Taylor Swift and Katy Perry have been accused of "ruining women" in a scathing review of their personas.

The pop stars are among the world's top-earning musicians, raking in a respective Us$57 million and US$45 million between May 2011 to May 2012 according to Forbes magazine.

In an article for The Hollywood Reporter, author Camille Paglia says the pair are winding back clocks to the 1950s with their winsome personas.

"We've somehow been thrown back to the demure girly-girl days of the white-bread 1950s. It feels positively nightmarish to survivors like me of that rigidly conformist and man-pleasing era, when girls had to be simple, peppy, cheerful and modest," she writes.

Paglia points out singers like Doris Day, Debbie Reynolds and Sandra Dee, who she says helped to oppress women of their era.

Twenty-two-year-old Swift's "golly, gee whiz" attitude, and Perry playing the
"wide-eyed teen-queen" at the age of 28 are no better, she argues.

The writer goes on to call the pair "insipid", with Swift having little more to offer in her lyrics than complaints about boyfriends.

She meanwhile compares the Firework hitmaker to a "maniac cyborg cheerleader".

"Katy Perry's schizophrenia - good-girl mask over trash and flash - is a symptom of what has gone wrong,"  Paglia writes.

The singers have not yet issued statements on the commentary.

Paglia is the best-selling author of Sexual Personae and Break, Blow, Burn.

- Cover Media