1950s redux?

Poor Camille Paglia. She’s worked herself into a froth. Writing in The Hollywood Reporter , she complains s(n)eeringly that the latest crop of women stars have betrayed feminism. With Taylor Swift, Katy Perry, and their crowd of new power women, we’re back “to the demure girly-girl days of the white-bread 1950s.”

Only not quite. Paglia spots a “yawning chasm between [Perry’s] fresh, flawless 1950s girliness, bedecked in cartoonish floral colors, and the overt raunch of her lyrics, with their dissipated party scenes.” Perceptive as always, Paglia recognizes that Perry’s “schizophrenia” exploits the fears that haunt her audience of “nice white girls from comfortable bourgeois homes.” Those anxieties are evidence of the incomplete success of feminism, whose success would presumably free Perry to be just plain raunchy.

Not quite also because of stars like Rihanna, who exudes ” an elemental erotic intensity, a sensuality inspired by the beauty of the Caribbean sun and sea” that appeals to Paglia. Rihanna is “the pleasure principle incarnate,” and that seems to be a Good Thing. I came in at the tail end of the ’50s, but I don’t think any Rihannas had made their appearance back then.

Paglia targets “a key problem with the current youth cult, which is devouring both entertainment and fashion, is that aging women have become progressively invisible. If girls are helplessly stalled at the ingenue phase, it’s partly because women in their 40s and 50s are, via Botox, fillers and cosmetic surgery, still trying to look like they’re 20.”

If feminism represents, as it seems to Paglia, at least the liberation of women to be unembarrassed in their sexuality, it seems we arrived long ago. If she read her own article carefully, Paglia might calm herself.