the ch!cktionary

lenachen wrote:

Summer anthem: Katy Perry’s “I Kissed A Girl”

I like to call myself straight-flexible. Kennedy’s kind of the same. She adores the above song and we are definitely going to a Katy Perry concert back in the States. Also, we should probably just consummate this friendship with hot girl-on-girl action (this is something I’ve been working on since freshman year — no luck yet).

miss-r:

Around 1997 or so, my favourite singer/songwriter was Jill Sobule, who had a song with the same title (although my favourite song of her’s was always Supermodel). My friends and I liked to giggle and coyly inform the boys in our life whenever it entered our heads, as teenage girls are wont to.

A decade on, Katy Perry’s take on the subject is catchy and tuneful (onto my iTunes it shall go), but dare I say it, a little… heteronormative? I mean, “You’re my experimental game”, “It’s not what good girls do, Not how they should behave”?

noraleah:

Admitedly, I am cursed to listen to lyrics, but I wholeheartedly agree with Miss R on this point. As rock & roll, the song is turn-it-up-fun, but sub-par. As a smart, empowered girls-gone-wild anthem, it sucks.

“Heteronormative” = nail on head. It’s just so … retro. So tee-hee I drank a bottle of Tequila Rose with my pretty, straight girlfriends, made out with them all on the floor of my parents’ TV room, and “innocently” spread the rumors around my high school for attention. (If it sounds like I’m speaking from experience, I am, which just goes to show how very passe this is.)

Then again, attention is Miss Lena’s currency. More buttcheeks and bulldogs, more piercings, more post-fellatio portraits, more glimmers of post-feminist brilliance: all to come, I don’t doubt.

She’s fascinating, of course, but I’m oddly dissappoinited in Lena for threatening this utterly predictable oops, I leaked my straight girl sex tape to the Internet coup d’etat.

Kiss your friend. Have sex with her. But don’t do it for an audience.

lenachen:

The song is heteronormative in that girl doesn’t end up with girl in the end, but that’s kind of the point for me. If it weren’t about a straight girl, I wouldn’t be able to relate. I read it more as a song about sexual experimentation, and say what you will about straight girls who mess around with girls but I have plenty of gay friends (both male and female) who toy with the opposite sex themselves, even post-coming out — and I don’t think either group does it for attention. So Katy Perry’s piece is hardly an anthem to sapphic love (and a few of the lyrics are laughably prudish), but I don’t really think it’s meant to be.