Enemies of Reason Poundshop potshots at the media moral maze.

Katy Perry’s cream tits v Lady Gaga’s meat surprise*

There's been an awful lot of attention given to Lady Gaga's dress made of meat. An awful lot. For some, it's a representation of the female artist as commodified meat for the marketing grinder; for others, it's the rotting ephemera of fame, decaying visibly in the public gaze; and for others still, it's a fucking dress made out of meat to try (and succeed) and grab a few headlines.

You may point out that the meat dress isn't original

even for Lady G herself

but what is an interesting point is the kind of meat involved. Where, oh where, is the fish? (Don't be grubby, now). But surely a nice couple of kippers wouldn't go amiss? Or an octopus hat - why not? Perhaps it's important to look at the meat as strips of flesh rather than as a dead animal with a face; perhaps the image only really works with strips of red meat, rather than, say, a pair of pants made out of chicken nuggets.

Is Gaga's meat surprise the new Carmen Miranda hat? Is this "fantasy and playful eroticism" or some deeper kind of statement about the nature of fame - or, as the performer herself stated, a protest about 'don't ask, don't tell'? Are we looking at the female performer as a human sushi table, a vessel for meat - or more of a raclette? Is this antipasti or is it raw meat? Is this just a nod to Hats of Meat, but with a whole outfit made of meat, instead of just the hat? After balloons and angle-grinding, was meat the only place to go?

Some may be disappointed with the choice of meat. In a world where many are starving, the flaunting of meat as clothing seems a little, oh I don't know, decadent. Others don't like meat, the idea of meat, the process of meat. Is this the popstar as that bloke who gets turned into sausages at the start of Prime Cut? Or is it just saying that, at this stage of the career, the meat is still fresh and hasn't been ground into burgers just yet? I don't find the meat as edgy as all that, but it did give me a chuckle.

I see it as more provocative, more interesting and more fun than the use of food as clothing by, say, Katy Perry. Whereas Gaga's meat dress attracts a storm of criticism like so many bluebottles trying to lay maggots in her shoulder straps, Perry just sails along comfortably enough - even though she's clearly doing the devil's work. And I say this as someone who doesn't believe in any form of god or devil. But if there is a devil - and I'm pretty sure there isn't, but I'll hedge my bets just in case - then the devil is clearly going to be Katy Perry fruiting around with a bra made of pastry.

Perry is, in some senses, Kenny Everett reincarnated - hell, her boyfriend, that Brand cove, even looks a trifle like Cuddly Ken about to tie Wogan's Wand into a knot on Blankety Blank. But there's something less playful, less silly, more calculating and calculated about Perry's aren't-I-so-naughty schtick - not just the lipstick lesbianism but the tits of cream.

In some ways, I suppose this is penis envy at its most obvious - here is Perry rejoicing in the act of a double ejaculation, spurting her musical cream (processed, fattening, lacking in nutrition) all over unsuspecting teens right across the world. Is this a desire to lactate, or a desire to ejaculate? It seems it could only be the latter. Does Katy want to be a boy or a girl, or both? In another sense, I think it's almost a wink and a nod to the frenziedly masturbating boys rubbing out a sly one to MTV that the video's nearly over and it's time to finish up. But there seems something so unsatisfactory about all this, so polished, so deliberate somehow.

Whereas Gaga draped in meat has a kind of sexual value but is not essentially erotic, Katy Perry covering her tits with cream is as subtle as, well, a woman squirting cream out of her tits. Do you know what I mean? If you look at the lyrics to one of her more recent efforts, you can see this lack of nuance quite clearly:

I wanna see your peacock, cock

Your peacock, cock

Your peacock, cock

Your peacock

Hmm. What on earth could all that mean, I wonder? It's certainly hard to tell, isn't it? Now I know you'll probably say that this isn't the point, that I'm not a teenage girl and therefore I can't pass judgement on whether this kind of thing is good or bad. But that's a cop-out; just because you're not the target demographic doesn't mean you can't see when something isn't tremendously subtle. And it isn't.

That for me is why Katy Perry is the real sausages out of the production line, and Gaga is something entirely different. One has the power to surprise and delight; the other is never going to stray too far from your expectations, no matter how diligently her oh-so-naughty teen-friendly image is cultivated.

And there's another thing, too: I could listen to Bad Romance for hours, but California Gurls makes me want to stick knitting needles in my ears to stop the agony. That kind of helps when making a decision, too.

* Some of you may consider this to be a shameful piece of SEO. I can only plead my innocence in the strongest possible terms.

