — and, as of Friday, a tattoo that reads “Breezy,” her nickname for the man who beat her.