What If Lady Gaga Were Fat

Two recent articles, “Lady Power” and “Lady Gaga: Pop Star for a Country and an Empire in Decline,” have attempted to analyze the complex persona of pop superstar Stefani Germanotta, known to the layperson as Lady Gaga. The paradox of Gaga is that she conforms to Western standards of beauty – young, blonde, slender – while challenging conventional gender roles and sexual norms. The gaudy outfits, blood-spattered performances, (mostly) male corpse-laden music videos, and semi-automatic mammary guns conjure an aesthetic amalgamation of Madonna, Elton John and GWAR. Initially forgoing the feminist label, Lady Gaga has most recently described herself as “a little bit of a feminist.” All women, regardless of rank on the hierarchy of American beauty, can choose to embrace feminism and champion women’s rights and gender equality. However, my question is this:

What if Lady Gaga were fat?

What if she were morbidly obese? What if her slender legs were strewn with tufts of thick black hair? Or what if, God forbid, she was middle-aged? (Or black or Muslim or gay, for that matter, but I digress.) Would her message of female empowerment resonate?

Of course not, which then begs the question, must one first conform to ascribed social standards before one can challenge those very standards? Is it hypocritical to kill a man in a music video for gawking at one’s scantily clad body while male America sits at home committing the very same act? If Lady Gaga innately gravitates towards a minimalist philosophy of dress regardless of the cultural expectation that women make themselves attractive to men, is motive enough to deem the act self-empowering? Or do the demands of superstardom simply render any challenge to the status quo impotent?

Take Green Day for example. Their last few albums, in somewhat more eloquent verbiage, essentially said “Fuck you, George Bush, and all the idiots that voted for you.” By punk rock standards, this message isn’t particularly subversive. But can Green Day be considered a punk band when they are signed to Time Warner, the third largest recording company in the industry? Is “selling out” justified as a means to spread expressions of dissent to a larger demographic? Does anyone give a fuck about what Green Day is saying to begin with? Producing an album that appeals to both angst-ridden teens and yuppie liberal suburbanites requires just the right amount of “edginess,” that wretched, watered-down, lukewarm, generic mound of hogshit that halts itself just shy of overstepping established lines of decency so as not to frighten away potential album purchasers, and in doing so, undermines its own authenticity.

And it is at this line that I question the efficacy of feminism ala Gaga. Lady Gaga embraces sexuality in her music and performances, combining themes of violence, voyeurism, fascism, and war in ways that no other mainstream artist does. She challenges established roles of domination and submission and, in doing so, uses her own sexuality as a vehicle of empowerment. Unfortunately, this message is mutilated nearly to the point of non-recognition once it is shoved through the meat grinder of American consumer culture. This is not to say that Lady Gaga is disingenuous. On the contrary, she treats issues of gender, sexuality and inequality, issues most mainstream artists shy away from, quite seriously. It is the so-called fourth branch of government, the crap-peddling pusher for the capitalist gangbang known as The Media that boils any substantive form of expression down to the lowest common denominator: tits and ass. A producer could read passages from "The Second Sex" through Kanye West’s Auto-Tuner, chop it up, throw it over a beat with a nice hook and use it to sell drinks to sweaty ass-shakers at nightclubs. Hell, The New York Times could run an ad featuring a topless Rosa Parks with the word “Greyhound” digitally stamped onto her forehead and the irony would largely go unnoticed. The CEO’s, producers, managers, A & R douchebags and all other industry lackeys don’t give two shits about what any artist is saying, as long as the albums and concert tickets sell.

Despite the desecration of the message and the commoditization of the artist and music, the greater theme of empowerment espoused by Lady Gaga cannot be entirely eradicated. In an article for the Los Angeles Times, Lady Gaga was quoted saying, “When I say to you, there is nobody like me, and there never was, that is a statement I want every woman to feel and make about themselves.” Although addressed to women, the statement above is inspiring to anyone struggling with self-identity in the face of constrictive and often prejudicious social roles. Young women (and men for that matter) struggling against the restrictive expectations of a consumer culture that strives to mold everyone into the same faceless drone with identical, generic, and standardized tastes whose behavior is managed and predictable can surely find inspiration in a successful woman who challenges conventional ideas of gender, sexuality, and identity.

And that’s reason enough to embrace the Tao of the Gaga.

Plus her music is catchy as hell.