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Pop music critic Ann Powers is sharing tidbits from her recent, revealing interview with the primal force known as Lady Gaga leading up to her three sold-out performances at the Nokia Theatre at L.A. Live on Dec. 21-23. Check Pop & Hiss daily for another pearl from the girl.

Today, Gaga sheds light on the true meaning of her excellent new song "Dance in the Dark." Sit back -- it's a long explanation.

"The record is about a girl who likes to have sex with the lights off, because she's embarrassed about her body. She doesn't want her man to see her naked. She will be free, and she will let her inner animal out, but only when the lights are out. She doesn't feel free without the moon. These lyrics are a way for me to talk about how I believe women and some men feel innately insecure about themselves all the time. It's not sometimes, it's not in adolescence, it's always.

"Also, I'm working with Viva Glam on MAC AIDS Fund stuff and the more I learn about AIDS and HIV.... most of the new infections are in women my age, and in women ages 53 to 64, older women who haven't had sex in a long time, and in a moment of passion are irresponsible and contract HIV, and women my age who think their boyfriend won't love them if they speak up. Condoms aren't female. They're making female condoms, but right now it's, "buy a Trojan" - it's for men. So everything's in a man's power, and women are taught to be receivers... It's just a very deluded way of looking at sex.

"I guess all of these new things entering my life are changing the way I view my purpose, but that song in particular is about me wanting to live -- but also, the song isn't called 'Dance in the Light.' I'm not a gospel singer trying to cross people over. What I'm saying is, 'I get it. I feel you, I feel the same way, and it's OK.'

"I hope and pray that I can inspire some sort of change in people subliminally through the show. They're singing 'Dance in the Dark,' but they're dancing and they're free, they're letting it out. But the songs are not about freedom, they're about [the fact that] I get it. I feel the way you feel."

-- Ann Powers
Photo: Kristian Dowling/Getty Images
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Gaga Wisdom: Words from the Lady, Part 2

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Pop music critic Ann Powers is sharing tidbits from her recent, revealing interview with the primal force known as Lady Gaga leading up to her three sold-out performances at the Nokia Theatre at L.A. Live on Dec. 21-23. Check Pop & Hiss daily for another pearl from the girl.

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Last night, Lady Gaga tried once again to shock the world, this time by wearing a "meat dress" during her acceptance of the Video of the Year award at MTV's Video Music Awards. Lately, Lady Gaga has been having a hard time keeping her act "over the top." Wearing a dress made out of cuts of dead cows is offensive enough to bring comment, but someone should whisper in her ear that there are more people who are upset by butchery than who are impressed by it-and that means a lot of young people will not be buying her records if she keeps this stuff up. On the other hand, maybe it was fake and she'll talk about that later. If not, what's next: the family cat made into a hat? Meat is the decomposing flesh of a tormented animal who didn't want to die, and after a few hours under the TV lights, it would smell like the rotting flesh it is and likely be crawling in maggots-not too attractive, really. The stunt is bringing lots of people to PETA.org to download a copy of our vegetarian/vegan starter kit, so I guess we should be glad.

A wonderful side note to mention, Ellen DeGeneres (who is vegan herself), presented Gaga with a veggie bikini and suggested she try that next time she wants to make a statement. Thanks, Ellen!

Written by Ingrid E. Newkirk

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Last night, Lady Gaga tried once again to shock the world, this time by wearing a "meat dress" during her acceptance of the Video of the Year award at MTV's Video Music Awards. Lately, Lady Gaga has been having a hard time keeping her act "over the top."

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When Susan Sarandon and Geena Davis went roaring into the abyss from the edge of the Grand Canyon at the end of Thelma & Louise, their fates could hardly have been more certain. But, 25 years after the cliffhanger ending to end all endings first played in cinemas, Ridley Scott's feminist road movie shows no signs of succumbing to the natural laws of gravity.

When Callie Khouri, a 30-something Texas native and jobbing production assistant, sat down to write her screenplay for the film, she had no idea she would end up spawning a pop-cultural phenomenon. Having studied acting at the Lee Strasberg Theatre and Film Institute in LA, Khouri was grindingly familiar with the two-dimensional roles typically offered to women in Hollywood, and, feeling that "I wasn't seeing women represented in a way that made me want to be one", set about writing the film she wanted to see.

