Almost 20 years ago, Camille Paglia made her name with an essay in which, prompted by the video to Justify My Love, she declared Madonna the future of feminism. Yesterday Professor Paglia returned to the fray to give us her take on Lady Gaga (via the Sunday Times, so sadly the whole piece isn't online but there's an extended extract here), or as the coverline put it "Camille Paglia demolishes an icon".

The woman who back in the day managed to win a flame war with Julie Burchill landed the odd decent punch below the belt (Poker Face, she said, perfectly describes Gaga's "frosty mug"), but Gaga remained undemolished as Paglia's critique missed the point by a mile.

Paglia's main criticism seemed to be that Gaga simply isn't sexy enough. "How would a figure so calculated and artificial, so clinical and strangely antiseptic, so stripped of genuine eroticism have become the icon of her generation?" she asked. But Lady Gaga has never presented herself as a sex object. She sells weirdness and eye-popping spectacle, not sex. She isn't posing in a meat bikini to woo Nuts' one-handed readers, and why should she? Though Paglia's tome Sexual Personae posits sex as the prime mover behind all culture, you'd still think that as a feminist she'd applaud the fact that there's a massive female pop star whose appeal doesn't depend on how many men she manages to arouse. Before Gaga, we had Britney – and look how that turned out.

Part of Gaga's brilliance is the way she plays with the darker currents in popular culture, which are hardly hidden away. She's as much Marilyn Manson as Madonna. Yet Paglia gets a fit of the vapours about the "disturbing trend towards mutilation and death" in Gaga's work, somehow missing the feminist statement in the final scene of the Bad Romance video, which shows that Gaga the kidnapped sex worker in a Russian bathhouse has barbecued her punter with her flamethrower bra. Paglia also takes literally Gaga's recent line – that she doesn't have sex very often because she fears losing creativity through her vagina – which surely was just a witty way of saying that men can be a distraction when you're totally focused on your work.

Paglia gives Gaga no credit for her prodigious work ethic, bizarrely suggesting that her constant touring is a way of avoiding "serious scrutiny". She seems to think that the job of a performer is to be dissected by beady feminist critics rather than to, well, perform – and how is strutting your stuff to 10,000 paying punters a night "avoiding scrutiny"? Paglia even disapproves of Gaga's habit of dressing up for the paparazzi, though the Lady's insistence on being fabulous at all times strikes me as pretty commendable – entertaining for us, an effort for her. Even her piano playing gets it in the neck (or lid), but which other pop stars have managed to play an instrument, (co-)write their own songs, sing brilliantly live, dance (though Paglia criticises her "inert torso") and make major fashion statements all at the same time? Certainly not Madonna, Paglia's long-term crush, who has been playing the guitar onstage for the past 10 years but still looks cross-eyed with concentration every time she picks up a plectrum.

Paglia accuses Gaga of stealing from Madonna, but Madge pilfered sounds and imagery from everyone from Marilyn Monroe to Daft Punk. She loftily says that Gaga "does not belong in Bowie's company", which seems unfair – did Gaga ever say that she did? (No, Ellen DeGeneres did.) Bowie – who wasn't sexy either by the way – was of course, genuinely transgressive. Homosexuality had only been legal for five years when he told the Melody Maker he was gay. Madonna also challenged taboos that have by now largely been broken down. So what? There's something ultimately boring about criticism that insists that the glories of the past were so great that nothing modern can ever match them. Worse, it inevitably makes the critic sound ancient. Paglia's Gaga essay contains some insights (is texting, emailing and Twitter making body language incomprehensible to us? Maybe it is), but the professor who once heralded the future of feminism now seems marooned in the past.