By Drew Grant 10/26/12 6:34pm

Feminist Counterpoint

Housewife Aviva Drescher and social critic Camille Paglia (Getty Images)

Aviva Drescher Responds to Camille Paglia’s Love of Feminist Housewives

Two weeks ago, feminist Camille Paglia did an interview with Salon.com in which she came out as the world’s biggest fan of The Real Housewives franchise, calling it “a revelation of the deep truth about female sexuality.” She added:

It’s like the Discovery Channel—sending a camera to the African savannah to watch the cheetahs stalking the gazelles! What you’re seeing is the primal battles going on among women. Men are marginalized on these shows—they’re eye candy, to use Obama’s phrase, on the borderlines of the ferocity of female sexuality.

We decided to call up Aviva Drescher, RHONY’s newest villainess (though we still think she’s very nice), to get her reaction to the compliment. Read More

By Simon Doonan 12/12/05 12:00am

Ta-Ta, Dull Do-Gooders: All Hail the New Virago

Great news: Bitches are back!

Being noble and self-denying and altruistic is totally over. Self-involved disco slags with flippy bangs are suddenly all the rage! The caring celeb—that gal who cannot accept an award without professing how “humbled” she is by it—is suddenly déjà vu. The era when even Ginger Spice became a U.N. Read More

By Simon Doonan 12/12/05 12:00am

Ta-Ta, Dull Do-Gooders: All Hail the New Virago

Great news: Bitches are back!

Being noble and self-denying and altruistic is totally over. Self-involved disco slags with flippy bangs are suddenly all the rage! The caring celeb—that gal who cannot accept an award without professing how “humbled” she is by it—is suddenly déjà vu. The era when even Ginger Spice became a Read More

By Ron Rosenbaum 4/18/05 12:00am

The Single Returns! From Paglia to iPod, New Unit Aesthetic

The signs are there. Maybe it’s too early, but I’d suggest we’re on the verge of a new aesthetic dispensation, a tendency I’d call “The Return of the Singular.” That’s what I’m calling it, anyway. And, no, not just the “single” as in popular songs, but in literature, in film, in criticism, in thinking about Read More

By Sheelah Kolhatkar 1/10/05 12:00am

Notes on Camp Sontag

“I can remember going to some very, very high-powered and glamorous parties, with her or because of her, at, say, Roger Straus’,” recalled the writer Stephen Koch, who became friends with Susan Sontag in 1965, when she was in her early 30′s. “And you would walk in, and it was wall-to-wall Nobel Prize winners and Read More

By George Gurley 8/31/98 12:00am

A Sexual Standoff in the Naked City

In the last weeks of summer, fall clothes fill the display windows of Barneys, Bloomingdale’s, Saks, Henri Bendel and Bergdorf Goodman. See the extra long knit wrap skirts, the wool jersey dresses, the roomy cashmere turtleneck sweaters, all in sullen shades of gray. For men, the windows are a sad signal that the scenic sex Read More

By Lorne Manly 10/13/97 12:00am

Vibe Magazine Suffers a Break-In

The offices of Vibe magazine suffered a break-in during the evening of Sept. 28, but the robbers didn’t avail themselves of the piles of CDs and complimentary Wu Wear. Instead, they concentrated on the office files and computer servers, leaving police and staff convinced that the burglary was one of industrial espionage.

“The nature of Read More