Katy Perry is a Whore >_>

Once I can turn the radio on without rolling my eyes after five minutes, I think we will have reached a new era of progress. I’m not holding my breath though. That this day will come soon is doubtful. It seems as though all that mainstream music attempts to do is glorify superficiality, conformity and monotony; stealing beats the same way that Vanilla Ice ripped off Queen and splicing genuine inspiration with failed attempts at drollery or overly serious (and often egomaniacal) soliloquies. People are heavily influenced by the music playing in the background of their lives, and it suggests how they should perceive the world around them. The media is an oppressive and powerful tool structured to make money...not empower people. Knowing this makes it a little hard to expect that the music playing on the radio will be very progressive. Degradation and exploitation somehow became a lucrative art form.
Sometime last year though, I heard a song that took my inner cynic by complete surprise. It symbolized to me, at first, progress to the very definition. It was a song by a girl, Katy Perry, about kissing another girl. Hell, she even liked it! I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Not because I find it strange that girls kiss girls. I listen to songs with lesbian undertones all the time. I was surprised because of where the song was being played. It was a radio station dominated by songs demanding that females shake their asses and be possessed. I was stunned and thrilled by the apparent turnaround. I felt I was witnessing a landmark. Progress! The Russian pseudo-lesbian duo t.A.T.u. had been a bust, but here was their retribution. The gay community was finally being represented in mainstream media!
Unfortunately my exhilaration was short-lived. Upon listening more closely to the lyrics my relief turned to disgust. Perry was completely missing the point. She was not doing the gay community a favor in any way. Instead, she was reinforcing the same harmful stereotypes that have been scaring people away from an in-depth observation of homosexuality since the beginning. When people hear gay, what they think (assuming it’s not in a context meant to convey one’s contempt toward a thing’s apparent worthlessness) is sex…capital S. It’s not an exaggeration that when typing the word “lesbian” into a YouTube search, rather than finding progressive lesbian artists like Alix Olson or the Good Asian Drivers and valuable lesbian entertainers like Ellen Degeneres and Bridget McManus, YouTube presents us with pages and pages of pornography; videos with artistic titles such as “HOT LESBIAN SUPER SEX.”
“HOT LESBIAN SUPER SEX” is not a fair representation of my community. If my niece were to have questions one day about what it means that I am a lesbian, and rather than talking to me she relied on the media and mainstream interpretations of homosexuality to attempt a deeper understanding of it, she would be horrified and sadly mislead by the supposed information that she would uncover about the gay community. Most of the information floating around out there is not information at all, but rather biased and ignorant opinions or stereotypes. The focus on sex when the issue of homosexuality comes up is deeply detrimental to the general perceptions people have of the LGBT community. That homosexuals are human beings with the desire to be loved is often a factor that is overlooked in lieu of a perverse fascination with the sexual expression of love--a perverse fascination that Katy Perry is capitalizing off of. Not that there aren’t any superficial gays out there, one look at the character Shane on the L Word is proof enough of that, but the privacy of the members of the gay community is constantly violated. Knowing sexual things about people is typically an uncomfortable thing, so it’s not really surprising when people feel uneasy upon discovering that someone is gay. Many people feel they are automatically targeted as potential sex-interests, a presumptuous fallacy that came about because so many people are led to believe that there’s nothing genuinely emotional about homosexuality. What happens in a same-sex bedroom becomes the perverse focal point of most of the overly sheltered people who are confronted with homosexuality, due in large part to the effects of misleading mainstream portrayals of the gay community.
Songs like “I Kissed a Girl” don’t do anything to disassociate “gay” with inappropriate carnal desire. They reinforce the harmful assumption that to be gay doesn’t necessarily mean to be able to love someone of the same gender, which leaves the LGBT community in a light that portrays them as sexual deviants and guilty of sodomy (which is a term also related to the inexcusable act of turning animals into sexual objects) while dismissing the emotional aspects altogether. Katy Perry takes same-sex experimentation into the same field as anyone with ignorant assumptions about the gay community. She reduces her alleged feelings toward the same sex into nothing but carnal desire. In fact, she does everything she can not to acknowledge the fact that the girl she’s kissing might have legitimate feelings. Perry describes this girl as her “experimental game,” something that she just wants to “try on” and, presumably, be admired in.
