2010-09-11

Is Camille Paglia channeling socionomics?

Peaks and troughs in social mood are also be turning points for cultural movements; the stock market is just the one of the clearest representations of the mood. Camille Paglia takes a look at the sexual revolution, which although she doesn't mention it, is also tied up in larger social trends such as feminism, gay marriage (a peak social mood movement?) and religious adherence secularism.

Lady Gaga and the death of sex
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…

Perhaps the symbolic status that sex had for a century has gone kaput; that blazing trajectory is over…

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…

I mentioned Lady Gaga and socionomics in Pop Culture is Filth

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