As some of you may not know, I actually consider myself a feminist. I enjoy a good feminist treatise every now and again, although my views on feminism and the treatment of women in society has grown and changed throughout the years – mostly, at this point in my life, I want women to take more responsibility for their own actions, and how we, as ladies, are holding ourselves back. As opposed to having things done to us, being passive, being the victims of a cruel, misogynistic world, I think many of us should admit (and I’m including myself here) that so much of the time, we’re doing it to ourselves.

So that brings me to the big girl-on-girl crime of the moment. Feminist author Camille Paglia has written a particularly condemning treatise against Lady Gaga in yesterday’s Sunday Times. Paglia has written about pop culture iconography before, notably Madonna and Marilyn, of course. But I really, really think Camille is being too harsh to Gaga – the full piece is here, and these are some of the highlights (most of it):

Lady Gaga is the first major star of the digital age. Since her rise, she has remained almost continually on tour. Hence, she is a moving target who has escaped serious scrutiny. She is often pictured tottering down the street in some outlandish get-up and fright wig. Most of what she has said about herself has not been independently corroborated… “Music is a lie”, “Art is a lie”, “Gaga is a lie”, and “I profusely lie” have been among Gaga’s pronouncements, but her fans swallow her line whole…

She constantly touts her symbiotic bond with her fans, the “little monsters”, who she inspires to “love themselves” as if they are damaged goods in need of her therapeutic repair. “You’re a superstar, no matter who you are!” She earnestly tells them from the stage, while their cash ends up in her pockets. She told a magazine with messianic fervour: “I love my fans more than any artist who has ever lived.” She claims to have changed the lives of the disabled, thrilled by her jewelled parody crutches in the Paparazzi video.

Although she presents herself as the clarion voice of all the freaks and misfits of life, there is little evidence that she ever was one. Her upbringing was comfortable and eventually affluent, and she attended the same upscale Manhattan private school as Paris and Nicky Hilton. There is a monumental disconnect between Gaga’s melodramatic self-portrayal as a lonely, rebellious, marginalised artist and the powerful corporate apparatus that bankrolled her makeover and has steamrollered her songs into heavy rotation on radio stations everywhere.

Lady Gaga is a manufactured personality, and a recent one at that. Photos of Stefani Germanotta just a few years ago show a bubbly brunette with a glowing complexion. The Gaga of world fame, however, with her heavy wigs and giant sunglasses (rudely worn during interviews) looks either simperingly doll-like or ghoulish, without a trace of spontaneity. Every public appearance, even absurdly at airports where most celebrities want to pass incognito, has been lavishly scripted in advance with a flamboyant outfit and bizarre hairdo assembled by an invisible company of elves.

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… For Gaga, sex is mainly decor and surface; she’s like a laminated piece of ersatz rococo furniture.

Gaga seems comet-like, a stimulating burst of novelty, even though she is a ruthless recycler of other people’s work. She is the diva of déjà vu. Gaga has glibly appropriated from performers like Cher, Jane Fonda as Barbarella, Gwen Stefani and Pink, as well as from fashion muses like Isabella Blow and Daphne Guinness. Drag queens, whom Gaga professes to admire, are usually far sexier in many of her over-the-top outfits than she is.

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…

Gaga is in way over her head with her avant-garde pretensions… She wants to have it both ways – to be hip and avant-garde and yet popular and universal, a practitioner of gung-ho “show biz”. Most of her worshippers seem to have had little or no contact with such powerful performers as Tina Turner or Janis Joplin, with their huge personalities and deep wells of passion.

Generation Gaga doesn’t identify with powerful vocal styles because their own voices have atrophied: they communicate mutely via a constant stream of atomised, telegraphic text messages. Gaga’s flat affect doesn’t bother them because they’re not attuned to facial expressions.

Gaga’s fans are marooned in a global technocracy of fancy gadgets but emotional poverty. Borderlines have been blurred between public and private: reality TV shows multiply, cell phone conversations blare everywhere; secrets are heedlessly blabbed on Facebook and Twitter. Hence, Gaga gratuitously natters on about her vagina…

[From The Sunday Times]

Um… what? So Camille doesn’t find Gaga “sexy”. Sure. I don’t find her sexy either, but I don’t think that’s the point…? I mean, it’s not like Gaga’s message is “I can STILL be sexy even though I’m wearing meat.” I might be wrong, but I think Gaga’s goal is be “fierce” not sexy – as in, “This meat makes me looks fierce.” And what’s so wrong with being asexual? I appreciate that the Gaga is NOT putting herself out there as some oversexed pop starlet – Gaga is refreshing that way, and yes, she veers towards the morbid and deathly, but I kind of like that too. It’s different. It’s like Paglia is complaining that Gaga has made up a wholly manufactured image, AND that Madonna is the authentic one because Madge was genuinely “sexy”? Note to Paglia: all pop star’s have manufactured images. Gaga’s image is supposed to be drag, it’s supposed to be morbid, it’s supposed to be novelty. Enjoy.

Basically, I’m awaiting Naomi Wolf’s take on Gaga. Because I think Paglia has lost her touch. And girl-on-girl crime hurts.

Header: Gaga on Sept. 12, 2010. Credit: WENN.