Let’s talk for a moment about girls kissing girls. More specifically, let’s talk about former Christian-singer-turned-pop-maven Katy Perry kissing girls. Because her incredibly popular single “I Kissed a Girl” leads us to believe that this is an activity she enjoys doing. It leads us to believe that mainstream pop music has finally (finally, finally) made some room for the LGBTQ crowd.

It lies.

I know the song has been out forever now, but this has got to be said. I know you’ve probably seen the YouTube clip of Perry jumping into a cake at the Latin VMA’s and then falling on her ass at least four times, and it probably made your heart a little softer for her. Stop that right now.

Perry’s song operates on the same tired exoticization of lesbianism that Girls Gone Wild does: Gay people: bad. Women making out: HOT. The understanding is that the girls that make out for a camera are not actually gay and thus pose no moral dilemma for the people who like to watch them. They will run back to their boyfriends when they’re done playing around. Consider the following lines from the song which exemplify this point perfectly:

“I kissed a girl, and I liked it
Hope my boyfriend don’t mind it
I kissed a girl, just to try it”

Experimenting with sexuality is a perfectly natural thing to do. Spending time questioning one’s romantic attractions and what they’re based on is a key part of sexual maturity. What Perry freely admits to doing in this song, however, is not natural. She is narrating a night when she drank too much, kissed a girl because she was feeling cocky and wanted the conquest, and went back to her boyfriend afterward.

Another telling lyric:
“I got so brave, drink in hand
Lost my discretion
(…)
It’s not what good girls do
Not how they should behave”

The narrator of Perry’s song is obviously aware she’s being watched. The male gaze is upon her, she knows her boyfriend knows she’s kissing girls, and she’s going to scamper back and tell him about it when it’s over and the “experimental game” she’s conducted has ended. There is nothing liberating about women who manipulate each other and mask their sexual feelings in order to put on a better show. From the vantage point of her safe, compulsory heterosexual relationship, the narrator is free to note the “soft skin so touchable” of her fellow females. We all know “it don’t mean [she’s] in love tonight,” after all.

And what would have happened if a man sang this song about kissing other men? First of all, the connotations of “I Kissed a Boy” are slightly more insidious than Perry’s version.   “Girl” could mean teenagers or fun-loving young adults, due to our sexist habit of pushing women back into adolescence whenever possible. “Boy” sounds more like kissing someone 12 and under. But assuming we all understand that the man singer is not breaking the law in the title of his song, we still would never sing along to this in our cars. Radios wouldn’t touch it. The artist may start receiving death threats in the mail. So it’s refreshing to hear a #1 single on the radio about gay women. It would just help if the women in the song still wanted to kiss each other when they hadn’t been drinking heavily.

Male homosexuality, on the other hand, is not something with which to experiment, according to what we hear in Top 40 radio and see in popular TV shows. Men that kiss men, even “just to try it,” are gay. No questions. No turning back. And it seems they’ve got no business flaunting it on American radio stations.

Seattle’s fantastic alternative newspaper, The Stranger, published a piece about the backwards feminism being broadcast by Katy Perry and Sarah Palin alike. The article contains this gem of a quote, describing Palin but equally applicable to Perry:

“What Palin so seductively represents… is a form of feminine power that is utterly digestible to those who have no intellectual or political use for actual women. It’s like some dystopian future… feminism without any feminists.”

The one step forward, two steps back result of Perry’s ridiculously popular song is no different. She touts a lesbianism without lesbians.

“I Kissed a Girl” is a catchy piece of music that’s fun to sing along to. It’s almost got a really great thing going, talking about branching away from the heterosexual whitewash of popular music. But ultimately the hope for progress represented in the song is proven false. When songs like this (and politicians like Palin) get mislabeled as the cream of the progressive thinking crop, blazing trails for woman-kind, we’re in even more trouble than we were before they arrived.