"Madonna is the true feminist. She exposes the puritanism and suffocating ideology of American feminism, which is stuck in an adolescent whining mode. Madonna has taught young women to be fully female and sexual while still exercising control over their lives. She shows girls how to be attractive, sensual, energetic, ambitious, aggressive, and funny—all at the same time"
You cannot ignore these two Italian-American women. Camille Paglia, notorious contemporary American cultural critic, declares herself a “dyed-in-the-wool, true blue Madonna fan” and included two short articles on the pop singer in Sex, Art and American Culture, a collection that still feels fresh and alive even though it now dates more than twenty years. There, Madonna comes across as much more than a narcissistic, attention seeking mass culture product, as some could depict her; the dancer-business-woman-actress-singer is rather portrayed as a strong female who has found intelligent solutions to contemporary aesthetic, sexual, moral and practical issues, incorporating perennial feminine values into her public persona, representing even an effective role model for today’s girls, who otherwise would fall prey to the man-hating whining swirling pool of mainstream feminism.
Our social thinker, professor at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia since 1984, is, like her pop idol, polemic, hated and loved — she is fast, smart, down-to-earth, she knows how to take care of herself and “cut to the chase”. Her adjective enthusiasm does hold power enough to make one see a pop phenomenon, otherwise intellectually irrelevant, in a different light. If popular culture is an “eruption of the never defeated paganism of the West,” the corollary is that Madonna is a present-day pagan priestess.
It is easy to see what gets on the nerves of Paglia’s political or cultural adversaries: defining herself politically as libertarian, she nourishes nevertheless a curious sympathy towards past cultural institutions, specially the one of masculinity. In her rejection of the “castrative” feminism which aims to eradicate the “male energy” from society, she is unhesitating to stand sometimes aligned with so called reactionary postures — at times she openly praises the good aspects of patriarchy, traditional family and religion. She invites women to accept independence with responsibility instead of resorting to “shameful” pleas for state interference in issues rather workable in a personal level. I disagree in so many points with her, but she is definitely a refreshing reading. I hope to be able to check her more consistent works in the future. To my humble opinion and taste, Madonna is much more appealing through Paglia’s lenses than in real life.
