Camille Paglia brings Jolie and Paltrow down to size

The self-confessed "dissident feminist" Camille Paglia has been whipping up a storm by saying that they don't make women like Elizabeth Taylor any more and that today's glamorous actresses have nothing in common with "real women".

Take the Gwyneth Paltrow type, for example. In Paglia's view, Taylor represented a kind of "womanliness" that is now completely gone from American and British cinema. "It was rooted in hormonal reality," Paglia told Salon.com, "the vitality of nature."

Citing "the painfully scrawny" Julianne Moore and Annette Bening as well as Paltrow, she argued: "This is the standard starvation look that is now projected by Hollywood women stars: a skeletal, Pilates-honed, anorexic silhouette that has nothing to do with females as most of the world understands them. There's something almost android about the depictions of women being projected by Hollywood.

"If Gwyneth Paltrow were growing up in the 1930s, she would have been treated as a hopelessly gawky wallflower who would be mortified by her lanky figure. But everything about her is being pushed on to young American women as the ultimate ideal."

Then there are the new-wave mothers - Angelina Jolie, for instance. "Despite all her children, no one would ever call Jolie maternal. But Taylor's maternal quality is central to her heterosexual power. She could control men. She liked men. And men liked her. There was a chemistry between her and men coming from her own maternal instincts.

"I've been writing about this for years and it was partly inspired by watching Taylor operate on screen and off. The happy and successful heterosexual woman feels tender and maternal towards men, but this has been completely lost in our feminist era.

"Now women tell men: you have to be my companion and be just like a woman; be my best friend and listen to me chatter. In other words, women don't really like men any more; they want men to be like women."

Hmmm... As one commenter on Andrew Sullivan's Daily Dish blog put it after he quoted from the Salon piece: "Classic Paglia. She wants to be interesting, so she ignores facts inconsistent with her thesis even when they are right in front of her nose. Scarlet Johansson, to name just one obvious example, is not in the anorexic or scrawny category. And in popular music, the ubiquitous Katy Perry may have almost the same measurements as Elizabeth Taylor when she was in her prime." ·