Slyly nodding to the outlaw movies - Easy Rider, Badlands, Bonnie & Clyde - of popular Hollywood iconography, Khouri's story was simple: two women, stifled by their romantic relationships and bored by the humdrum possibilities afforded them by life in small-town Arkansas, hit the road for a weekend on the lam. But when Thelma (Geena Davis) is raped outside a roadhouse bar and Louise (Susan Sarandon) guns down her attacker, the pair decide to go on the run to Mexico with the law in pursuit.

It sounds like a depressing ride on paper, but Thelma & Louise comes alive on screen as an exhilarating story of female friends discovering their potential - sexual, physical, human - in the most desperate of circumstances. Hailed at the time for its bold embrace of third-wave feminism - and criticised, depending on which side of the fence you were on, for its "male-bashing" tone or "betrayal" of the feminist cause - Khouri's script wound up winning the best screenplay award at the 1991 Oscars, an occasion she used to declare that, "for everyone who wanted to see a happy ending for Thelma and Louise, to me this is it".

And yet, Khouri's hopes that the film would prove a milestone moment for female characters in cinema was to prove short-lived. In a recent interview with Harper's Bazaar, Geena Davis remembers a friend of Khouri's pitching a movie with two female leads shortly after the film's release, only to be told by the studio, "Oh, no, there's been Thelma& Louise." The intervening years have scarcely been kinder: in 2011, The Atlantic critic Raina Lipsitz felt able to declare Thelma & Louise the " last great film about women ", while the current crop of ass-kicking female leads in multiplex fare often feels like a poor substitute for living, breathing, three-dimensional characters.

Then there are the reams of statistics about female talent either side of the cameras, which never fail to depress despite increasing clamour for change in the industry. In 2014, just seven per cent of the top-grossing films in the US were directed by women, while 12 per cent of the protagonists in those films were female - four percentage points lower than in 2002.

So what happened? And where do we look for reasons to be cheerful? We spoke to Khouri, currently working as the series creator of Nashville, to get her thoughts on the film's legacy, why women are plain bored by contemporary cinema, and what the future looks like for females in film.

On writing Thelma & Louise
Callie Khouri: " Thelma & Louise was a movie I was making because, one, I had never seen a movie that made me feel good about the way the women were represented, and two, it was speaking to issues that were important to me. Not that I was really thinking of it in terms of issues, it was more about (asking myself), 'Well, let's just see what the reality would be if these things were to happen. If two women were to do what they did, how would it be perceived?' I don't think I realised (how the film would resonate with people), I just knew it was the film I knew I really wanted to see."
On the 'male-bashing' hysteria surrounding the film
"The thing that blew in my mind from being at college was, like, 'Gee, the opportunities (as a female actor) to play prostitutes are never gonna run out!' And I thought, 'Why is it that?' and I think it's because seeing women as sexual creatures that aren't in a submissive position does seem threatening (for a lot of people). I think that was borne out by the fact that people saw Thelma & Louise as male-bashing. At the time there was a lot of negative, uh, flap about the film being all of these things. And I was completely stunned and caught off guard by that, I'll never forget the first time I read it. I was just like, ' What?! What are you talking about?' I mean, you see men blowing the bejesus out of each other in every single movie that you go to. And women are practically non-existent, except to be the girlfriend or the evil insider of violence or something like that, you know. I wasn't seeing women represented in a way that made me want to be one. I didn't feel compelled in any way to be writing a movie about role models. Nobody is talking to Tarantino or Sorcese about that! Nobody was asking Oliver Stone about whether he was writing role models. And actually I noticed then that John Singleton's movie, Boyz n the Hood, received a similar kind of criticism, and so did other movies that were predominantly black. And it was like, 'Oh, I see - women and black people have to portray role models, but everyone else can just do whatever the fuck they want.'"

