lady gaga and sexualisation Wednesday, 26 January 2011

Today it has been reported/rumoured/(fabricated) that lady gaga's new perfume will "smell of blood and semen". Shocking? Only 'mildly' according to the fashionista website. Apparently someone called Rad Hourani has beaten her to it. Yet behind this banal and laughable gossip is something more sinister: the pervasive pornification of western culture. John Whitehead has in fact already written a fantastic article on this exact subject over at the Huffington Post, explaining how lady gaga is one of many artists contributing to the sexualisation of young children through pop music and videos.

All of this of course goes far beyond music videos; it is rather just one small part of a closely choreographed image which not only appears to show a genuine motherly love and concern for her fans, but projects a deeply and persistently sexualized image, which is almost impossible to evade. I expected my search for an ideal sexualized image to take at least a minute, but I was obviously a little naive. In fact, I managed to strike gold with the splash page of her own website, which shows an picture of her wearing a leather jacket and turned away from the viewer. She is also sporting her fashionable 'pantsless' look, although this time in the British rather than American sense of the word. In this light, the reported 'blood and semen' scent fits neatly into lady gaga's existing image; this is clearly not some perverse and shocking aberration. The ever-useful twitter seems to support this further. Despite the occasionally bewildered '???' and satirical statement, the vast majority tweeted the news uncommented as if it were simply another middle-of-the-road gossip story.

The rumoured fragrance is also a illuminating example of the progressively pervasive normalisation of pornography in our culture, and the internalisation of the messages and sexual acts that it depicts. Because in pornography, semen is not just merely a reproductive fluid, but an explicitly visual symbol that is projected onto the subservient woman's face or body, who, of course, is portrayed as loving every second of it. Researchers such as Gail Porter have shown how this sexual act has translated and proliferated into reality through the direct influence of pornography, with surveys indicating its increasing perception as a perfectly acceptable and standard sexual act. I hesitate to be more explicit or go into much further detail myself, but an interview with Porter, founder of Stop Porn Culture and the recent book PornLand: How Porn Has Hijacked Our Sexuality, over at New Left Project is probably a good place to start. So there you have it. Lady gaga, sexualisation, pornography, and mainstream western culture. Now that's something you won't often read in the Guardian.