Feminist academic and curmudgeon critic Camille Paglia has penned yet another criticism of pop icon Taylor Swift, this time taking on the artist's Girl Squad. In the treatise which appears in The Hollywood Reporter, Paglia says the pop star's squad is a "tittering, tongues-out mugging" posse that does the opposite of empower females due to the presentation of a "silly, regressive public image." "Swift herself," she adds, "should retire that obnoxious Nazi Barbie routine of wheeling out friends and celebrities as performance props," The Guardian reports.
Much like the pop stars she criticizes, Paglia has made a career of saying outrageous, provocative and even offensive things and getting those statements published. As NME reports, the academic has also written similar diatribes concerning Miley Cyrus, Lady Gaga, Katy Perry, Rihanna, Hillary Clinton and Madonna.
The feminist icon burst onto the scene back in 1990 with the publishing of Sexual Personae, which is widely considered her opus, and immediately established herself as something like a heretic in the midst of the Third Wave of feminism at a time when women like Madonna were ruling the airwaves, "Girl Power" was becoming a "thing" and the Riot Grrrl movement was brewing throughout punk scenes across America. Somewhere in the depths of that seminal 700 page text, the theorist wrote "If civilization had been left in female hands we would still be living in grass huts."
She has since made a career of calling-out other notable feminists and pop icons for perpetuating ideas that most American feminist theorists would argue remain at the core of feminism in itself--like gender being a social construct and women working together generally being a step in the right direction.
Back in the early 90s, the academic lauded Madonna for being "the true feminist" and commended the pop star for teaching "young women to be fully female and sexual while still exercising control over their lives" in a New York Times thinkpiece. Years later, however, she put Madonna on blast in The Sunday Times for "not aging well," urging the middle-aged pop star to "cover up" rather than continuing to embrace her own sexiness as she ages. In general, she seems uncomfortable with artists who show different sides of sexiness as she has called Perry trashy and insisted that no amount of flesh could make Lady Gaga sexy.
In her latest treatise, the feminist asserts that the 1989 star "twinkly persona is such a scary flashback to the fascist blondes who ruled the social scene during my youth." Weirdly enough, the singer is not the first icon the critic has aligned with fascism--the academic called Gloria Steinem the "Stalin of feminism" in a number of interviews and articles throughout the early 90s.
The bottom line is: Camille Paglia is probably not applying to be a part of Swift's girl squad. Judging from responses from Swifts' fans all over social media today, there is sure to be some bad blood between the pop star's large fanbase and the critic.
