Paglia the vitalist?

You've probably heard of Camille Paglia. She's a lesbian feminist professor from the U.S. She's generally left-wing, though she doesn't always follow the standard line.

Anyway, she's written a column that's critical of the pop stars Taylor Swift and Katy Perry:

Despite the passage of time since second-wave feminism erupted in the late 1960s, we’ve somehow been thrown back to the demure girly-girl days of the white-bread 1950s. It feels positively nightmarish to survivors like me of that rigidly conformist and man-pleasing era, when girls had to be simple, peppy, cheerful and modest. Doris Day, Debbie Reynolds and Sandra Dee formed the national template -- that trinity of blond oppressors!

As if flashed forward by some terrifying time machine, there’s Taylor Swift, America’s latest sweetheart, beaming beatifically in all her winsome 1950s glory from the cover of Parade magazine in the Thanksgiving weekend newspapers.

The minor note in this comment is a swipe at white people ("blond oppressors"). The major note is a criticism of feminine women. She doesn't like it if women are demure, or girly-girl, or man-pleasing, or peppy, or cheerful or modest.

And what of Katy Perry? Camille Paglia notes that Katy Perry is more overtly sexual than Taylor Swift:

Most striking about Perry, however, is the yawning chasm between her fresh, flawless 1950s girliness, bedecked in cartoonish floral colors, and the overt raunch of her lyrics

But this "overt raunch" doesn't satisfy Paglia - as it's not truly rebellious or decadent:

Whatever sex represents to this generation of affluent white girls, it doesn’t mean rebellion or leaving the protective umbrella of hovering parents. The messy party scenes where everyone boastingly goes crazy don’t have the debasement and ostracism of true decadence once projected by such avant-garde groups as The Velvet Underground and The Doors. No alienation here!

So who does Paglia prefer? Black or Hispanic women like Rihanna, Beyonce and Jennifer Lopez:

Authentic sizzling eroticism does appear among the strata of high-earning female celebrities. Rihanna, who earned $53 million last year, was born and raised on Barbados, and her music ... has an elemental erotic intensity, a sensuality inspired by the beauty of the Caribbean sun and sea. The stylish Rihanna’s enigmatic dominatrix pose has thrown some critics off. Anyone who follows tabloids like the Daily Mail online, however, has vicariously enjoyed Rihanna’s indolent vacations, where she lustily imbibes, gambols in the waves and lolls with friends of all available genders. She is the pleasure principle incarnate.

That's interesting. By now Camille Paglia is beginning to sound like a vitalist nihilist, i.e. as someone who, to overcome a void in their lives, feels the need for excitement, novelty, intense experience of any sort (that's the vitalist part) and who also wants to pull down what is left of society or social values (hence the emphasis on debasement, rebellion, decadence and alienation).

There's more:

With her multicultural roots ... Beyonce draws on the emotional depths of black gospel as well as the brazen street sass of hip-hop, which produced her formidable persona of Sasha Fierce. Urban rappers’ notorious sexism seems to have made black female performers stronger and more defiant. But middle-class white girls, told that every career is open to them and encouraged to excel at athletics, are faced with slacker white boys nagged by the PC thought police into suppressing their masculinity -- which gets diverted instead into video games and the flourishing genre of online pornography.

The emotional deficiencies in sanitized middle-class life have led to the blockbuster success of the five Twilight films as well as this year’s The Hunger Games...

The insipid, bleached-out personas of Taylor Swift and Katy Perry cannot be blamed on some eternal law of “bubblegum” music...

...Middle-class white girls will never escape the cookie-cutter tyranny of their airless ghettos until the entertainment industry looks into its soul and starts giving them powerful models of mature womanliness.
 

Again, we're being presented with an image of boring, middle-class, whitebread whites in contrast with more vital and alive blacks and Hispanics. In this viewpoint, Rihanna is the role model even if she gets beaten up by the boyfriend she then returns to (which is a more "vitalist" experience, I suppose, than having a merely nice husband).

It's interesting, though, that moderns who choose to go down the vitalist path sometimes reach different conclusions to those who choose the more orthodox liberal path. For Camille Paglia the failure of whites is not in being too powerful and too oppressive, but too repressed and insipid. She is willing, for instance, to recognise that white boys have had their masculinity suppressed by the ruling PC.

The problem with vitalists, though, is that even if they are willing to unleash the masculinity of white boys, it is not to serve the good, but to pursue an unrestrained lifestyle in which what matters is the intensity of sensation in whatever direction, a preference for the primitive, and an unrestrained and unbounded assertion of self.

Perhaps I've read Camille Paglia wrong - after all, it's just one article. It's just that she doesn't seem to have any orientation to what is good or true in society or social mores; it's all about avoiding what is bland and insipid in favour of what is intense or challenging, no matter what it is. If Taylor Swift were to swear black and blue on stage, or act like Madonna and wear weird corsets and flash on stage, I get the impression that Camille Paglia would be impressed and think things were moving in the right direction.