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Via Left Coast Rebel:

Below is Lady Gaga at last night's MTV music awards.

We've often thought how excellent a mesquite charcoal-scented perfume would be for the ladies. Of course, it would be for us, but are not all perfumes?

However, we think Lady Gaga has us trumped with her meat dress. Irresistible, no?





Unfortunately, our girl, cultural hall monitor, Camille Paglia is not so impressed.

Furthermore, despite showing acres of pallid flesh in the fetish-bondage garb of urban prostitution, Gaga isn’t sexy at all – she’s like a gangly marionette or plasticised android. How could a figure so calculated and artificial, so clinical and strangely antiseptic, so stripped of genuine eroticism have become the icon of her generation? Can it be that Gaga represents the exhausted end of the sexual revolution? In Gaga’s manic miming of persona after persona, over-conceptualised and claustrophobic, we may have reached the limit of an era…

Gaga has borrowed so heavily from Madonna (as in her latest video-Alejandro) that it must be asked, at what point does homage become theft? However, the main point is that the young Madonna was on fire. She was indeed the imperious Marlene Dietrich’s true heir. For Gaga, sex is mainly decor and surface; she’s like a laminated piece of ersatz rococo furniture. Alarmingly, Generation Gaga can’t tell the difference. Is it the death of sex? Perhaps the symbolic status that sex had for a century has gone kaput; that blazing trajectory is over…

Paglia bemoaning the fate of the sexes (the blurring of the roles, thereof) which has resulted in the "death" of sex as a result has been a common theme with her of late.

OK, we're way out of our swim lane with all this so it's time to quit while were behind but before we go...

...Exit question: Has American pop culture as a whole jumped the shark when Madonna is considered the good ol' days?


(UPDATE #1): Phoning in on the ladies' line and liberated from the comment section, Ms. Sarah B.:

Camille misses the real issue...this poor girl just isn't pretty. Great bod, ho-hum face. And one must be pretty to make it in music...or throw a whole circus tent at the crowd to get noticed. That's all. And she's painted herself into a corner and can't get out. And for heaven's sake, it's just club music for gays and the gym. Camille only WISHES sex were dead. Now that she's no longer a spring chicken herself, all those books and papers she writes on the subject just creep people out.

And no, Madonna is not the good old days for music. She's more like the smell of Aquanet...not particularly pleasant, but takes us back to fond memories of bad hair and even worse fashion.

For us, it's Brut but, yeah, same effect.