"Seeing women as sexual creatures that aren't in a submissive position does seem threatening (for a lot of people). I think that was borne out by the fact that people saw Thelma & Louise as male-bashing" Callie Khouri

On Geena Davis, Susan Sarandon and the cast
"Obviously, I was thrilled when Geena and Susan were cast. From the first conversation that Geena and I had, I knew she was just gonna nail it. She just saw a really clear picture, she really knew the movie we were making. I had been wanting Michael Madsen, who I thought he would be so great for the boyfriend, and I was very happy that that happened. Brad (Pitt, in an early breakout role) was the very last person to be cast. We'd had a really hard time finding anybody, and then he just walked in out of the rain and, you know, stole the show. He's gone on to do OK for himself."
On the film's continued resonance
"I'm surprised at how the film has stayed in the conversation - I mean, the moniker 'Thelma and Louise' has become a shortcut for describing any number of events from 'two-headed snake' to people who are seemingly committing some kind of political suicide or otherwise. Audiences still seem to respond very positively, and I don't how I can be anything other than grateful for the fact that it's still in the consciousness. When they see it people say, 'Wow, it's amazing how relevant it still is,' which is kind of a sad statement on the one hand, but I'm glad that they feel that way. I just wish I could say I felt things had changed in a more positive direction as far as women making strides in film and television, and in the political arena. The numbers are absolutely so unbalanced, it's hard to imagine that this could be considered progress."
On what Donald Trump means to feminism
"Right now we have this one Republican candidate who is openly hostile towards women, and sadly that seems to be his appeal for some people. There must be plenty of women out there that can't stand themselves, I guess. I don't know what else to chalk it up to, because they support these guys who would absolutely have them lose the vote, if it came down to it. But at the same time I think he's going to have some real challenges, because I can't imagine a thinking, sentient woman thinking that this guy is going to do anything for them. I think (Trump's popularity) is exposing this racism and sexism that everybody on the right insists is a thing of the past, and yet there it is, in all its glory."

On whether Thelma & Louise would get made now
"The film was made by MGM, and I just cannot imagine any studio making that movie now. If it had Ridley Scott as the director, which it did, maybe it would have a shot, but I don't think any studio would be chomping at the bit to make it. Not that that many were at the time anyway."
On the new generation of female industry talent
"There's something really wrong with a system where there are so many talented women, directors and writers, and yet it's so hard for them to make any real in-roads. But, you know, that conversation is just not going away. There's this whole crop of young women who are not going to rest until they get their say, and they are figuring out how to get their films made. It just wasn't as easy 20 years ago because the technology to do it wasn't quite as available, but now it's a little easier. People are having to pay attention to the fact that women want to see films about women, women want to see films directed by women, women want to be fairly represented in the culture. And they're bored. That's why you see people like Amy Schumer do so well, you know? She's exciting." (I actually think) there is a much better shot at finding something more interesting on television these days. When you look at the people who go to Amazon, it's something like 70 per cent female, and I think that gives their programmes a better shot of reflecting that fact, so at some point they will be making more female-driven content."

"I didn't feel compelled in any way to be writing a movie about role models. Nobody is talking to Tarantino or Sorcese about that! Nobody was asking Oliver Stone about whether he was writing role models" Callie Khouri

On 'badass' female characters in modern blockbuster cinema
"I guess it's a small step, but it's not solving the problem, necessarily. And I still think in a lot of the female superhero kinda movies, they still have these super-sexualised renditions. There's a documentary made four or five years ago called Miss Representation. It's all about how women are represented in film and television, and how that shakes out into the general conscious. One of the women interviewed was talking about (the trend for badass female characters), and she referred to those women as 'fighting fucktoys', which I thought was hilarious."
On starting out in the industry
"I was extremely lucky in getting Thelma & Louise made. But part of that luck came from having been at least near enough to the playing field, that when I was trying to get it made, I knew people who knew people who knew people. Had I been just sitting in Ohio, it would never have happened. So my advice (for women starting in the industry) is to take whatever job you can to get on a movie or television set. You can't be discouraged by the numbers, you just have to keep slogging away at it. On our show ( Nashville) we hire a lot of women directors, as many as we can possibly schedule. If anything we find that, because the numbers are so few, availability becomes an issue. Because it's that thing of them wanting the people with the most experience, but if you're not hiring women then they're not going to have the most experience. It ends up being that kind of conundrum."
On her plans for a sequel
"I've been asked that (question) a lot, and my answer is that I'll write a sequel as soon as they make a sequel for Easy Rider."

