I expect the New York Times paid extra to discover Camille Paglia's opinions about the Female Viagra, because there was just no chance whatsoever she would just re-gush her usual brainless bullshit about "the Dionysian," cod sociology, and how she dislikes imaginary feminists.
Uh... money well spent!
WILL women soon have a Viagra of their own? Although a Food and Drug
Administration advisory panel recently rejected an
application to market the drug flibanserin in the United States for
women with low libido, it endorsed the potential benefits and urged
further research. Several pharmaceutical companies are reported to be
well along in the search for such a drug.
The implication is that a new pill, despite its unforeseen side effects,
is necessary to cure the sexual malaise that appears to have sunk over
the country. But to what extent do these complaints about sexual apathy
reflect a medical reality, and how much do they actually emanate from
the anxious, overachieving, white upper middle class?
Whatever the validity or worth of such questions, it's certainly clear that having Camille Paglia involved in the process of publicly contemplating them is not likely to help anyone or anything, unless you're looking for glib, pointless answers. And why would the NYT opinion section be interested in that sort of thing? Weird!
In the 1950s, female “frigidity” was attributed to social conformism and
religious puritanism. But since the sexual revolution of the 1960s,
American society has become increasingly secular, with a media
environment drenched in sex.
It is difficult to calculate the amount of nothing in these two sentences. It's cliche wrapped up in being smug about not having to bother with conducting research. But I'm sure it has immense value for helping people who are already convinced they understand everything reassure themselves about how right they always were. What this canned cultural history has to do with the wisdom of sanctioning a particular pharmaceutical to be ingested by actual human women...?
The real culprit, originating in the 19th century, is bourgeois
propriety.
Forget I asked.
As respectability became the central middle-class value, censorship and
repression became the norm. Victorian prudery ended the humorous sexual
candor of both men and women during the agrarian era, a ribaldry
chronicled from Shakespeare’s plays to the 18th-century novel. The
priggish 1950s, which erased the liberated flappers of the Jazz Age from
cultural memory, were simply a return to the norm.
I actually sort of semi-admire the sheer bloody cheek here. If only I were not so restrained by my sense of, like, knowing things, as regards, you know, stuff that actually happened, maybe I would be confident enough to blather centuries-spanning sex-thesis crap. (Shakespeare to Lady Gaga, and maybe in between, Chartism and the Mutiny and that thing where all the Tories were hanging themselves whilst jerking off? You know, that sex thing? And also The Beatles?)
Only the diffuse New Age movement, inspired by nature-keyed Asian
practices, has preserved the radical vision of the modern sexual
revolution.
Kudos. Big score for the diffuse nature Asian fuck-artists.
But concrete power resides in America’s careerist technocracy, for which
the elite schools, with their ideological view of gender as a social
construct, are feeder cells.
Perhaps someone well-versed in the subtle distinctions between the Apollonian and the Dionysian might someday explicate why this particular sentence does not suck sad sorry balls.
In the discreet white-collar realm, men and women are interchangeable,
doing the same, mind-based work. Physicality is suppressed; voices are
lowered and gestures curtailed in sanitized office space. Men must
neuter themselves, while ambitious women postpone procreation. Androgyny
is bewitching in art, but in real life it can lead to stagnation and
boredom, which no pill can cure.
In the modern office there is not a lot of fucking going on because nobody is sure where the penises and vaginas truly lurk. Perhaps they are left near the photocopier. This is where men must neuter themselves, traditionally, after all, and why new corporate hires are always shy about being asked to "refill the toner."
Meanwhile, family life has put middle-class men in a bind; they are
simply cogs in a domestic machine commanded by women.
Sucks to be a middle-class man! Chicks get all the cog commanding.
Contemporary moms have become virtuoso super-managers of a complex
operation focused on the care and transport of children.
MollyI already does not like Paglia, so for Paglia's sake, I won't mention this particular line, until tomorrow. Also I am relieved to note that I don't focus on the complex activities of my kids; clearly I have more free time than I imagined....
But it’s not so easy to snap over from Apollonian control to Dionysian
delirium.
For you. I do it as a party trick.
Nor are husbands offering much stimulation in the male display
department: visually, American men remain perpetual boys, as shown by
the bulky T-shirts, loose shorts and sneakers they wear from preschool
through midlife. The sexes, which used to occupy intriguingly separate
worlds, are suffering from over-familiarity, a curse of the mundane.
There’s no mystery left.
That's why on weekends I cut the lawn in a jockstrap. Also, I hate our neighbors.
The elemental power of sexuality has also waned in American popular
culture. Under the much-maligned studio production code, Hollywood made
movies sizzling with flirtation and romance. But from the early ’70s on,
nudity was in, and steamy build-up was out. A generation of filmmakers
lost the skill of sophisticated innuendo. The situation worsened in the
’90s, when Hollywood pirated video games to turn women into cartoonishly
pneumatic superheroines and sci-fi androids, fantasy figures without
psychological complexity or the erotic needs of real women.
Stupid '90s Hollywood, unable to grasp the progressive gender codes of 1940-60s Hollywood, when dames had it made. Why aren't more women nostalgic for the feminist paradise so fondly depicted in Mad Men?
Furthermore, thanks to a bourgeois white culture that values efficient
bodies over voluptuous ones, American actresses have desexualized
themselves, confusing sterile athleticism with female power. Their
current Pilates-honed look is taut and tense — a boy’s thin limbs and
narrow hips combined with amplified breasts. Contrast that with Latino
and African-American taste, which runs toward the healthy silhouette of
the bootylicious Beyoncé.
If I have to look up how long ago Sir Mix-A-Lot said this better, I'll get depressed.
A class issue in sexual energy may be suggested by the apparent striking
popularity of Victoria’s Secret and its racy lingerie among multiracial
lower-middle-class and working-class patrons, even in suburban shopping
malls, which otherwise trend toward the white middle class. Country
music, with its history in the rural South and Southwest, is still
filled with blazingly raunchy scenarios, where the sexes remain
dynamically polarized in the old-fashioned way.
The lower orders fuck like bunnies because their preferred forms of music are all boy-girl, unlike citydwellers, who don't buy lacy bras in malls because their music is gay, except for the black and Hispanic people in cities, who go to malls to buy lingerie, where the old-fashioned white people like to buy underpants that make them want to fuck each other, boy-girl-like, in the manner of Shakespeare and the 18th-century novel, and also Hank Williams, and black people really dig that shit, unlike liberals.
It's a theory.
On the other hand, rock music, once sexually pioneering, is in the
dumps. Black rhythm and blues, born in the Mississippi Delta, was the
driving force behind the great hard rock bands of the ’60s, whose cover
versions of blues songs were filled with electrifying sexual imagery.
The Rolling Stones’ hypnotic recording of Willie Dixon’s “Little Red
Rooster,” with its titillating phallic exhibitionism, throbs and
shimmers with sultry heat.
But with the huge commercial success of rock, the blues receded as a
direct influence on young musicians, who simply imitated the white
guitar gods without exploring their roots. Step by step, rock lost its
visceral rawness and seductive sensuality. Big-ticket rock, with its
well-heeled middle-class audience, is now all superego and no id.
Please, Camille, explain for us how all this inevitably culminated in Milli Vanilli not being very good. Because that would be groundbreaking, for her.
Her stupid book is nineteen fucking years old.
In the next paragraph she finally mentions Madonna.
