Shut up, Camille.

Cultural critic Camille Paglia gained fame by pushing the right “controversial” buttons during the rise of the “second wave” of feminism (or third, depending if you consider suffrage as the first wave) in the early 90’s. Now, twenty years later, I hoped that she shriveled up and disappeared, but every so often she publishes an essay or opinion piece that tries to push those same “controversial” buttons again.

Paglia’s latest opinion piece for the NY Times appeared on Sunday, titled “No Sex Please, We’re Middle Class”, and it is a complete mess. A hot mess. A messy mess.

It is the worst piece of writing I have read in the NY Times in a long, long time, coming from a supposedly educated, smart, aware cultural critic who is still held in high esteem in certain circles. (But not me - I always thought she was a pretentious windbag with little to say.)

I’ve read it through five or six times now, and still can’t follow the “logic” of how Paglia goes from libido-enhancing drugs for women, to Pilates, to “bootylicious” bodies (yes, she uses that exact word), to Debbie Harry and Madonna, and how white people are a bunch of repressed pussies.

Or at least that’s what I think she’s saying. Maybe. I got kind of distracted by her theory that the poor, working class, and minorities are less inhibited sexually because they frequently shop at Victoria’s Secret, prefer “bootylicious” body types, and because “black rhythm and blues” songs were full of “electrifying sexual imagery” (which is why white rock bands covered them). Also, there’s also no cock left in rock anymore, and country music is all tight ass traditional stories. There’s also something in there about how the modern office has somehow castrated both males and females, creating a “sanitized office space”. And apparently also “family life has put middle-class men in a bind; they are simply cogs in a domestic machine commanded by women”. She concludes (I think) that as a society we’re all too repressed to enjoy the potential benefits of a female enhancement pill, that the tight-ass, middle class whites don’t deserve it until we start... well, something.

It angers me that such a soft, squishy load of verbal diarrhea can make the Sunday NY Times, just because the author once was a controversial cultural critic. This essay is so poorly reasoned, constructed, (non)reasoned, and written, it almost reads like a first-year women’s studies student trying to either (a) impress the professor by being “shocking” or (b) parrot back exactly what the professor wants in an assignment. Maybe the paper ran an early draft of the essay by mistake. The content itself is also offensive, suggesting that the trashier, poorer, and less white are more sexually liberated, career aspirations have desexualized the workplace for the worse, and marriage somehow castrates men, while keeping them dressed in baggy t-shirts and sneakers.

Or at least I think that’s why it’s offensive. But I still haven’t figured out how the death of the Jazz Age, the production code, female avatars in video games, and the New Age movement fit into her argument.

It makes my brain hurt.