Music never dies. Do we really need another Madonna tour? Does she have to compete with women performers 25 years her junior?
Camille PagliaHistory shows that male homosexuality, which like prostitution flourishes with urbanization and soon becomes predictably ritualized, always tends toward decadence.
Camille PagliaWestern man represents himself, on the political or psychological stage, in a spectacular world-theater. Our personality is innately cinematic, light-charged projections flickering on the screen of Western consciousness.
Camille PagliaRIHANNA IS TODAY'S MOST FASCINATING PERFORMER, A MYSTERIOUS AMALGAM OF AMIABLE WARMTH AND GLITTERING CHARISMA. WITH HER KEEN CREATIVE EYE FOR LINE AND COLOR, SHE HAS BECOME A FASHION ICON, LIKE AUDREY HEPBURN. YET SHE IS A TEMPESTUOUS WILD CHILD AND INTERNATIONAL ADVENTURESS, LIKE AVA GARDNER. MOST IMPORTANTLY, AS AN ARTIST IN THIS OVERMECHANIZED AGE, SHE BRAVELY DRAWS ON DEEP WELLS OF PURE EMOTION, ENDEARING HER TO MILLIONS OF FANS WORLDWIDE.
Camille PagliaI want a revamped feminism. Putting the vamp back means the lady must be a tramp. My generation of the Sixties rebels wanted to smash the bourgeois codes that had become authoritarian totems of the Fifties. The 'nice' girl with her soft, sanitized speech and decorous manners had to go. Thirty years later, we're still stuck with her - in the official spokesmen and the anointed heiresses of the feminist establishment.
Camille PagliaFor all the feminist jabber about women being victimized by fashion, it is men who most suffer from conventions of dress. Every day, a woman can choose from an army of personae, femme to butch, and can cut or curl her hair or adorn herself with a staggering variety of artistic aids. But despite the Sixties experiments in peacock dress, no man can rise in the corporate world today, outside the entertainment industry, with long hair or makeup or purple velvet suits.
Camille Paglia