Guilty Pleasures: Feminist Camp from Mae West to Madonna by Martin Rubin
Published 2000 · 76,000 words · about 6 hours at an average pace · Essays & Criticism
How hard is Guilty Pleasures: Feminist Camp from Mae West to Madonna to read?
Guilty Pleasures: Feminist Camp from Mae West to Madonna scores 63 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 63 out of 100
- Film studies vocabulary at the advanced undergraduate level, accessible to readers outside the discipline.
- Sentence structure: 58 out of 100
- Abstraction: 73 out of 100
- Theoretical claims about audience experience are abstract but grounded in scene-level analysis.
- Information density: 74 out of 100
- Each chapter synthesises theory, genre history, and specific film analysis.
- Narrative indirection: 16 out of 100
- Some theoretical argument builds through sustained analogy before reaching its conclusions.
- Symbolic density: 20 out of 100
- The ticking clock and restricted point of view are read as symbols of the genre's core experiential logic.
- Ironic distance: 14 out of 100
- Analytical tone is earnest and descriptive with little ironic register.
- Resolution withholding: 12 out of 100
- Chapters reach definite conclusions about the nature of thriller experience.
- Structural complexity: 38 out of 100
- Thematic and analytical structure moves from broad genre definition to specific formal techniques.
How Guilty Pleasures: Feminist Camp from Mae West to Madonna is regarded
Guilty Pleasures: Feminist Camp from Mae West to Madonna holds a literary regard score of 72 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.