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The Pagan Goddess and her Kiss of Death
Sep. 26th, 2007 03:41 pmI'm glad Camille Paglia has a presence again on the internet. When I first started Livejournal, she kept a column at Salon.com, as well as included her opinions and insights in other forums. She disappeared for six years (writing and touring a book, I think) but it looks like she's back to stay.
She was the first one to hate bloggers, even before anyone knew what was a blog. She unapologetically supported Ralph Nader, even after Bush Jr. beat Al Gore. And if you've read Sexual Personae, you know what a shit-stirrer she is, just in general. I'm not going to say that I agree 100% with everything she says (e.g. Madonna is the future of feminism), but I enjoy her thoughts, barbs and prophesies (last year, she correctly said that Madonna gave Britney "The Kiss of Death").
I finally saw Basic Instinct last night with her commentary, and it was brilliant. My thoughts on the movie can be found here. If you don't own the DVD, it's worth checking out purely for her commentary. What was once a homage to Hitchcock and Hollywood's golden era becomes, in Paglia's hands, the study of a pagan goddess wrecking the world of men.
I'm now scared of watching Basic Instinct 2 and being disappointed.
She was the first one to hate bloggers, even before anyone knew what was a blog. She unapologetically supported Ralph Nader, even after Bush Jr. beat Al Gore. And if you've read Sexual Personae, you know what a shit-stirrer she is, just in general. I'm not going to say that I agree 100% with everything she says (e.g. Madonna is the future of feminism), but I enjoy her thoughts, barbs and prophesies (last year, she correctly said that Madonna gave Britney "The Kiss of Death").
I finally saw Basic Instinct last night with her commentary, and it was brilliant. My thoughts on the movie can be found here. If you don't own the DVD, it's worth checking out purely for her commentary. What was once a homage to Hitchcock and Hollywood's golden era becomes, in Paglia's hands, the study of a pagan goddess wrecking the world of men.
I'm now scared of watching Basic Instinct 2 and being disappointed.
Gays have two choices. First, if they want to think of themselves as a distinct group worthy of the special protection of civil rights, they should perhaps accept the Judeo-Christian position that homosexuality is against nature (which has tyrannically designed our bodies for procreation) and then celebrate gay love as a seditious and necessary act of human freedom and imagination, in the Sade, Baudelaire, and Wilde way. The scornful term breeders, used by some urban gays about heterosexual couples with children, suggests that this strategy is still possible. Another solution is to blur homosexual and heterosexual desire and to see all of eroticism as a dynamic continuum, in constant flux from hour to hour and day to day. This would logically end in withholding legal recognition from gays as a distinct category but would argue instead for protection of all nonconformist sexual behaviour on the pagan grounds of pansexuality.
Camille Paglia, from Sex, Art, and American Culture
