Katy Perry "I Kissed a Girl" and I Liked it Too!

This song garnered some attention on National Public Radio recently because of it's overtly "same sex" message and its number 1 Billboard ranking. I find it interesting because, though it is a song about a same sex "relationship," the singer is unquestionably ambivalent about the experience and ultimately the lyrics express society's simultaneous disdain and fascination with lesbians.

When I was in college my friends and I would jokingly say, "Well, if I were a girl, I'd like girls too. Who'd want to get that close to a hairy smelly muscled guy?" And the last verse in this Katy Perry song brought me right back to those fun talks in our dorm room. She sings, "Us girls we are so magical / Soft skin, red lips, so kissable / Hard to resist so touchable / Too good to deny it" And I agree. But this, along with the opening line of the chorus, "I kissed a girl and I liked it / The taste of her cherry chap stick" is the only truly positive thing that Perry's lyrics say. The rest of the song questions, Denys, and tries to justify her actions.

Before I go on, let me say that I don't know Katy Perry's sexual preferences or whether the lyrics in this song express anything truly personal. it is my intention only to demonstrate what these lyrics convey, not to promote my own heterosexual viewpoint. I will try to write from this perspective.

Perry's lyrics demonstrate two simultaneous conflicts, internal and external. She acknowledges the social impropriety , and the personal, dichotomy in her actions.

She shows that her actions may have been interpersonally unacceptable when she writes, "I hope my boyfriend don't mind it" This shows that she recognizes that she has broken some rule of heterosexual relationships.

She moves on to acknowledge that in her society, this is inappropriate in the second verse when she writes.
"It's not what good girls do / Not how they should behave / My head gets so confused / Hard to obey"
Of course society tells us how "good girls should behave" and when Perry sings that it is hard to "obey" it is obvious that she recognizes that there is some "authority" that should be obeyed.

We can see that this societal pressure has affected the singer. In the first verse She sings, "This was never the way I planned / Not my intention / I got so brave, drink in hand / Lost my discretion / It's not what, I'm used to"
This was not what she had planned, and is not her usual behavior. But the alcohol presumably contained in the "drink in hand" seems to have affected her.

But one must ask the question, did the drink lower her inhibitions, thus causing her to do what she wanted to do, not what society told her to do? There seems to be a struggle here between what society says "good girls" should do, and what the singer wants to do as demonstrated when she has a drink. This leaves us with the question of whether her intentions are her own, or those of society. "Discretion" seems to suggest a choice made for the purpose of keeping something secret. Thus, her indiscretion brings something out in to the open. Maybe she has always made a choice based on what society tells her, not on her own free will?

This idea is further supported when she sings that the drink made her "brave." Generally bravery suggests the achievement of things which are positive or good. So by singing that the drink made her "brave" she suggests that kissing the girl was something, on some level, positive, because she was brave enough to do it.

To this point, we seem to have a person torn between doing something which is, "brave" on some level good, interesting, and possibly something she has subconsciously wanted to do, and something which is socially unacceptable. She is torn both on the inside, knowing she has done something generally different than her previous behavior, and on the outside, having done something which "good girls" don't do.

She seems to try to justify this, make things better in two ways. First, she passes the blame. In the second verse she sings that it's not her falt because it's just, "human nature" and that her "head gets so confused / Hard to obey." She suggests here that she can't help herself, that it's too difficult to go against her nature. This could also be seen as suggesting that though she denies it, this is in her nature, something she wants to do, drunk or not.

Second, and I believe that this is the saddest thing of all in this song, she trivializes it, passes it all off as a game, an experiment, discarding her fleeting lover. Perry sings in the first verse, "Just wanna try you on I'm / Curious" and in the chorus, "I kissed a girl just to try it / I hope my boyfriend don't mind it / It felt so wrong / It felt so right / Don't mean I'm in love tonight" and in the last verse she finishes with, "Ain't no big deal, it's innocent."

The ultimate denial, the injury which men often inflict on women is this, in the second verse "No, I don't even know your name / It doesn't matter / You're my experimental game"

In the end, this is just a song. I am not suggesting here that she had to accept her actions as ultimately good, but she might have recognized them as a learning experience and shown some respect for the girl who helped her learn. Whether or not this is innocent, a mistake, a passing fancy, the lover is thrown away, turned in to a game, minimized, trivialized by the absence of even a name. And the purpose seems to be to save face. The edgy hard sound of the song seems to support the hardness of the denial. Whether it "felt so wrong" or "felt so right" Katy Perry anonymizes the experience and minimizes her momentary lover because of her internal ambivalence and her acceptance of society's taboo against same sex experimentation.

This is a great song because it tackles the issue of same sex relationships in our society. I believe it ultimately promotes a heterosexual viewpoint, but the message is complicated by Katy Perry's acknowledging that, at the moment, it felt good to her. As a society, we must be brave enough to wrestle with these issues, and sensitive enough to recognize and forgive experimental mistakes.