Moranthology (12 page)

The video is about the “purity of my friendships with my gay friends,” Gaga explained, earlier. “And how I've been unable to find that with a straight man in my life. It's a celebration and an admiration of gay love—it confesses my envy of the courage and bravery gays require to be together. In the video I'm pining for the love of my gay friends—but they just don't want me.”

We look at the photo on her BlackBerry again.

“I'm not sure about my hair,” Gaga says, suddenly, staring at the BlackBerry.

3
AM
.
I am pretty wasted. I am kneeling on the banquette, with Gaga lying by my knees. I have just come up with the theory that, if you have one of your heroes lying tipsily next to you, you should tell them all the pretentious pop culture theories you have come up with about them. So I slurringly tell her that the difference between her and, say, Madonna, is that you don't penetrate Gaga. Her songs and videos are—while sexual—about dysfunction and neuroses and alienation and self-discovery. They're not, in any sense, a come-on. Despite having worn very little clothing for most of her career, Gaga is not a cock-tease.

“Yeah! It's not what straight men masturbate over when they're at home watching pornography,” she confirms. “It's not for them. It's for . . . us.” And she gestures around the club.

Earlier in the day, she had said—somewhat unexpectedly—“I still feel very much like an outsider. And I have zero concept of how I'm assessed in the world.” As one of the most-discussed women in the world, this is a surprise. Does she really not read her press? Perhaps this is how she's stayed so . . . normal. Ordering drinks, chatting to everyone. She's the least pretentious multi-million-selling artist I've ever met.

A minute later, Gaga springs up, and beckons for me to follow her. Weaving her way down a series of corridors, we eventually end in—the VIP toilet.

“You're wearing a jumpsuit,” Gaga says, with feminine solidarity. “You can't get out of one of those in the normal toilets.”

As I start to arduously unzip, Gaga sits on the toilet with a cheerful, “I'm just going to pee through my fishnets!” and offloads some of those whiskies.

For the first year of her career, massive internet rumors claimed that Gaga was, in fact a man—a rumor so strong that Oprah had to question her about it when Gaga appeared on her show.

Perhaps uniquely amongst all the journalists in the world, I can now factually confirm that Lady Gaga does not have a penis. That rumor can, conclusively, die.

4
AM
.
Time for bed. We pull up outside the Ritz Carlton, in a people carrier with blacked-out windows. Gaga opens the door, and totters out, looking—despite the McQueen cloak—like any tipsy twenty-three-year-old girl on a night out in Newcastle, on a Saturday night. Her gray wig looks dishevelled. Her face-sequins are wonky. Her eyes are pointing in slightly different directions—although, to be fair, I can only focus on her myself if I close one eye, and rest my head against the window. Tonight, she played to 40,000 fans. Tomorrow, it's Sting's Rainforest Benefit, where she takes her place among the pantheon: Debbie Harry, Bruce Springsteen, Elton John.

She leans against the car for a moment, issues a small hiccup, and then turns, dramatically.

“I. Am. KNACKERED!” she roars. She then walks, slightly unsteadily, up the steps of the Ritz Carlton hotel. A total, total dude.

 

Gaga is, of course, the perfect bridging subject between “ranting about gays” and “ranting about feminism.” And so we move on, to the vexed subject of wondering where all the clothes went on MTV.

MTV
H
OES

“I
wish,” my friend Jenny tweeted last week, “there was an MTV Normal. For people who love pop—but don't want to watch a load of girls dressed as hoes.”

I knew exactly what she meant. Twenty-first–century pop music presents one of the biggest vexes for the modern feminist—and by “feminist” I mean “all women,” really; unless you have recently and decisively campaigned to have your voting rights removed.

When I was a teenager, all my pop heroes were Britpop and grunge—unisex jeans and sneakers for all. I was raised with the expectation that, if I wanted to, I could sell twenty million albums with my upper arms covered at all times.

