Why Lady GaGa Does Not Matter

I’ve been astounded lately by how many articles have been posted on the main page and on the community board about how Lady GaGa is not really a feminist.
I’ll expose my bias right away by admitting I do not understand the nature of looking up to celebrities. Lady GaGa’s job is to make music and sing and dance and entertain us with her glitter and her disco sticks. Somewhere along the way in the entertainment business, doing these sorts of things also became about obsessing over the person behind the music (or movies, or television shows, take your pick). For some reason, they’re considered role models and people who might say things worthy of our attention that have nothing to do with their singing or their acting.
Part of that comes with a joy on the consumer’s part for tearing these people down. No one gets ridiculed more than singers and actors, and it’s often said that they’re fair game for attacking because, hey, they put themselves out there, didn’t they? So the comments threads on all the Lady GaGa blog posts have been filled with people sneering at her and her stupidity and lots of writing her off as someone not worthy of our time.
In the newest What We Missed blog post on the main page, a lot of commenters have been discussing the Psychology Today article written by an evolutionary psychologist who completely. There’s been some praise and applause for the rebuttal to that article, which is here.
In this article (which is FABULOUS), the author details how she went from being an, “I’m not a feminist, but…” to claiming the label for herself. She also explains how so many of her female students do the same thing –
I see, rather remarkably, my female students going through the same sorts of trials and self-examinations today in spite of the fifteen years of feminism that have passed. Some of these women students are planning to go to medical school. Some are engineering majors. They are track stars or nationally-ranked basketball players. These young women certainly work hard, compete fiercely and are not embarrassed about admitting that their goals are high. They work to put themselves through school. Most of them aren’t considering getting married until they’re several years into their chosen professions. Most of them leave home after graduation to make their way in cities across the country to find interesting, challenging jobs.
Yet when I ask how many of them consider themselves feminists, only about a third in any one class will dare to raise their hands. These women may not be afraid of getting bad scores on the LSATs or GREs, but they’re afraid of not getting a date. They can be independent, intelligent and proud to be women. But a little word like “feminism” scares them. One girl, a student who’d taken two women-and-literature classes with me said that she loved the material, that the books had changed how she thought about herself and her relationships with men. We were having coffee in my office while discussing the subversion of the marriage plot in the contemporary woman’s novel when I mentioned something about being pleased that her feminist perspective was being finely delineated by her careful work on the novel. “Oh, but I’m not a feminist,” she said, surprising me, “I don’t like that word.” I gulped, and felt that whatever work I’d done in class I’d obviously missed out a crucial discussion.
Why are so many women afraid to call themselves feminists? It is because they fear the condemnation of experts such as Satoshi Kanazawa?
This, which I see reflected in so many women in my own life, makes all the hullabaloo over Lady GaGa stupid and misplaced. Lady GaGa is not special in her delusions about what being a feminist is about. She is not, along with other Hollywood starlettes that have been torn apart on this site, a lone idiot who just doesn’t get it.
So are we also sneering at the 2/3 of the women in the professor’s class who didn’t raise their hands? Are we writing off her student who she had coffee with who, after being enlightened by the class, still refused to accept the f-word? Somehow, I think not, since they don’t share that magical celebrity quality that Lady GaGa has. It’s not quite so fun to be meanspirited when it comes to women who we might encounter in our classrooms, our offices, and our personal lives.
What can we, as feminists who are not afraid of claiming the label, do to attack this widespread misunderstanding? What sort of implications does this misunderstanding have outside of the glitter and disco sticks?