Katy Perry, We Need To Talk About Consent

ABC/Mark Levine

My daughter is 10 at the time of this writing.  Like me, she is a lover of all things pop culture.  She loves music, she lives for her TV shows, and she is always on top of the latest Next Big Thing.  Along with this comes a lot of admiration for her favorite stars, whether they be from TV, movies, music, or YouTube.  Now, I can’t – and don’t – tell her who she can and cannot look up to.  That’s her choice.  But you can rest assured that I do keep up a continual dialogue about what makes a good role model, what integrity means, and what we can learn from the people in the public eye (for both good and bad.)

Right now, her very favorite is P!nk.  I adore P!nk.  She’s awesome.  She’s all about empowerment.  She’s strong, she stands up for what she believes in, and she’s by all accounts a devoted mother.  She’s also all about being yourself, and not what society says you need to be.  And you guys?  We just saw her in concert a few weeks ago (AMAZING concert, by the way).  She’s almost 40, and she still straps herself to a harness, and flies and does acrobatics – while singing, no less! – way over a crowd of 10’s of thousands of people.  She is a BADASS.

And now here’s Katy Perry.  Up until a couple of weeks ago, I didn’t have a particularly strong opinion about Katy Perry either way.  I have to admit some of her songs are catchy.  And I saw a documentary about her once – I am a total sucker for behind-the-scenes, musician documentaries – and it stirred up some compassion, for sure.  There was one scene where she was in tears, total panic attack mode, right before she had to go onstage and make this grand entrance.  Her marriage was ending, she was emotionally spent, and she didn’t know if she’d be able to do the show.  But she gathered herself, put on a smile, and went out to give a killer performance.  No one knew what had just been taking place backstage, until/unless they saw it on the documentary months later.  It made me gain new respect.

But Katy.

You did something really, really wrong.

In case you missed it, she is a new judge for American Idol.  There was a young man (still a teenager at the time of the audition) who said he’d never had a girlfriend, and therefore had never kissed a girl.  Katy called him up to the judge’s table, inviting him to kiss her on the cheek.  He was embarrassed, clearly, but did he want to kiss her cheek?  I don’t know.  But he obliged, kissed her on the cheek, and she immediately complained, “No, you didn’t even make the smoosh sound!” And then she held out her cheek a second time.  This time, when he went in to kiss her (again, on the cheek), she turned her head at the last second, kissing him on the mouth.  He was so shocked he literally fell over.  Katy threw her arms up in victory like she’d just scored a goal in soccer, the other two judges laughed and whooped it up, and the poor kid was so shaken that he had to ask for a glass of water before he could even perform his audition.  His performance, by the way, was greatly influenced by the whole thing, and his nerves got the better of him.  The judges found this funny; one of them commenting, “He’s still trying to recover from that kiss!”

Shame on Katy Perry.

Shame on the other judges for laughing and encouraging.

Shame on ABC for using this footage as advertisement, again and again and again.

Because let’s be clear on a couple of things here:

1) If the situation had been reversed, and it had been one of the male judges kissing a young female contestant… we all would have seen in for what it was:  sexual harassment.  He likely would not have had a job the next day.

2) She abused her power and her celebrity to take advantage of someone in a sexual way, which is never okay.

3) Despite those who argue “chill, it was just a kiss!”, kisses are intimate.  Yes, there are different kinds of kisses, that connote different things:  The kiss between a parent and child; the kiss between friends and relatives; the kiss between lovers.  But no matter the kiss in question, it is intimate.  It is personal.  It requires and demands consent from both parties.  Katy Perry kissed someone on the lips (someone who, it should be noted, was barely a legal adult) without his consent.  That is the very definition of sexual harassment – at a minimum.  Some would say sexual assault.   And it was applauded!

I don’t care that it was “all in good fun.”  I don’t care that it was Katy Perry.  Does she just assume that anyone should be happy to receive a kiss from her??  I don’t want a kiss from Katy Perry.  And this young man didn’t want one either.  Which should bother us.  A LOT.  And it’s backwards and disturbing that we need to reverse the roles in order to understand the severity and the ramifications of what she did.  If it had been a male judge?  We would have been horrified.  We would have had an immediate, visceral, angry reaction.

It’s intensely disturbing that I need to say this, but consent matters, no matter your gender.

What Katy Perry did was wrong.  The fact that people are laughing about it, applauding it, thinking that this young man should consider himself lucky: that’s wrong too.  Full stop.

I find it sad and ironic that in today’s current climate, when we are finally calling out all the men for their actions, that we’re not doing the same for women.

Consent goes in both directions.

Every time, in every situation.

If there is ever to be any change, we at the very least need to have some consistency.  It really does nothing for our cause if we (rightly) chastise men for their crimes, but somehow excuse women… because, what?  Because they’re Katy Perry?  Because this boy should be counting his lucky stars that this famous pop star gave him his first kiss on the lips?  It doesn’t work that way.  We need to be standing up, again and again, and saying “no more” to sexual harassment, no matter the gender of the person doing the harassing.

 

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6 Comments

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6 Responses to Katy Perry, We Need To Talk About Consent

  1. Eliz

    I am so glad to see you write about this. I read about the kiss a week ago or whenever it happened and I have been waiting to see the news cycle to call this harassment. I haven’t seen a thing (but I don’t read pop culture articles much – hopefully there has been some appropriately upset reaction somewhere). You are very correct that Katy’s actions and those of the other judges, and ABC are so wrong. I keep asking myself, Why hasn’t the mainstream news been reporting this as harassment, especially in the current Me Too climate? Very scary. Thanks Jen, as always, for saying the things that need to be said.

  2. Natatat

    Agree. Totally disturbing. P!nk all about empowerment though? Seems she has a few double standards on that when she wants to shame others for posing without their clothes on- as she has.
    https://www.google.co.uk/amp/s/uproxx.com/music/pink-kim-kardashian/amp/

  3. Lisa from Iroquois/Canada

    Don’t know the incident you are referring to, I tend to avoid those shows like the plague, however, you are absolutely right – it would have been seen as harassment if the sexes had been reversed, and we need to call out women for bad behaviour just like we need to call out men.

  4. Kit

    This is a tricky situation, because as I read it, there had to be consent given the first time when she invited him up to the desk for the first kiss. We dont know if he nodded, he also didnt refuse. He was so happy to go up there to start with. He could have had the option to do his audition first. So many factors seem to clash in this argument, but also, so many line up. I agree with giving consent for so many things, but are we going too far with this consent thing now? to the point that romantic spontaneity is being thrown out the window. A kiss is a kiss, its not rape, its not an inappropriate grope , Agreed the second kiss was probably a little too much for this young man, but personally if it was me, I would have loved to be surprised by a kiss that was given in gentle gesture. There has to be a line somewhere before this world gets so PC that we are all going to be needing a 5m no approach zone around us permanently.

    • john millard

      Kit … sadly your response suggests that you are part of the problem. Consent is one key part of the sexual abuse solution but is so little practised as it is culturally disregarded and, by some, mocked as PC.
      John

    • Eliz

      Agreed, consent is not always easy to identify. I see this as analogous to any person in power making a request or a suggestion to a subordinate and the subordinate doesn’t want to risk what happens if they don’t comply.

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