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Dissecting the feminist legacy of Thelma & Louise

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When Susan Sarandon and Geena Davis went roaring into the abyss from the edge of the Grand Canyon at the end of Thelma & Louise, their fates could hardly have been more certain. But, 25 years after the cliffhanger ending to end all endings first played in cinemas, Ridley Scott's feminist road movie shows no signs of succumbing to the natural laws of gravity.

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Gaga explained in the interview, which will air on DeGeneres' daytime show this afternoon, that the meat dress was tied to her protest against the military's "don't ask, don't tell" policy and was a statement against the governmental restrictions placed on the rights of gay soldiers.

"It's certainly no disrespect to anyone that's vegan or vegetarian," Gaga told DeGeneres, who herself is vegan, in a post-show interview. "As you know, I'm the most judgment-free human being on the Earth. It has many interpretations, but for me this evening it's [saying], 'If we don't stand up for what we believe in, if we don't fight for our rights, pretty soon we're going to have as much rights as the meat on our bones.' "

Gaga then held up her recent cover for Vogues Hommes Japan, on which she wears a "meat bikini," and said, "I am not a piece of meat."

DeGeneres ended the segment by presenting Gaga with a two-piece and skirt made out of kale, leafy greens and other vegetables, for "the next time you want to pose in a bikini somewhere."

As they did when Gaga's Vogue Japan cover image leaked, PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) released a statement regarding Gaga's meat dress, saying, "Wearing a dress made out cuts of dead cows is offensive enough to bring comment, but someone should whisper in her ear that there are more people who are upset by butchery than who are impressed by it -- and that means a lot of young people will not be buying her records if she keeps this stuff up."

Gaga won a total of eight VMAs Sunday night, including video of the year, best female video and best pop video.

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Lady Gaga Explains Her Meat Dress: 'It's No Disrespect'

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Gaga explained in the interview, which will air on DeGeneres' daytime show this afternoon, that the meat dress was tied to her protest against the military's "don't ask, don't tell" policy and was a statement against the governmental restrictions placed on the rights of gay soldiers.

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Lady Gaga Reveals Emotional Inspiration Behind 'Grigio Girls'

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The first time I was in the same room as Lady Gaga, she was dressed as a sofa. It was 2014, and she was in flowing, fluffy white, hosting a talk in Texas. It was hard to work out where singer ended and upholstery began. Every movement looked tricky. This was the Artpop phase, her third album, labelled a flop even though it sold 2.5m copies. The whole era seemed like effort, but, 2½ years later, thousands of miles away, she enters London's gloomiest room and blends in with its shadows.

Her outfit today is off-duty car mechanic at a late-1960s rockers' night: dark jeans and a striped black and brown shirt - sleeves rolled up, showing off her tattoos - blonde hair, roots showing,

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The first time I was in the same room as Lady Gaga, she was dressed as a sofa. It was 2014, and she was in flowing, fluffy white, hosting a talk in Texas. It was hard to work out where singer ended

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What is 'Femvertising'? Over the last year, the advertising industry has been churning out more and more adverts that use pro-female talent, messages and imagery to empower women of all ages. However, pro-female advertising or 'femvertising' is nothing new - Nike's 1995 'If you let me play' adver

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What is women's empowerment?

Women's empowerment can be defined to promoting women's sense of self-worth, their ability to determine their own choices, and their right to influence social change for themselves and others.

It is closely aligned with female empowerment - a fundamental human right that's also key to achieving a more peaceful, prosperous world.

In Western countries, female empowerment is often associated with specific phases of the women's rights movement in history. This movement tends to be split into three waves, the first beginning in the 19 th and early 20 th century where suffrage was a key feature. The second wave of the 1960s included the sexual revolution and the role of women in society. Third wave feminism is often seen as beginning in the 1990s.