There are a lot of dimensions (most of them overlooked by people like Katy Perry) that come with the territory of being a member of the LGBT community. I personally grew up in a small oppressive town where I couldn’t even take a girl to the prom if I wanted to. I was completely isolated from anybody that I could relate to (which isn’t one hundred percent due to being a lesbian but it definitely didn’t help) and, considering I was a particularly angst-filled teenager, it was nearly unbearable. It felt like no matter what, I wouldn’t be able to find happiness in a relationship that wasn’t hindered by barriers of every kind; extreme distance, familial opposition, and the distinct possibility of being a target for cruelty and violence.
My little sob story is nothing in comparison with the thousands of other stories out there told by less fortunate members of the gay community. Even so, the misery I experienced was real and is shared by countless others, which makes me wonder about the girl that Katy Perry targeted in her song. Was she someone like Perry, who uses alcohol as an excuse to do things that aren’t “what good girls do,” without having to take responsibility for them or deal with a few societal reprimands? Or was she someone like me, who had been forced to endure her adolescence locked inside of herself throughout the terrifying stages of self-discovery?
If Katy Perry’s “experimental game” was a legitimate member of the gay community, unless she was dismissive of emotional relationships it’s doubtful that she would brush off Perry’s advances as merely “human nature” and worth no further exploration. The victim of Perry’s saliva, if she is a lesbian, would more likely than not want the chance to develop some sort of connection with her. If this was a girl seeking a valid emotional relationship, it’s impossible to assume that she’d be able to dismiss that kind of attention, which might explain why Perry is so quick to state that she isn’t “in love tonight” and altogether avoid the complications that arise when you integrate sexuality with love, especially when it comes to the same sex. In fact, she belittles the concept of a relationship with the same gender by throwing in the fact that she has a boyfriend, and the time and physicality she invests in her “game” are never going to compare to what she considers a real relationship.
Assumptions like this are everywhere in the media. Shows like Nip/Tuck are constantly reversing the roles of women who proclaim they are lesbians or in strictly lesbian relationships and back track these statements with supposedly irresistible flings with men, making the label of “lesbian” appear to be nothing but temporary sexual insanity. It seems like nobody believes in the emotional validity of same sex relationships, and those that try fail when confronted with the choice between the same or the opposite sex. When it comes to lesbians, men absurdly are always still an option, most lesbians just need a good romp in the sack with the right guy. Hoping that her boyfriend won’t mind that she has objectified and used a woman in a sexual way while staying emotionally dedicated to him implies that there’s nothing about being with a woman that compares to being with a man in a socially acceptable relationship. (Ironically it’s more socially acceptable to cheat on your boyfriend with a girl than to be in a monogamous same-sex relationship.)
Katy Perry goes a step beyond this implication by dedicating an entire verse to objectifying women. It seems like a pathetic appeal and a veiled threat to straight men, maybe even directed at her boyfriend in a “Can you blame me?” attitude. She reinforces the assumption that many men have that it’s okay to see women initially for nothing but their physical traits. It’s an idea that these kinds of men will find sickeningly affirmed coming from a woman herself. At the same time though, she seems to be teasing the men, attempting to make them feel insecure and threatened by women and homosexuals and view them as further competition.
Katy Perry reduces same-sex experimentation into a superficial mockery and harmful emulation of the gay community. Her music, because it is popular, influences the way that people who learn how to live and act from MTV view and treat members of the gay community. There is no hope for a widespread acceptance of homosexuality if we keep allowing harmful generalizations to persist. A small way that we can help is by spreading awareness and boycotting harmful portrayals of the gay community by the media (like, for example, Katy Perry’s song) and working to disassociate homosexuality with sexual deviancy and perversion. The cheapening and exploitation of homosexual lifestyles has got to stop. The only difference between homo and heterosexuals is in an arena that shouldn’t be scrutinized by the public anyway. It is essential that homosexuals become acknowledged as people as opposed to the sexual objects that Katy Perry implies that they are.