Is There Something Degrading About It ?

[Operahaven]

The following are excerpts from an essay titled 'Woman as Goddess' by American author and cultural critic Camille Paglia:

http://www.nakedtruth.ca/bb_womanasgoddess.htm

"White middle-class feminist rhetoric has been produced by professional women, lawyers, bookworms, and paper pushers who can't stand the fact -- it's unbearable to them -- that most men will still turn their heads and gasp when a beautiful women walks into the room and exposes a little tit and ass. It's a white, bourgeois prejudice to find the seductive wiggling of a butt degrading. 

(......)

People go to strip clubs to see beauty and it's fucking elitist for people who go to museums to look at paintings and statues of beautiful bodies to denigrate strip clubs. These museum goers are staring at beautiful nude bodies for pleasure, and it's supposedly high art. The educated and rich get their kicks in museums. Most people who come to these mid-level or sleaze-level clubs are usually not highly educated literati. It's perfectly legitimate for them to want to look at beautiful female bodies. I don't want a culture that says that a woman exposing her breasts is degrading. That's white middle-class bullshit. 

(......)

College women are being trained in women's studies courses to say that when men focus on a woman's breasts and buttocks, they are reducing women to dead parts. This is absolute bullshit. I'm radical on this. I'm militant. I know I'm really extreme, and most women probably can't feel what I feel. I say there is nothing degrading in the exhibit of any naked form, in whole or in part, male or female.

*********

I generally don't agree with her views but on this issue I think she is absolutely right. 

[BorisG]

I generally do agree with her views. You go girl!

[Joe Barron]

Yeah, well, at museums, the paintings don't roll around on your lap at forty dollars every three minutes, and nobody stains their pants. I enjoy looking at a beautiful woman as much as the next guy, but don't try to tell me strip clubs and art museums proceed from the same impulse. 

Elitist, shheeeeee-it. That used to be compliment.

[paulb]

I generally do agree with her views. You go girl!

Boris, i would have suspected you'd give both thumbs up.
Your "girl in the jordache" dream gives me the hint.
There's a  2 sides the isle in women's culture, the ones who can do the stylish thing, and those that can't. The ones that can fit into BEBE's clothes and have the money, will have to always take some disdain from the women who can't. Women who go to work with the slightly open blouse need to always keep in mind while  they are a hit with the guys they also  have to carry the bad vibes of jealousy and worse envy of the other office gals.
Such is life,  ying/yang.

btw i am surprised at how much is allowed on florida beaches, thongs and such. I guess its OK, no harm done.

[paulb]

Yeah, well, at museums, the paintings don't roll around on your lap at forty dollars every three minutes, and nobody stains their pants. I enjoy looking at a beautiful woman as much as the next guy, but don't try to tell me strip clubs and art museums proceed from the same impulse. 

Elitist, shheeeeee-it. That used to be compliment.

I saw this painting pop up on GMG a  few days ago. For some reason i find this art more sensual to me now that i've recently turned mid age
, than say a  playboy layout. Is this a  sign I'm more cultured

[PSmith08]

As little use as I generally have for Ms. Paglia, her comments on this subject are - even by her standards - inane. The attempt to engage in some paradigmatic leveling and say beauty-is-beauty-is-beauty, in every sense of the word, specious.

What Ms. Paglia seems to have forgotten is why people go to strip clubs and why people go to musea. People, in my experience, do not go to a strip club to appreciate female forms on an aesthetic level. No, they are going for a very specific and very visceral thrill. It's a different function. Musea are populated by people appreciating, in theory, male and female forms on an aesthetic level. We cannot, no, we assuredly cannot, forget that there is a craftsmanship factor, which is why Rodin's Age of Bronze is better-regarded than some clay I sort of half-shaped in an art studio long ago (before I realized that I had no talent for the visual, plastic, or performing arts). Strip clubs and musea are, at root, two different things.

Should be be bothered by institutions established solely for folks to get their proverbial rocks off for cheap? I don't see how anyone who believes in the dignity of mankind and a fundamental liberty for all human beings (and don't kid yourself: many performers are at the end of their ropes, so to speak, and are not acting rationally and freely) can really support such establishments, but that's me. That point also comes once we can get past this "high-art-equals-lowest-common-denominator-entertainment" business.

Aside from that issue, this was a better-than-usual attempt to stir the pot, Eric. Well-played. 

[(poco) Sforzando]

What Ms. Paglia seems to have forgotten is why people go to strip clubs and why people go to musea. People, in my experience, do not go to a strip club to appreciate female forms on an aesthetic level. No, they are going for a very specific and very visceral thrill. It's a different function. Musea are populated by people appreciating, in theory, male and female forms on an aesthetic level. We cannot, no, we assuredly cannot, forget that there is a craftsmanship factor, which is why Rodin's Age of Bronze is better-regarded than some clay I sort of half-shaped in an art studio long ago (before I realized that I had no talent for the visual, plastic, or performing arts). Strip clubs and musea are, at root, two different things.

So I would think. But I can't help recalling, while waiting on a long line to see Michelangelo's David in Florence some years ago (the original, not the copy in the public square), all the graffiti written on the walls along the lines of: "Hey, you're standing in line an hour and a half to see this hot naked guy," "For a good time call David," etc.

[drogulus]

      Here are some Camille Paglia quotes:

      Out with stereotypes, feminism proclaims. But stereotypes are the west's stunning sexual personae, the vehicles of art's assault against nature. The moment there is imagination, there is myth.

