Hollywood Is Too "Woke" For Female Sex Symbols
There are exaggerated cartoon women -- thanks to drag, notes Camille Paglia:
In the long gap since Basic Instinct, drag has boomed in movies and on TV. Even in its most extreme parodic form, drag has preserved the archetypal power of the sex symbol that Hollywood abandoned....Drag and trans performers, operating artistically outside gender conventions, might help counter the current wave of reductive literalism that sees nothing in sex but a rigid binary of oppressive political power, authored by male evil.
Camille Paglia writes in the Hollywood Reporter, in "The Death Of The Hollywood Sex Symbol":
The last great sex symbol performance was given nearly three decades ago by Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct (1992), where the femme fatale is a scary-smart writer of eerie omniscience. Stone's Catherine Tramell, first seen communing with crashing waves far below her stone patio, unmans a team of police inquisitors by merely uncrossing her legs. Stone recently told Allure magazine that Basic Instinct probably couldn't be made today.What confluence of social trends has led to the sex symbol's current eclipse? At the heart of ancient myths about beautiful, mysterious women was a quest pattern: The hero endured a series of perilous challenges to win the lady or merely to survive an encounter with a magically deceptive temptress. At the deepest level, the woman represented special or occult knowledge, a secret treasure that could only be won by extraordinary men.
Jump-cut to today's humdrum office world, where men and women sit side by side, doing the same routine jobs. Turf sharing and overfamiliarity between the sexes have produced boredom and simmering resentments. Meanwhile, casual, oafish hookup culture has spread from college campuses, turning formal courtship rituals into creaky antiques. Sex has lost its mystique.
Second, in the digital era, the sex symbol as radiant Hollywood icon has been displaced by a blizzard of Instagram selfies, where increasingly young girls strike provocative poses, appropriating star-making techniques pioneered by the movie industry. Bare flesh is suffering serious overexposure. Wholesale blurring of the line between private and public is ultimately antithetical to eroticism. When everything is seen and known, there is no titillating taboo to transgress. Paradoxically, despite its relentless skin display, virtual reality dematerializes the body and has made it a locus of chronic anxiety. Body dysmorphia, from which singer Billie Eilish suffered, has gone epidemic.
Third, the female sex symbol, descended from mother goddesses like Venus and Isis, once implicitly represented the life force, nature itself. Because of overpopulation as well as career demands, today's values have shifted. Marriage and pregnancy are often delayed or avoided by ambitious middle-class working women. Furthermore, the body is becoming mechanized, wed to technology. From cosmetic plastic surgery to fertility treatments, science rather than mother nature is in charge. The next inevitable step is AI sex robots with "faux flesh." The sex symbol as natural wonder is fading -- and with her goes the internal compass of our primeval animal instincts.
Fourth, in this current climate consumed by politics, interest in psychology has waned. Sex and gender, following academic postmodernism, are now treated as socially constructed matters of choice. Many seem to believe that all the uncertainty, turbulence and risk of sex can be remedied by passing laws and imposing after-the-fact penalties. But great art, including classic Hollywood movies, has always shown the irrational forces boiling just beneath the surface of civilization. Poets since Sappho have seen love as obsession, delusion and madness. The present over-politicized formulas about sex, with their ritual combat of villains and victims, fail to recognize the inherent complications, instabilities and delirium in attraction and desire.
...Signs of hope for a revival of Hollywood's pagan glory days can be seen in the smash success this year of Hustlers, written, directed and produced by women. A female caper film set in a real-life strip club, Hustlers amusingly documents the ancient sexual theater by which women have aroused, managed and profited from male desire. With her tough athleticism, steely jaw and commanding gaze, Jennifer Lopez as a virtuoso pole dancer restores the Amazonian lineage of Raquel Welch and relights the fire of Hollywood sex.
Related: "Social justice has turned men into manboys."
Feminism has made it almost illegal to have lust for a woman. Men are supposed to be pigs because they get so turned on by boobs and butts. The sex drive is powerful and the push to trivialize it (hookup sex) and make it evil are sick. The bonding of a man and woman via sex can help make a marriage strong, but not if PIV sex is rape or if women insist they are oppressed all the time.
cc at December 7, 2019 9:44 AM
This is what Camille Paglia worries about these days. She's apparently given up the struggle to remain relevant, recognizing that she has no hope of this. She is now struggling just to remain existing.
Patrick at December 7, 2019 10:21 AM
"Hustlers"?!
Ugh.
Jay R at December 7, 2019 1:23 PM
> She is now struggling just
> to remain existing.
Golly!
Which of her titles have you read?
Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson, indisputably the most intellectually influential book of its decade, is 736 pages long.
It's difficult to believe you ever made the time.