My daughters, on the other hand, are being raised in the Era of the Pop Ho. This is a time when the lower slopes of Britney Spears's leotard-clad pubis mons are more recognizable than—although oddly redolent of—David Cameron's face, and pop videos for female artists have become so predictable, I can run you through what will happen in 90 percent of them, right here:

1. “Just checkin' my legs are still there.” Self-groping which begins with a lascivious sweep across the collarbone, develops into decisive breast-rubbing, and then ends with some pretty full-on caressing of your own buttocks, belly and thighs. The ubiquity of this dance move is baffling: however much healthy, positive self-love a woman has, she's still not going to be this mesmerized and excited by having an arse by the age of twenty-three. She knows it's there. She doesn't have to keep checking. By and large, women generally can keep their hands off themselves for the three minutes it takes to make a pop video. I know up to nine women, and none of them have ever had to excuse themselves from the table, saying, “Sorry—just going to feel myself up in the coat closet. Back in a moment.”

2. Having sex with an invisible ghost. Sooner or later, every modern popstress is going to have to vibrate in a squatting position, in order to pleasure the Ghost of Christmas Horny. That's what we ladies do in 2011. We hump spooks.

3. “Making your booty touch the ground.” Women of pop—if you want to get to Number One, you will, at some point, have to make your “booty” (bottom) touch the ground. It is as regulation a move in twenty-first–century pop as having incredibly dry-looking hair was in the 1980s. Of course, making your booty touch the ground isn't that difficult—almost any woman can do it, given a full minute or so to get down and up again, and allowed to repeatedly say “Ouf!” and “Argk!” while clutching at the mantlepiece. In the scheme of things, it's no biggie. But what may sadden the viewer, after a couple of hours, is noting how “booty grounding” is solely the province of women. You never see the boys doing it—despite them having legs that are anatomically identical to women's, and rocking the considerable advantage of not being in six-inch heels. I have never seen Bob Dylan make his booty touch the floor. It is not something that was asked of Oasis.

4. “Having some manner of liquid/viscous substance land on your face, then licking it off lasciviously.” In no other field of human experience does someone busily engaged in their work—in this case, miming to their latest single—have something land on their face, and react with anything other than a cry of “WHAT? WHAT IS GOING ON? I am gonna start effin' and jeffin' if we cannot keep the rain-machine/mud/custard off my face, Andrew. Just—stop hurling stuff at me! I'm trying to look thoughtful! I sold fifteen million singles last year!”

Do not get me wrong. It's not as if I
dislike
women acting all fruity in videos—I was raised on Madonna. Beyoncé and Gaga are my girls. Put the Divinyls'
I Touch Myself
on, and I will terrify you on the dance floor. Literally terrify you. You will want to leave.

It's just the . . .
ubiquity
of female pop stars dressing up as hoes that's disturbing. It's as weird and unnerving as if all male pop stars had decided, ten years ago, to dress up as farmers. All the time. In every single video. Imagine! Sitting down to watch your 5,000th video incorporating a hay-baler, and a man in a straw-covered gilet giving medicine to a coughing ewe. You'd think all men had gone insane. But that's what it's like with the women, and the ho-ing.

Anyway, I've finally found the best moral through route for watching MTV with my daughters, without making them feel that if they want to sell twenty million albums, they must dress like hoes. And it is pity. Every time we see Rihanna on her hands and knees with her coccyx hanging out of her knickers, my girls will shake their heads, sadly, and say, “It is a great song—but we feel sorry for Rihanna. If she was really one of the biggest pop stars in the world, she'd be allowed to wear a nice cardigan once in a while. Poor Rihanna. Poor, cardigan-less Rihanna.”

 

Rihanna has too few clothes. Someone in a burqa, meanwhile, could be argued to have too many. Sometimes, it's hard to be a woman. Your wardrobe might as well have “socio-sexual-political minefield” written on it.

I lifted a paragraph of this column—on burqas—from
How to Be a Woman
, but have included it in full here, because the idea of a “woman-made religion” continues to deeply intrigue me, to the point of maybe making one myself. After all, how much did L. Ron Hubbard coin off inventing Scientology? And that's a
bollocks
religion. People being controlled by tiny aliens inside? You've just lifted that off
The Twilight Zone
, Ron. It's pathetic.

