Mild Blogging
Just discovered this doc...Still believe in these quotes I gathered about 2 years ago...Am I stagnating?
“Male homosexuality, pushing outward into risky, alien territory, is progressive and – overall - intellectually stimulating.”
Camille Paglia - Italianamerican pagan and cultural iconoclast strongly identifies with gay men. To the extent that she is often attracted to them - from the perspective of a gay male. Professor Paglia has been upturning conventional thinking in academe since her collegiate youth in Upstate New York while writing Sexual Personae - her fearless, illuminating expedition into Western culture. She’s also a huge fan of Madonna. Her office at the University of Arts at Philadelphia is distinguished by two features: a Babylonian erection of books and a colour photograph of La Ciccione in a bustier that could compete with America's nuclear deterrent.
The nemesis of white, upper-middle class feminists and Suzanne Vega aficionados alike, Paglia rejects French Theory - Foucault knew fuck-all - that constituted the lit bateau of 1970s feminism, instead embracing Nietzsche's postmodernisn and divorcing herself from what she perceived to be that school’s increasingly anti-male ideology. She was instantly unfashionable. Banished to the Siberia of the academic, it took her twenty years to return. Believing that feminism has led men into becoming contemporary eunuchs, Paglia wants to reclaim masculinity to reinform the political correction we have arrived at today:
“We want a hard penis. We want masculine vigour. To men I say: ‘Get It On!’ To women I say, ‘Deal With It!’
Well, one doesn't want to be strapped into a time machine and shot backwards to an age of archaic, Sicilian machismo but neither does one wish to see men in American Tan tights all the time. She expresses a desire to "restore the penis back to its former position of centre-stage." I know a few people who would gladly put in free overtime to help Ms Paglia with the hydraulic crane. They are all female.
She was universally upbraided in the furore surrounding her comments on date rape:
“The uncontrollable aspect of male sexuality is part of what makes sex interesting. And yes, sometimes it can lead to rape in some situations.”
I think what alarmed people was the declaration that men's penises somehow possess an unrestrainable autonomy that operates independently from the will. In some cases, it does. Moreover, there was a widespread misapprehension that she was condoning rape. In truth, she was defending the quintessential freedom of women (or men, for that matter) to wear a micro-skirt, to get drunk and to hitch a ride in Ted Bundy’s Volkswagen Beetle - providing they acknowledge the risk and accept the onus of personal responsibility in doing so.
If contemporary liberalism has been untruthful to women about the world - and about men - Paglia volubly reminds us of that fact. She examines gender, sexuality and feminism through the prism of art and cultural history, as set forth in one of her best books, Sex, Art, And American Culture. On popular music she notes that even Greek Tragedy never gave full expression to the Dionysian impulse - the uninhibited, irrational and orgiastic self - until rock’n’roll squeezed into its first box-fresh leather catsuit. That’s something you’d rarely hear within Viognier-sipping intellectual circles. Further, here is a woman who unselfconsciously namechecks Hitchcock’s The Birds and Proust in the same breath. Sound bite queen, 'outlaw' polemicist, some of her best work is while extemporising over the telephone - possibly going into raptures over Keith Richard. The fraternity and the media is undecided as to whether La Paglia is an inspired tour guide or one of the great intellectuals of the late 20th century. What is certain is that she is one hell of a Motormouth Maybelline.
In a film of startling power and unsettling intimacy - produced exclusively for wallpaper.com - video artist and photographer Robbie Cooper shoots back at active porn aficionados lost in ecstatic release and hears how their passion developed. Be aware that this is not easy titillation and some of you may find the footage shocking. But the film does throw up any number of questions about voyeurism and exhibitionism and makes clear the incredible nakedness of the solo sex act
It’s official. Men’s tits are now more popular than women’s. With men.
Men’s Health, the metromag with the pec-fest, ab-tastic covers is now the best-selling men’s magazine in the UK, selling more than 250,000, compared to 235,000 for previous best-seller so-called ‘lad mag’ FHM with its famous cover babes sporting udders almost as big as those of Men’s Health models.
The truth is of course is that FHM is as much a metromag as Men’s Health (or ‘Men’s Hypochondria’ as I like to call it). It just used the ‘lad mag’ tits-and-booze formula as a beard for its metrosexuality. When it was attacked by female journalists for being ’sexist’ FHM’s publishers secretly cheered because this meant that these mass-circulation magazines peddling male vanity, fashion and self-consciousness might be mistaken for something traditional.
The real money shot in FHM - and the reason for its very existence - was never the ‘High Street Honey’ spreads but rather the pages and pages of glossy ads featuring pretty male models in various states of (expensive) undress.
But fifteen years on from the launch of the first ‘lad mag’ - and also fifteen years on from my first use of the word ‘metrosexual’ in an article for the Independent which predicted that male vanity was ‘the most promising market of the decade‘ - the moisturised future has arrived. A generation of young men have grown up with metrosexuality, see it as ‘normal’ – and don’t need the hysterical heterosexuality of lad mags.
In a sense, lads mags have done what they were invented to do: metrosexualize men on the sly. So they aren’t really needed any more. (And arguably, post YouTube/iPhone, magazines in general aren’t needed any more.)
Men’s Health by contrast was always the most nakedly metro of the metromags - and the most openly narcissistic and homoerotic. In a post metro world, men are most interested in themselves – and can download hardcore porn 24-7. So they choose the lifestyles mag that puts men’s (shaded) tits and abs on the cover, rather than hiding behind women’s.
But no revolution is ever complete. And everything is relative. Precisely because everyone knows what it is, Men’s Health are still trying convince you that none of their readers are gay or bisexual – or even metrosexual. Instead the deputy editor reassures The London Times all their readers ‘have kids or want to have kids’, and and are ‘heteropolitan’ – an uptight marketing inversion of the word ‘metrosexual’, with HETERO in place of anything ambiguous and with that dangerous ’sexual’ part taken away altogether.
As I noted a couple of years ago in a piece lampooning their prissy denial, I suspect that most of even their straight readers (and most of their readers are probably straight – just not very narrow) are way ahead of them. But then, marketing tends to be instinctively dishonest even if there’s no particular reason to be any more.
Whatever, I think it will be a while before male homoerotics and steroids, those unspoken staples of every single issue of Mens Health, get a strapline on the cover - even if female-on-male strap-on sex apparently already has (see the cover picture at top).
By the way, a similar trend has emerged in Australia, with MH also outselling FHM down under. This recent piece in The Age, complete with rather amusing mock-up of what a men’s mag might look like in the not-too-distant future (which I thought for a moment was an publication currently available), provides a rather better analysis of what’s going on than much of what appeared in the UK press.
Shame then that The Age, along with its sister publication The Sydney Morning Herald, ‘borrowed heavily’ from my 2002 Salon essay ‘Meet the metrosexual’ for a feature it ran in 2003 called ‘The rise of the metrosexual’ – with no acknowledgement. I’ve yet to receive an apology.
I suspect I’ll get a column in Men’s Health before I do.
Tip: Sisu
