The End of the Revolution?

Camille Paglia is as ardent an advocate of the sexual revolution as you're likely to find this side of the Playboy mansion so when she talks about the revolution's demise it catches one's eye. In the U.K. Sunday Times Paglia points to the exotic and beguiling Lady Gaga as exhibit A in her case that the social revolution in sexual mores which began after WWII has run its course. I'm not nearly as educated on these matters as is Ms Paglia, but nevertheless I'm not so sure that Western society could be so fortunate. In any event, here's a bit of what Paglia has to say about Ms Gaga:

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…

Actually, I doubt it. That "blazing trajectory" which has left so much pain, heartbreak, and shattered lives in its wake won't be over until the West in general, and the U.S. in particular, recognize that sexual license causes far more hurt and suffering than it does pleasure. It has certainly been lethal to families and destructive of young lives, particularly those of women, especially minority women, and their children. Sexual liberation created a culture of death, represented by the abortion industry, fed an explosion in the rate of divorce, and an increase in the incidence of STDs. It could be argued that the only people who have really benefited from the revolution are pornographers, doctors, lawyers, therapists and abortionists.

Easy access to sexual gratification has led to the devaluation of marriage and a disinclination on the part of men to make a commitment to one woman for a lifetime. It has been something less than the blessing its proponents were promising back in those heady years of the late fifties and early sixties when women were encouraged to loosen their inhibitions and men were urged to act pretty much like a buck in rut.

Lady Gaga is not, in my opinion, a symptom of the revolution's demise so much as a symptom of it's weariness. When society wearies of sex, when sex begins to cloy, people don't lose interest. They turn instead to ever more bizarre, destructive, and violent means of gratification. If Ms Gaga's peculiar persona is a manifestation of sexual ennui then it's also a sign of even more perverse expressions of sex to come.

Lucky us.