Crid at December 7, 2019 5:26 PM
Dear me! I have questioned the relevance of one of Crid's idols!
I haven't seen him this enraged since I dared mention Alex Jones (whom, at the time, Crid had never even heard of).
Patrick at December 7, 2019 10:39 PM
Patrick, you're a child. This is pathetic.
Crid at December 8, 2019 4:50 AM
Crid, once upon a time, it was actually enjoyable to push your buttons. But in your eternal crankypants old age, you make it way too fucking easy.
(For the record, I once mentioned Camille Paglia as an example of a modern influential philosopher. Stefan Molyneux claimed that he was the world's most influential modern philosopher, so I offered Camille Paglia, Jordan Peterson, Noah Chomsky, Peter Singer and Kwame Anthony Appiah.)
Patrick at December 8, 2019 11:47 AM
Try and understand how weird this is. I'd never heard of this guy. There's no way I could have mentioned him. To this day I don't know whether he's on Fox or CNBC or whatever. Through some inexplicable & lonely medication fantasy, you concluded that I had heard of him and cared a lot. And you've said it over and over for years, on the basis of zero evidence. This isn't even childish. It's not an insight or a presumption. It's just imaginary and deranged.
Imagine if I started saying that for breakfast, Cousin Dave will ONLY eat sausage Egg McMuffins, and NEVER the ham kind, when driving eastward on Interstate 22 in the morning, and he'll only buy them from the shop at the cloverleaf for State Road 46.
Then imagine, and this should be easy, that he said he's never been on that highway, has no idea where it is, and hasn't had a fast food breakfast of any kind since 1976.
But then let's say that I argued, on the basis of no evidence whatsoever, that he was obviously lying, and that his defensiveness proved the point. And let's say I was really snotty & panties-pissed about it, year after year.
That's what this is like. There's no political or even social point being made. You seem troubled.
CD, where do you get breakfast when you eat out? Never mind.
Crid at December 8, 2019 12:27 PM
Try to understand how weird this is. I simply mentioned Alex Jones (radio show host, and owner of the far-right conspiracy theorist website InfoWars). I do not recall how he came into the conversation, but it was likely due to some conspiracy theory. Jones is probably the leading proponent of conspiracy theories in the nation. Frankly, I doubt he believes half the stuff he claims to. He makes his living catering to the tin-foil beanie crowd.
I never accused you of knowing who Alex Jones was, much less caring about him. Unless you enjoy reading about conspiracy theories, you probably wouldn't have heard of him.
Only that you seemed to devolve into an incoherent rage that I would mention him.
You see, if someone mentions someone to me that I'd never heard of, whether on this blog or some other social media venue, I simply Google the name and take a few seconds to learn who this person is we're discussing. I don't become furious and demand to know why I should give a flying fuck about who this person is.
Patrick at December 8, 2019 4:24 PM
Sexiness has become vastly unsexy. I think that is why so many kids are identifying as demi or asexual.
NicoleK at December 9, 2019 1:25 AM
I have in fact not been on I-22, although I've been through its interchange with I-65 a number of times. And I don't get breakfast of any kind at McDonald's anymore because they broke their drive-through service when they implemented the stupid two-lanes thing. Chick-Fil-A has the right idea: send people out to go down the line and take orders and money, so the window only has to hand food out.
What were we talking about?
Cousin Dave at December 9, 2019 12:57 PM
> Sexiness has become vastly
> unsexy. I think that is why
> so many kids are identifying
> as demi or asexual.
I think they're just terrified. It's not a fashion problem.
One of Haidt's observations is that teenagers are getting started later with every independent behavior nowadays. They don't learn to drive as early, they don't have sex as early, they don't drink as early...
And of course all these things are related. If you're only attending events that Mom can drive you to between fourth grade and high school graduation, you're not going to have as many chances to stay an extra hour (or two) later and feel up that one girl from the Westside with the knockers who actually looked you in the eye when you made that lame joke to the group. You're not even going to have the conversational practice of approaching that tragic moment of intimacy.
Instead, you'll move directly from the harsh florescent light of the school event to your mother's car, where her vibes and chatter will vanquish an attraction or even the memory of how Westy's T-shirt fabric would drape so precipitously down to her belly.
And then you'll be at home with your smartphone, desperately tracking the scoring of points on social media (as we do here)... The only interpersonal currency with which you'll be proficient is the kind that doesn't get you laid.
Demi-asexuals don't know or care what grown adults do naked for animal pleasure. They're just playing a new version the Dress:
Crid at December 9, 2019 6:10 PM
"(as we do here)"
LOL. Not saying you're wrong.
Cousin Dave at December 10, 2019 6:33 AM
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