One is not born a woman

This is Katy Perry (taken from her Flickr account), whose album One Of The Boys is released in the US this week. According to "tastemaker" Perez Hilton, she is the new Lily Allen. So it can't be long before she's heading across the Atlantic for Radio 1 interviews and assorted promotion.

I heard her first single Ur So Gay at the end of 2007 (one of those tentative, limited edition releases) and hoped that would be the end of it. Because that song is so dumb on so many levels that I don't even want to think about it. But if you must know, Katy lambasts an ex-boyfriend for being feminine (in this context, feminine is defined as listening to Mozart, wearing SPF45 etc) because "feminine" = gay and gay = bad. Of course! Didn't you know that? If not, you're probably the sort of person who spells it 'you're'. Chuh!

Anyway, her more recent US single is I Kissed A Girl, another abomination trampling all over Helene Cixous and Lucy Irigaray. It's cute white girl R&B pop with a "rock edge", like Pink or Natasha Bedingfeld. Except that Katy (who released a Christian gospel album in 2001 under her birth moniker, Katy Hudson) is a naughty girl. A very naughty girl who is supposed to make you go "phwoar!" and think zexy zexy thoughts. If you can't guess from the title, it's about Katy kissing a female friend while drunk and discovering "it felt so wrong, it felt so right". Were this simply a tale of discovering an emerging sexuality, perhaps from the mouth of Yelle or similar, I'd be ok. But Katy has to go and add "hope my boyfriend don't mind it". So it's not about a young woman discovering herself, it's about a young woman positioning herself firmly in the male gaze and looking DEAD SEXY.

It's not really fair to direct bile at Katy as she's simply the empty vessel through which this slurry passes. (But it's dead sexy slurry, yeah?) Cathy Dennis has a writing credit. Oh Cathy, you can do better than this. Even Michelle McManus was a step up.