ABSTRACT
Like Marxists feminists are drawn from a broad church. In Sex, Art and American Culture Camile Paglia argues from the libertarian end of the paradigm. In the short piece below she advances the argument that ‘Madonna is the true feminist’ in the face of feminist criticism of the ‘Justify My Love’ video. This piece is a genuine polemic: it is written to provoke controversy. However it is also a genuine call for feminism to embrace ‘ideas of ambiguity, contradiction, conflict, ambivalence’. Animality and Artifice
Madonna, don’t preach.
Defending her controversial new video, ‘Justify My Love,’ on Nightline last week, Madonna stumbled, rambled, and ended up seeming far less intelligent than she really is.
Madonna, ‘fess up
The video is pornographic. It’s decadent. And it’s fabulous. MTV was right to ban it, a corporate resolve long overdue. Parents cannot possibly control television, with its titanic omnipresence.
Prodded by correspondent Forrest Sawyer for evidence of her responsibility as an artist, Madonna hotly proclaimed her love of children, her social activism, and her condom endorsements. Wrong answer. As Baudelaire and Oscar Wilde knew, neither art nor the artist has a moral responsibility to liberal social causes.
‘Justify My Love’ is truly avant-garde, at a time when that word has lost its meaning in the flabby art world. It represents a sophisticated European sexuality of a kind we have not seen since the great foreign films of the 1950s and 1960s. But it does not belong on a mainstream music channel watched around the clock by children.
On Nightline, Madonna bizarrely called the video a ‘celebration of sex’. She imagined happy educational scenes where curious children would ask their parents about the video. Oh, sure! Picture it: ‘Mommy, please tell me about the tired, tied-up man in the leather harness and the mean, bare-chested lady in the Nazi cap’. Okay, dear, right after the milk and cookies.
Sawyer asked for Madonna’s reaction to feminist charges that, in the neck manacle and floor-crawling of an earlier video, ‘Express Yourself,’ she condoned the ‘degradation’ and ‘humiliation’ of women. Madonna waffled: ‘But I chained myself! I’m in charge’. Well, no. Madonna the producer may have chosen the chain, but Madonna the sexual persona in the video is alternately a cross-dressing dominatrix and a slave of male desire.
But who cares what the feminists say anyhow? They have been outrageously negative about Madonna from the start. In 1985, Ms. Magazine pointedly feted quirky, cuddle singer Cyndi Lauper as its woman of the year. Great judgement; gimmicky Lauper went nowhere, while Madonna grew, flourished, metamorphosed, and became an international star of staggering dimensions. She is also a shrewd business tycoon, a modern new woman of all-around talent.
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.
American feminism has a man problem. The beaming Betty Crockers, hangdog dowdies, and parochial prudes who call themselves feminists want men to be like women. They fear and despise the masculine. The academic feminists think their nerdy bookworm husbands are the ideal model of human manhood.
But Madonna loves real men. She sees the beauty of masculinity, in all its rough vigour and sweaty athletic perfection. She also admires the men who are actually like women: transsexuals and flamboyant drag queens, the heroes of the 1969 Stonewall rebellion, which started the gay liberation movement.
‘Justify My Love’ is an eerie, sultry tableau of jaded androgynous creatures, trapped in a decadent sexual underground. Its hypnotic images are drawn from such sadomasochistic films as Liliana Cavani’s The Night Porter and Luchino Visconti’s The Damned. It’s the perverse and knowing world of the photographers Helmut Newton and Robert Mapplethorpe.
Contemporary American feminism, which began by rejecting Freud because of his alleged sexism, has shut itself off from his ideas of ambiguity, contradiction, conflict, ambivalence. Its simplistic psychology is illustrated by the new cliché of the date-rape furore: ‘“No” always means “no”’. Will we ever graduate from the Girl Scouts? ‘No’ has always been, and always will be, part of the dangerous, alluring courtship ritual of sex and seduction, observable even in the animal kingdom.
Madonna has a far profounder vision of sex than do the feminists. She sees both the animality and the artifice. Changing her costume style and hair colour virtually every month, Madonna embodies the eternal values of beauty and pleasure. Feminism says, ‘No more masks’. Madonna says we are nothing but masks.
Through her enormous impact on young women around the world, Madonna is the future of feminism.
(Paglia 1993: 3–5) What's Next?What reasons does Paglia give for Madonna being ‘the future of feminism’?
How do you respond to the issues of representation raised by this article? Remember that Althusser suggested that ‘ideology is indeed, a system of representation’.