      The only thing that will be remembered about my enemies after they're dead is the nasty things I've said about them.

      If you live in rock and roll, as I do, you see the reality of sex, of male lust and women being aroused by male lust. It attracts women. It doesn't repel them.

       Museums and strip clubs aren't the same. Paglia is right, however, to insist that sex is the raw material that fuels art, and that art is an attempt to contain natures wildness, to impose order on the chaotic. From her vantage point the relation between temples of art and temples of sex is a close one. What is missing in the sex temple is the layer of abstraction in art, turning raw impulses into something refined. In Sexual Personae Paglia explores these themes in some detail and it's worth reading.

       

[Homo Aestheticus]

In Sexual Personae Paglia explores these themes in some detail and it's worth reading.     

Yes.

Also, what do you make of her belief that the female sex worker is an embodiment of 'pure female power' ?

[Josquin des Prez]

Paglia is right, however, to insist that sex is the raw material that fuels art      

And western civilization continues spiraling down, each iteration more idiotic then the previous one.

[Josquin des Prez]

Damn, i hate thread necromancy.

[Joe_Campbell]

And western civilization continues spiraling down, each iteration more idiotic then the previous one.

If it's any consolation, JdP, I don't think that drog's comments can be taken as a microcosm of anything

[snyprrr]

Paglia THINKS she has a penis, but oh how wrong she is.

Dear Guys,
       Your destructor knows that you will believe any lie if it's delivered to you by a just-one-of-the-guys lesbian.

She's just trying to steal your woman, you bunch of manginas!

[drogulus]

As little use as I generally have for Ms. Paglia, her comments on this subject are - even by her standards - inane. The attempt to engage in some paradigmatic leveling and say beauty-is-beauty-is-beauty, in every sense of the word, specious.

What Ms. Paglia seems to have forgotten is why people go to strip clubs and why people go to musea. People, in my experience, do not go to a strip club to appreciate female forms on an aesthetic level. No, they are going for a very specific and very visceral thrill. It's a different function. Musea are populated by people appreciating, in theory, male and female forms on an aesthetic level. We cannot, no, we assuredly cannot, forget that there is a craftsmanship factor, which is why Rodin's Age of Bronze is better-regarded than some clay I sort of half-shaped in an art studio long ago (before I realized that I had no talent for the visual, plastic, or performing arts). Strip clubs and musea are, at root, two different things.

Should be be bothered by institutions established solely for folks to get their proverbial rocks off for cheap? I don't see how anyone who believes in the dignity of mankind and a fundamental liberty for all human beings (and don't kid yourself: many performers are at the end of their ropes, so to speak, and are not acting rationally and freely) can really support such establishments, but that's me. That point also comes once we can get past this "high-art-equals-lowest-common-denominator-entertainment" business.

Aside from that issue, this was a better-than-usual attempt to stir the pot, Eric. Well-played. 

     I think Paglia is starting from where you leave off. We know the differences between sex and art temples. Sophisticated types have a more complicated relationship to lust than others do, or at least it comforts them to think the distance art affords gives them cover. I'm not just looking at a painting of a naked woman, I'm also appreciating the art and the many layers of meaning etc. And of course this isn't false. It's just that the art story doesn't cancel the sex story, it supplements it.

Yes.

Also, what do you make of her belief that the female sex worker is an embodiment of 'pure female power' ?

     When she says sex power is female power I'm with her. However when you take that power into the marketplace the game is rigged in favor of men. Women have a far better deal when they go upmarket, get educated and then use their sex power with other goods to trade. That leaves poorer, less educated women with only sex power. I think Paglia is aware of how the game is rigged at this level, so there's a little cheerleading going on.

[snyprrr]

FacePalm.

[Cato]

      Here are some Camille Paglia quotes:


      If you live in rock and roll, as I do, you see the reality of sex, of male lust and women being aroused by male lust. It attracts women. It doesn't repel them.

       

                           SHHHHUUUUUURRRRRRE, she "lives" rock and roll!  BWAAAH-HA-HA-HAAAAA!           

"Hi!  I'm Chevy Chase.  And you're not!"   0:)

[snyprrr]

That's what I meant to say.

[drogulus]

                   SHHHHUUUUUURRRRRRE, she "lives" rock and roll!  BWAAAH-HA-HA-HAAAAA!            

   I think so. I'm sure about me, and fairly sure about Camille Paglia. She said she loved the Rolling Stones (you know, Under My Thumb and all that) and her feminist friends gave her what for about how male power, rock and lust oppress and objectify women. Her reply was along the lines of "yeah, but they're great!". That's when I knew..... Her story makes sense to me, and if you see her in person it's pretty easy to see that she really is an Italian-American working class girl who grew up to be an art historian and a social critic from a genuinely different perspective. Of course, only stereotypical differences are really valued by differentiators, who paradoxically also value "authenticity" IOW stay in your lane. They tend to get upset when a real iconoclast like Paglia comes along.

    Paglia plays the media well. I don't take everything she says seriously, just the good stuff. Start with Sexual Personae.

[drogulus]

    The Madonna worship grates a little bit. It's safe to ignore that. I think she's just trying to make her point about pop culture being a kind of counter-programming, the pagan id asserting dominance. I'll grant the point and continue to dislike Madonna.

[Homo Aestheticus]

I remember an interview Paglia a while back where she said:

"If I were ever raped I'd simply dust myself off and go on with my day..."