The last good day of the year

Thanks to Drivelcast in the comments of last week's post for bringing this to my attention. I'd been meaning to post this up all week, but it seems rather apt today.

Wall-to-wall Popery

One of the nice things for me about being an atheist is that you don't belong to a club. (In the same sense that I dare say one of the nice things for other people about being religious is that you do feel that sense of belonging.) So if some other atheist says or does something that I don't agree with, I don't feel any sense of loyalty because of our shared (or rather unshared) beliefs, no sense of kinship with people with whom I have very little in common, apart from that we don't do the whole churchy praying stuff.

In the midst of all this wall-to-wall Popery at the moment, I get the sense that a lot of atheists are being portrayed as haters. Well, more than the sense - and look, it's our friends at the Mail doing it (though there was a fairly awful bit of kite-flying flamebait in the Telegraph the other day that I can't find right at the moment). You can roll it around in your head why one minority group, Catholics, might be pandered to by certain sections of the press in a way that, say, another minority group like Muslims are not, and it might be inviting to draw some conclusions from that. But maybe there's too much drawing of conclusions being done at the moment.

Anyway, I think that's slightly unfair, and wrong, for atheists to be portrayed as haters. I'm pretty sure there is a lot of hate out there - don't get me wrong - from atheists and others, but it's wrong to say that those atheists who don't hate are haters, just as it is equally wrong to smear all Catholics, or Baptists, or Muslims or whatever with the same characteristics.

But I don't hate the Pope, or what he stands for, or the idea of Christianity, or anything like that. I may have called him "an elderly virgin" and "odious" and a "ridiculous old cunt" in the past on this blog, but that wasn't meant in a hateful way - I was trying to be insulting rather than hateful, I hope you can understand. Even as a person with no religious beliefs, I can see why a religious leader should be welcomed by this country as there are many millions of followers here - even more so in a place where discrimination has been built in to the constitution against people of that faith. It's a good way to try and reconcile things. I may not choose to practise Christianity, but I can see a lot of good things in it - I went to Sunday School and all of that back in the day, and I remember some of the positive stories, as well as some of the downright weird and scary ones. There's a force for good in a lot of faith groups, bringing people in the community together and trying to achieve positive things.

Of course, you could point to any number of areas in which the Pope's edicts and orders have failed victims of child abuse, for example, or are discriminatory in themselves against any number of other minorities. That's a difficult thing for liberals to tiptoe around - the idea that in respecting some minorities and faith groups, you have to try and respect their right to be disrespectful to other groups. It doesn't sit easily. But still - I don't have any hate, only hope that perhaps something good will come from this papal visit. Well, you have to try and have what people might call a 'Christian' attitude towards these things, I suppose, even if you don't do the believing bit.

All that said, the wall-to-wall Papa is getting me down already. I watched television this morning and looked at a camera shot of an empty street in Edinburgh before the plane had even touched down. I watched interviews with people who had met the previous Pope back in 1982, and I couldn't help thinking "But it was a completely different man, how is this even relevant?" and I find it tedious that a state visit is making national headlines when surely there are other things going on in the world. I was even faintly disappointed that generic daytime property-buying programmes with overly-chirpy presenters who look like they should have been in Bucks Fizz - I'm talking about Homes Under The Hammer here, in case you weren't sure - had been removed from the schedules in order to accommodate all this super-reverent dirge.

But that's all I have. I don't seem to have any hate. I might not like this particular Pope or be a big fan of his pronouncements or views or anything like that - and that's putting it mildly - but I think I'm such a bleeding heart that I try to be tolerant towards even people like him.  Otherwise, who is the one who ends up looking disrespectful and intolerant - the medieval-mentality waste-paper-bin wearer in the carriage clock case on wheels, or the people who attack him?

I don't think there is a lot of Pope-hate anyway. Mockery and derision, yes, but mockery and derision is fine. You may recall the amount of 'hilarious' mocking that South Africa's Jacob Zuma had from certain sections of the dead-tree press during his state visit back in March, because of his polygamous lifestyle. I'm pretty sure those same newspapers will be tut-tutting at anything seen as unpleasant towards this chap Ratzinger, and won't see anything wrong with that. But that's the way it is.

Priorities, priorities…

You know those floods in Pakistan recently that killed thousands and displaced millions, creating an ongoing human crisis devastating huge areas of the country? Well they did something even worse...

Yes, friends. It's even worse than we feared. The era of the £2 t-shirt and £4 pair of jeans could be coming to an end. Those selfish bastards, saving themselves and their families, instead of our cheap Primark clothes!

Oh, the humanity...

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