Lady Gaga fascinates me.  She makes me think.  I often find myself wanting to defend her, to whom I’m not sure.  I think she puts me on edge, makes me wonder why she does what she does, and I always come up with a self-satisfying answer.  Take her fashion statements for example.  They’re often… weird, to say the least.  They are revealing, bizarre, and often unattractive or even kind of hideous.  She does not dress like we typically expect our pop star/sex icons to dress.  And in an avant-garde, art club/theater kid misfit kind of way, that’s cool.  But I think it’s more than an angsty rebellion.  Lady Gaga’s fashion choices often make statements about how our society dictates female beauty.

Lady Gaga is thin, white, blonde, hairless…  She’s got the body of the pop star/sex icons of the last decade (Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, P!NK, Fergie, Mandy Moore, Jessica Simpson, Gwen Stefani… you know the mold), so she’s not scoring major points by presenting us with a new body type.  But what she does with that body is unusual.

Exhibit A: Body Shape

Despite having that “perfect” bod, Lady Gaga frequently distorts the way we see her body, using sharp angles, increasingly large shoulderpads, and poufs or wings to accentuate her hips.  Each of these things in moderation have been considered attractive/fashionable at one point or another, but the extremes to which she takes them have a distracting effect, creating a mismatched, unnatural body shape.

Exhibit B: Nudity

Lady Gaga was first known to me as that pantsless popstar.  Everywhere I saw her, she was rocking the leotard, and I’ll admit, I wasn’t into it.  However, I do remember loving Elizabeth Hasselback’s reaction when Gaga was interviewed on The View with no pants (priceless).  Although we like seeing young hot skin, there is a time and a place for it, but Gaga didn’t follow those rules, and it made people uncomfortable.  Furthermore, she has pushed the boundaries of lingerie as formal wear and the flesh toned body suits made popular by Britney Spears that fateful music award night.  Gaga puts taboo spins on what has formerly been described as sexy.

Exhibit C: The Masquerade

Lady Gaga is beautiful, but you might not know it.  In fact, if you saw her on the street in jeans and a t-shirt, I’m almost certain you wouldn’t recognize her.  Her fashion statements speak for themselves, and just as she often distorts her body, she frequently disguises or even hides her face.  Be it make-up, masks, glasses or veils, Gaga’s face is one of her least recognizable aspects.  In most of our day to day lives, faces are our primary cues in relating to one another.  Gaga’s masquerade takes the human component out of the pop star.  It also prevents her face from being plastered on T-shirts, folders, pencil cases, and sneakers because her image is constantly changing.  Not so marketable to the bubblegum crowd.

Exhibit D: The Kid Thing

Speaking of the bubblegum crowd…  We’ve touched before on our culture’s obsession with sexualizing girls and infantilizing women.  Gaga messes with this, too.  She takes the pure and childlike to a whole new confusing level.  Our society likes to be aroused, not confused.

Exhibit E: Danger, Pain, and Injury

Furthermore, we like our pop stars sexy, naughty, but safe.  Xtina may have gotten Dirty and Britney may have been Toxic, but those were essentially role-play to Gaga’s for-serious S&M.

Gaga gets messy, she gets ugly, she owns her sexuality, she makes us uncomfortable by giving us what we say we want – but on her terms.  She might not be entirely subversive, but she’s messing with our “traditional” definitions of what it is to be feminine, beautiful, and sexy – not by showing us different ways to be beautiful, but by showing us how our definitions can be hideous and unnatural.