Women's empowerment and promoting women's rights have emerged as a part of a major global movement and is continuing to break new ground in recent years. Days like International Women's Empowerment Day are also gaining momentum.

But despite a great deal of progress, women and girls continue to face discrimination and violence in every part of the world.

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Womens Empowerment - Facts, Stories and How To Help | World Vision Australia

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Women's empowerment can be defined to promoting women's sense of self-worth, their ability to determine their own choices, and their right to influence social change for themselves and others. It is closely aligned with female empowerment - a fundamental human right that's also key to achieving a more peaceful, prosperous world.

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Dance in the Dark Lyrics: (Make it stop!) / Silicone, saline, poison, inject me / Baby, I'm a free bitch / I'm a free bitch / Some girls won't dance to the beat of the track / She won't walk away, but she

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This is not just another beauty brand.

They say beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but at HAUS LABORATORIES, we say beauty is how you see yourself. We want you to love yourself, and it is our mission to spread kindness, bravery, and creativity by providing tools for self-expression and reinvention.

THIS IS YOUR GLAM. YOUR EXPRESSION. YOUR ARTISTRY. THIS IS OUR HAUS. YOUR RULES.

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About HAUS - Beauty by Lady Gaga - Vegan, Cruelty-Free

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This is not just another beauty brand. They say beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but at HAUS LABORATORIES, we say beauty is how you see yourself. We want you to love yourself, and it is our mission to spread kindness, bravery, and creativity by providing tools for self-expression and reinvention.

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Is the 'F' word co-opted by conservatives & consumerist media? Where are real icons & core values? On The Issues Magazine, Winter 2011, considers feminist icons, feminist values and feminist cons.

Lady Gaga: Celebrity Feminist?
by Nona Willis Aronowitz

This past summer, I found myself in Chicago's Grant Park amid a sea of zealots. They were pushing and laughing, or cheering with their eyes squeezed closed in ecstasy. They were wearing t-shirts that said things like "He ate my heart" and "Just dance," body paint smeared with sweat in the August heat. There was not a place they would have rather been.They were there for Lady Gaga -- pop star, tabloid dream, contested feminist icon.

I was a few rows from Gaga herself, her chest heaving, her lips right up to the microphone and frozen in an open-mouthed snarl. The show was a tangle of set changes and light tricks and video montages, Ms. Gaga at the center of it, on the floor wearing ripped fishnets and a bubble dress spattered in fake blood, being humped by nearly naked greasy god-like gay dudes, shouting out every few minutes how much she loved us, her little monsters, how we can be anything we want to be!

How did Lady Gaga get here in front of hundreds of thousands of people, just two years after her first album, The Fame, was released? People can't look away, and she won't let them. And with her lightning-fast ascension, she has become the focus of much discussion about how -- or whether -- it's possible to fit pop celebrity and feminism together. During this short time, while I've been immersed in a loose configuration of young feminist bloggers/activists/writers, I've watched Lady Gaga and other feminist-tinged pop culture figures be skewered for not being feminist enough. But I think she is a feminist — as much as you can be a coherent feminist icon and a pop star at the same time. At the very least, she's cheering us on, and she's lightyears ahead of her peers.

Lady Gaga puts herself squarely in the middle of debates over feminism and politics

Despite how much attention she gets, her music is run-of-the-mill. Her lyrics are mostly boring, and her catchy songs get lost in the crowd. (She does get points for playing real instruments onstage.) The woman used to write songs for Britney Spears, for chrissake. It's her performance that turns my head. And not just the kind of performance I attended in August — although they're epic, more Rocky Horror Picture Show than concert — but her performance as a woman, as a celebrity and as a piece of art. She never wears pants and never wears the same thing twice. Every dress she dons is a statement: made out of fatty, slimy, gory meat, or made out of a million Kermits, or simply see through. She compares herself to Andy Warhol while boasting about her originality (and ignoring comparisons to Madonna and other pop stars). She's not afraid of ugliness. In fact, she embraces it.

