CAMILE PAGLIA: Lady Gaga: The Death of Sex.

Generation Gaga doesn’t identify with powerful vocal styles because their own voices have atrophied: they communicate mutely via a constant stream of atomised, telegraphic text messages. Gaga’s flat affect doesn’t bother them because they’re not attuned to facial expressions. They don’t notice her awkwardness because they’ve abandoned body language in daily interactions. They’re not repelled by the choppy cutting of her videos (in febrile one-second bursts) because that’s how they process reality – as a cluttered, de-centred environment of floating bits.

Gaga’s fans are marooned in a global technocracy of fancy gadgets but emotional poverty. Everything is refracted for them through the media. They have been raised in a relativistic cultural vacuum where chronology and sequence as well as distinctions of value have been lost or jettisoned by politically correct educators. It is a world of blurred borderlines – between childhood and adulthood as well as between parents and children. The young waver between dependence and independence and are slow to leave the comforts of home. Old family hierarchies have broken down. Gaga, for example, gets drunk with her parents and calls her father her “best friend.” She startlingly said this summer: “I’ve been in my father’s arms for two weeks wishing him happy Father’s Day.”

There are blurred borderlines between the sexes: gender is now alleged to be fabricated rather than biological; so everything is a pose. Thus Gaga welcomed the rumour about her being intersex and converted it into a fashion statement. Casual “hooking up” blends friends and lovers, with sex becoming merely an excuse for filial hugging. Borderlines have blurred too between public and private: reality-TV shows multiply; cell-phone conversations blare everywhere; secrets are heedlessly blabbed on Facebook and Twitter. Hence Gaga gratuitously natters on about her vagina. In the sprawling anarchy of the web, the borderline between fact and fiction has melted away.

Yes, it’s a decade old, but it’s also a bravura piece of writing. read the whole thing.