Is the Gaga Revolution the death of sex or did the sexual
revolution die before she rose to fame?
Are Gaga’s actions (such as music videos and her fashion)
meant only to portray sex in her own way or are they actions to make herself
stand out from the crowd of celebrities and be remembered?
Is Paglia going too far by labeling Generation Gaga as
basically automatons?
Nowadays, sex has intermixed itself with the social world
through the network of the media. It is
being broadcasted all over—in movies, TV shows, pictures with sexual innuendos,
and even our music. Something that used
to be shared privately between two lovers is now out and about. One would think something like sex would
never die, but it has. Paglia argues
that Lady Gaga’s crazy antiques have slaughtered sex in the world. Of course, one could never completely
destroy sex since humanity needs it to keep the population growing. However, in the media world, it has died,
but I believe it is not because of Lady Gaga and her actions. Rather I believe it is because of sex being
so widely spread for the world to see.
I myself have been taught to be modest and
conservative, which means that I believe what is meant to be private should be
kept private. However, ever since
before I was born, unnecessary skin was already being shown to the world. As producers and media people started
getting more competitive in revealing sexual things to gain larger margins of
profit, the private soon became the public.
Yes, when all of these sexual things were first released to the public,
it indeed attracted attention and money was made since these sexual things have
never been on media. However, once
everything sexual was revealed, after a while, the sexual became the normal. Lady Gaga was not the one to kill the
attractiveness of sex, but she was unfortunately in the spotlight during the
time when sex became the norm and no longer the exotic. Paglia forgets that if something exotic is
shown and exposed for too long, it no longer holds the same attractive force it
had before. Something secretive and
mysterious always attracts attention since the person will want to find out
more about this mysterious thing. Sex
and the human body has been exposed to the media for much too long and now no
longer has the same power they had over the audience; they will never again
have the same power unless sex and the human body are removed from the public’s
eyes for a while then revealed (but not fully or else the cycle begins again).
Your argument that Lady Gaga did not kill sex, but the media and society has killed sexuality I found to be very strong. Throughout history, there are many examples of society embracing once-considered taboos. The flappers in the 1920s started to dress differently after World War I and during the economic boom. In the 1960s, hippies, drugs, and the sexual revolution were embraced after the baby-boomers grew out of the conformist age of the 1950s. Sexuality has been inundated in the mainstream-media that it is not considered taboo anymore. We will never have sex symbols anymore like Marilyn Monroe because everywhere we turn we are exposed to sexuality. At the time, there was a genuine beauty seen in Marilyn Monroe, in part to a media that did not have the capacity to showcase beauty in other women. Today, whether it is on magazine covers, in movies, the lyrics in the music we listen to, we are always exposed to very sexualized women. Overtime our society will not get the same allure to the human body, thus causing sex to die.
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