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In a world where gender still creates powerful dividing lines — between men and women, gay and straight, “normal” and “queer” — sexuality is always a problem. Expressing one’s sexual power can be a very freeing experience. It can also be a trap. The most exciting pop stars, male and female, negotiate this shifting ground and help us understand it better. In the 21st century, this means confronting limits that often seem invisible. Aren’t we living in a “post-feminist” era, when women can do anything with their lives and with their bodies? Oh, wait. They still can’t hold guitars in a bestselling music magazine.
Woody Guthrie famously wrote “This Guitar Kills Fascists” on his battered instrument. Gaga turns a bra into a machine gun; Perry, always sweeter and more capitulating, spewed whipped cream out of hers. Could it be that the urge female pop stars feel to turn their revealing costumes into weapons is an attempt to instrumentalize sexuality, to foreground and even problematize the fact that it’s the force that moves these women forward?
Lady Gaga is the most sensational player in a wide field of musicians still struggling to comprehend and express the connections between sexuality and power. Rather than being emotionally impoverished and sexually burnt out, they’re exploring how old feminine paradigms (and masculine ones, within the work of artists such as Eminem or Kanye West) empower and constrict in an age of technologically assisted identity flux. What’s happening in pop is so far beyond a simple need for liberation that we need a new language for it, beyond what worked in the age of classic rock and soul to which Paglia is so attached.
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Ann Powers, taking on Paglia, is way more worth reading. Because she also takes on pop and rock, Rolling Stone, sexism, 90s nostalgia, and of course La Gaga.
And yeah, I’m reading about pop but listening to Ani DiFranco at the moment and there, as Garland Grey pointed out, is my 90s nostalgia. I don’t really miss Pearl Jam and Nirvana. I miss Tori and Ani and Fiona, none of whom are gone at all. But I miss the layered thing that my persona, my sexuality, and yes, Camille, my sexual persona, became because of them.
And later, sure, there were lady punks and riot grrl and Siouxsie Sioux, and I’m still magpie-stealing from rock and pop stars now younger than me (hello, endless pictures of Alison Mosshart, how to be scary-sexy with a round baby face—hide it under masses of black witch hair and send your voice echoing from under it, throat-ripping, strong).
I had Madonna’s latest reinvention back when I was a teenager. And then came the Spice Girls and Britney. But what would I have done, instead, with Lady Gaga?
I wrote once about superheroines and sexiness. About sports and beauty. Essentially, my point, inspired by this post from Jennifer de Guzman, was that sometimes it was indeed attractive to women to be able to simultaneously be on display and be safe. To wear something that makes us feel sexy without fear of what will happen. De Guzman was talking about superheroines and women when she wrote “Now, what if, what if, as a woman, you could walk around, be sexually attractive and not have to feel threatened?”
What is Gaga’s machine-gun bra if not an extension of that? I am half-clothed or less on the cover of a magazine, yes, and you will buy my picture because you find it sexy, yes, but that fucking sexiness you think you can own, it might just turn into a weapon on you?
Camille, like so many retrograde sexists, is angry at women’s sexuality when it’s not asking for her approval.
Yesterday I twittered a joke about wearing ridiculously high heels and not caring if the boys were threatened by my added height. (these shoes, for reference.) I of course got a response about wearing flat shoes to not be eye candy for the boys.
But there’s another line in there, one that Camille and my Twitter commenter and the people who don’t understand why a lot of women actually liked Wonder Woman’s old costume better don’t get. It’s that sometimes we are eye candy for ourselves. Sometimes we wear what we wear so that we can look in the mirror or take blurry cameraphone pictures and be pleased with ourselves.
That we are exploring paradigms, options, costumes. That it’s not, as Powers notes, just about a need for liberation. It’s about what we want that liberation to look and feel like when we have it.
