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This loneliness is also emphasised by her costumes, many of which act as exo-skeletons, essentially cages within which she performs. While most women in the spotlight are intent on appearing as small as possible – and Gaga is certainly physically tiny, a 5ft 2in stripling – her costumes are often bulky, lumpy, tough, hard, impenetrable. She has appeared encased in concentric metal hoola hoops, in a coat made of Kermits, a skirt made of a Muppet's head, a multitude of masks, studs, lace and latex, crowns and feathers and a massive lurex tent. McEwan sees these outfits as a commentary on female consent; a woman taking ownership of her body and keeping others at arm's length. "She's a performance artist," she says, "and a lot of what she does is physically representative of this outer shell. The gyroscope outfit was just ridiculously distancing – as was the time she wore the Kermit outfit. You couldn't hug her, even if you wrapped your arms around her. You wouldn't be anywhere close, because she wears these outfits that are physically distancing. I think that's an affected and deliberate look that says: you can't touch me . . . She's very positive about her fans, she reaches out to them, loves them, talks very fondly to them from the stage. But her suits of armour say that they can't just walk up and touch her. Nobody can."
Gaga's outfits are distancing and, in some ways, dehumanising. In fact, the downside of her act – the fact that the performance, is, as Paglia rightly says, so artificial at all times – is that very little of the real, the emotional, the passionate, is ever allowed to leak through. We never, ever get to see or understand who she really is. Gaga seems to live inside a mass of contradictions: one moment she says she's not a feminist, "I hail men"; the next she's declaring she is a feminist, and making feminist remarks ("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"). Is this slipping and sliding some form of evolution, or just a sign of someone who is terrified of being pinned down?
The stories that do emerge about life behind the costumes are often windy tabloid tales of exhaustion or weight loss, which can seem like desperate attempts to turn her into this year's Britney Spears or Amy Winehouse, just another female car crash. "They've tried everything," Gaga told Rolling Stone earlier this year, "when they start saying that you have extra appendages [it's been suggested that she has a penis] you have to assume that they're unable to destroy you. I've got scratch marks all over my arms, and they say I'm a heroin addict. It's from my costumes. When I pass out onstage, they say that I'm burning out, when I have my own a) personal health issues, and b) it's fucking hot up there and I'm busting my ass every night."