clipped from Ms. Paglia’s latest column at Salon.com
(and her latest book BREAK BLOW BURN is amazing)
Sex, of course, remains a hotly contested issue within feminism itself. I have defended pornography and supported the decriminalization of prostitution, positions that I still maintain. (I hope that the valiant women staffers of the Emperors’ Club, Eliot Spitzer’s hypnotic Xanadu, don’t suffer in any way.) However, I am very concerned by a degeneration of erotic images in American media. It isn’t their mammoth proliferation that disturbs me (as it does many other feminists); it’s their antiseptic quality in this era of Botox and plasticized Barbie boobs. American sex is all flash and no sizzle.
One could see it in the banal pack of glamazon young actresses on the red carpet at the Oscars — with their parched, stylist-honed outfits, their bony Pilates arms, their immobilized faces and simpering smirks, and their vapid, perky voices. All of them were upstaged in an instant by Marion Cotillard, the best actress winner whose French sensuality and sparkling vitality simply leapt off the TV screen. In France, there’s still a mystique about female sexuality, a quiet magnetism that has been completely lost in the U.S., where at least our major movie stars once had it.
But even the annual Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue, which used to be a luscious winter extravaganza of sinuous tigresses or golden California gals lolling in sultry, exotic locales, has now become utterly boring and flat. The artistry, charm and provocation are gone; all that’s left is empty, mechanical attitudinizing. Yet another cultural landmark down the tubes. If you want to see what a collapse has occurred in America’s imagery of sex, check out this 1961 Life magazine cover starring my pagan goddess of that era, Elizabeth Taylor. She is regally presiding with her gleaming Oscar for “Butterfield 8,” where she played a glossy Manhattan call girl. Now that’s a woman!
By the time we got to college in the 1960s, my baby-boom generation had access to a huge range of exciting female personae — from the splendiferous Diana Rigg doing karate chops in leather jumpsuits in “The Avengers” to the mercurial Edie Sedgwick setting off her elfin youthquake as an Andy Warhol superstar. Speaking of Edie, I found this “diaporama” tribute to her on YouTube, set to a song composed and sung by Étienne Daho. That led in turn to another video, where Daho does a deliciously relaxed duet on French TV with Charlotte Gainsbourg (daughter of the legendary Serge Gainsbourg and that British crumpet, Jane Birkin).
Here’s natural, invigorating French womanliness on display again in the supply expressive Gainsbourg. And despite the intermittent corniness of French pop, what an affectingly simple and evocative performance — a mature man and a sophisticated young woman exchanging meaningful glances and exploring a palette of authentic emotions. With the death of the vaudeville-derived variety format, we never get that on American TV anymore, except from aging country singers, who have become increasingly pat and formulaic in their stagecraft over the past 20 years.