English Audio Request

What was interesting about Paglia's article was its implication that, in order to be a star – and particularly a female star – you have to be sexually appealing. This was underlined by her list of female singers she does admire. "Among the magnetic presences in music today," she wrote, "are tigresses of charismatic sensuality or gamines of buoyant charm – Beyoncé, Shakira, Rihanna, Lily Allen, Nelly Furtado." All of which apparently ignored the fact that, for her fans, one of Gaga's key attractions is precisely her dismissal of traditional, feminine sex appeal, of the need to be charming, of the values and aesthetic of other female singers: the ripe, pert bodies, the pretty, familiar costumes.
Of course, Gaga does sometimes embrace the iconography of traditional sex appeal. She often wears a basque, or other underwear, and vertiginously high heels; just this week, after the MTV awards, she wandered through an airport in bra, knickers, ripped fishnets and a gold leather jacket, a pair of handcuffs swinging from her waist. In her Telephone video – which attracted huge interest, but wasn't her finest hour – she danced in stilettos and a stars and stripes bikini, aping sexploitation films such as Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill! a reference that just seemed worn and wearisome.
But for every bikini, for every batted eyelash, Gaga introduces intimations of the grotesque, the repulsive. The meat dress is an obvious case in point. As is her appearance at the end of the Bad Romance video, lying beside a smoking corpse, sparks putt-putting from her bra. And then there was her performance on The X Factor last year, singing that same song. She and her dancers gyrated in an enormous bath – so far, so kooky-but-palatable - and then Gaga perched on a toilet. I repeat: a toilet. There's almost nothing that could have been more subversive; as the feminist writer, Melissa McEwan, points out, "there is an episode of Sex and the City where Carrie isn't able to go to the bathroom in Big's apartment". For a singer – and, again, especially a female singer – to introduce these kind of references into a performance, in such a matter-of-fact way, with no wink or humour, was genuinely astounding.