B
URQAS:
A
RE THE
M
EN
D
OING
I
T?

O
ver the last few weeks, I've whiled away hours imagining how different the world would would be if the major religions—Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Sikhism, Hindusim—had been invented by women. As someone who had atheism burned into them when they were fifteen and noticed a) all the terrible, unanswered suffering in the world and b) the first growths of a desperately unwanted woman-mustache, apparently given to me by a cruel God, my subsequent interest in theology became one of sociological curiosity: looking at religions' rules, and working out why people thousands of years ago would have invented those particular guidelines in the first place.

Lots of them are obvious and laudable morality—not killing, not lying, not stealing, doing your very best not to have sex with next door's wife; or else common sense housekeeping tips for hot countries—pork and shellfish would have been perilous in a pre–Sub-Zero era in the Middle East, for instance. They're all fine.

Then there are the more questionable rules. For anyone who's watched Jerry Springer or read
Us Weekly,
“respecting your parents” doesn't make sense if your father is basically Frank from
Shameless,
or your mother some neurotic socialite who abandoned you to a host of disinterested nannies.

And, finally, there are the rules—scattered across all religions—that would only have been made up in an era where women were second-class citizens, i.e., any point before the release of
Working Girl
in 1986. The value on female virginity; female sexuality being “dangerous”; divorce being considered shameful: understandable rules from a pre-contraceptive society where women's main purpose was to keep family bloodlines undisputed, and prevent small, muddy villages exploding in a series of
General Hospital–
like plot-lines.

And, so, to the burqa—currently the world's most controversial outfit. Last week, the French government brought in a law making the burqa illegal in public places—prompting complex, but often inconclusive, emotional reactions, from pub gardens to broadsheets.

On the one hand, there feels something deeply amiss about seeing a woman walking down a street, in twenty-first century Paris, shrouded from head to toe as if she were some ghostly, flickering projection from 1,000 years ago. Some official urge to address this seems understandable.

On the other hand, the pictures that went around the world on the day the laws came into statute—French policemen grabbing a woman, on her own, and dragging her away; the inference, if not the actuality, being that they would then strip the
burqa
from her face, even as she protested—were also deeply disturbing. Xenophobic governments telling immigrant women what to wear—making laws about their wardrobes—
also
feels medieval. With another cultural shift, what other laws could be brought in to legislate against the clothes on women's backs: Fur? Mini-skirts? Pants? You could find passionate advocates against all of them. But in the case of the French government against burqas, who is
really
telling who what to wear here?

Well, I have a rule for working out if the root problem of something is, in fact, sexism. And it is this: asking “Are the boys doing it? Are the boys having to worry about this stuff? Are the boys the center of a gigantic global debate on this subject?”

And this is basis on which I finally decided I was against both the French legislation
and
women wearing burqas. France was the last European country to give women the vote, the French senate is 76.5 percent male, and it's never passed a law on what French men can wear. Not even deck shoes; or alarming all-in-one ski suits in bright pink nylon. So there's clearly some sexism going on there.

Secondly, meanwhile, the logic of the burqa is a paradox. Yes, the idea is that it protects your modesty, and ensures that people regard you as a human being—rather than just a sexual object. Fair enough.

But who is your modesty being protected
from?
Men. And who—so long as you play by the rules, and wear the correct clothes—is going to protect you
from
the men? Men. And who is it that is regarding you as just a sexual object, instead of another human being, in the first place? Men.

And—most importantly—which half of the population has never been required to walk around, covered from head to toe, in order feel like a normal human being? Men.

Well, then. Burqas seem like quite a man-based problem, really. I would definitely put this under the heading, “100 percent stuff that the men need to sort out.” I don't know why women are suddenly having to put things on their heads to make it better.

Men invented burqas—men are banning burqas. And they are the only people who
would
have invented them. Because I can't believe a female-invented religion—with a female god, female prophets, and laws based on protecting women's interests—would
ever
have invented an item of religious clothing that required so much ironing.