I was, at one point, blissfully unaware of Lady Gaga. I saw her lampooned on television (something about her possibly possessing a penis?) without understanding the reference. Oddly enough, leaving the country brought her existence to my attention.
The Japanese love Lady Gaga, which isn’t really surprising given the prevalence of visual kei performers, not to mention that the Japanese music industry is chock-full of stunning examples of the style-over-substance precept. She writhes on TV screens in record stores and second hand shops, and blares on speakers in crowded night clubs packed with bobbing Japanese youth. I broke my policy of ignorance when I heard that Alexander Skarsgard appeared in her video.
I think I got to the part where she dances on forearm crutches (3:14) before I really lost it.
But I can’t hate things with the proper intensity if I remain uninformed. I spent the rest of the night going through her videos with growing rage until I practically foamed. Female pop artists being overly sexualized is nothing new, but in none of the videos I watched that night did she offer anything that didn’t involve pelvic thrusting or writhing against a flat surface or — better yet — a sweaty pile of men. And I found myself thinking, “What sort of message are you sending??”
It was the echo of a voice from my pre-adolescence, back when I was a middle school student at a private Catholic school, listening to “Baby One More Time” after commandeering the car’s radio. After listening to the chorus, my father demanded to know the meaning of the song. “‘When I’m not with you I lose my mind…Hit me baby one more time’? Is she condoning domestic violence?” he asked me. Given his background working with victims of domestic violence, I suppose it wasn’t an unreasonable question to ask. Without having ever tried to analyze the lyrics, and with my limited 12-year-old understanding of the world, I was hard pressed to convince him that that certainly wasn’t the message of the song, and that, even if it were, it’s not the type of song whose lyrics are internalized as scripture. At least not by me.
Instead I muttered about how he was so lame for not “getting” it. He shook his head. “I don’t think she’s a good role model for girls your age.”
Obviously, given my childless state, it’s not the fragile young mind of my impressionable offspring that I’m trying to protect by protesting the hyper-sexual nature of the image Lady Gaga portrays. Rather, I’m alarmed by mainstream images of femininity, which reflect the current cultural gender climate as well as influence the future evolution of gender ideas.
“To be born a woman has been to be born, within an allotted and confined space, into the keeping of men. The social presence of women has developed as a result of their ingenuity in living under such tutelage…A woman must continually watch herself. She is almost continually accompanied by her own image of herself…She has to survey everything she is and everything she does because…her own sense of being in herself is supplanted by a sense of being appreciated as herself by another…Thus she turns herself into an object…”
It’s been argued that such self-objectification empowers women to celebrate their own sexuality, but ultimately such objectification — whether willfully achieved or not — subverts the female identity, making it not about what the woman herself wants but what she believes men want. Having surveyed herself as she would be surveyed by a man, a woman determines her own self-worth.
Lady Gaga’s frequent peek-a-boo gestures to her eye while maintaining eye contact with the camera reveal that she’s aware of her objectification. “I’m watching you watching me,” it says, suggesting that she agrees with the supposition that self-objectification is empowering. Lady Gaga takes this point of view a step further. She ends several of her videos by killing the men who objectify her (Alexander Skarsgard in “Paparazzi,” Jurij Bradač in “Bad Romance,” and Tyrese — although he objectifies Beyonce rather than Gaga — in “Telephone.”)
This violent end to objectification would seem to uphold the idea of empowerment; a great “fuck you” to patriarchal society, but the process of becoming an object relies on the internalization of male dominance, an actual subversion of the perspective.
Regardless of the outcome of such objectification, in order to become an object a woman must first internalize the male perspective, thus alienating herself from her own point of view. Rather, this self-objectification encourages women to accept male dominance by subverting their own view of themselves in favor of the male perspective.
That Lady Gaga suggests that self-objectification as a means of violent empowerment is ultimately detrimental. That she does so actively and willfully is appalling.