She does all of this while simultaneously inducing eye rolls and adoration. I'm a fan, but I don't remember the last time I've listened to one of her songs without watching a video on YouTube at the same time. I stick up for Lady Gaga, but I get tired of her continued attempts to be "original" - which, eventually, just end up being contrived themselves.

The eye-roll/adoration relationship extends to feminism. At first, she clearly had no idea what the word meant; in an interview with a Norwegian journalist, she called out double standards in the music industry, then balked at being called a feminist, saying that she "loves men, hails men!" Later, she told Ann Powers she was "a little bit of a feminist" in the L.A. Times. At that point I perked up, but then she annoyed me and a lot of other pro-sexual liberation feminists when she said, while promoting her Viva Glam campaign, "It's not really cool anymore to have sex all the time. It's cooler to be strong and independent."

Lady Gaga has vacillated on the actual word, but she has a very real opportunity to make feminism go just as pop as she has made herself. Gaga has sold out gargantuan stadiums in this paltry economy, as others have cancelled shows and tours. In terms of numbers and fans, she's up there with the bubblegum good girls of the present and the past -- Beyonce and Taylor, Mariah and Shania. Except she uses the F words -both "fuck" and "feminism."

Strong Women and Pop Music

Not that feminism hasn't gone pop before, albeit on a smaller scale. Since the '70s, feminist pop culture has worked two ways, at least in the music world: On one side you have the call-to-action feminists who use the power of music as an explicitly political organizing tool: the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival that began in 1976, the Riot Grrrl movement of early-to-mid '90s, the softer, hippier Lilith Fair women, like Sarah McLachlan and Paula Cole, in 1997. On the other you have the fuck-the-world iconoclasts who flip the bird to gender roles -- Janis, Madonna, Courtney Love. In either case, the mystique and fascination of celebrity is central to the message's success. Gaga is a spawn of the second set, with a big huge exception - the previous women sidestepped the word "feminism," and even politics. Gaga puts herself squarely in the middle of both.

When does liberation become 'feminism for one'?

Superficially, she challenges gender roles in a literal, aesthetic way. She embraces traditional femininity - long hair, bustiers, heels, red lipstick - without mandating it. Unlike hypergirly sexpot Madonna, Gaga is androgynous, attentive to gender fluidity and comfortable with the grotesque. In her Paparazzi video, she fetishizes paralysis with a gold-plated back brace. She's worn eyeglasses made out of everything from lit cigarettes to a huge, tentacle-y lobster — none of them, I'm guessing, meant to be "hot." Instead of being shamed by the rumors that she's a hermaphrodite, she explained on a radio show that the whispers were just "society's reaction to strong women." Then she posed with a strap-on on the cover of Q Magazine.

Her feminism extends to the outside world. It's tied up in her general ethos: inclusive, free-to-be-you-and-me. She even latches onto a political cause once in a while -- stressing the importance of condoms on Good Morning America, speaking out against SB1070 at an Arizona concert, advocating for gay teens. Generally, though, she stays on a more abstract, libertarian message: What you do is your business. And it's all okay.

I'm reassured by this, but there's always a devil whispering: when does liberation become "feminism for one," especially given the entertainment industry's insidious relationship to money, power and objectification? Sometimes I feel like Gaga is just milking the girl-rebel image under a vaguely activist veneer, just railing against the status quo in order to distinguish herself from those other lame-ass pop stars — all while giving into the sexist expectations of the industry that manufactured her. She doesn't always please feminists around her, especially when it comes to sex. Older feminists are unconvinced and think her free sexuality is misguided or empty. Even young ones who appreciate Lady Gaga's experimental persona furrow their brow when she betrays her own public narrative and says that having a lot of sex doesn't equal being strong or independent. This coming from the woman who says she wants to free her fans of cultural restrictions?

Feminist Objectification?

Lady Gaga's conflicting messages about sex cut to the heart of a deeper feminist debate, whether being sexually objectified is, or can be, feminist. To me, a huge part of feminism is allowing women to express their sexuality and not be punished for it. I don't think sexual objectification is inherently bad in every context, and no one becomes a pop star (male or female) without wanting their body to be put on public display. Still, even as she flouts our restrictive ideas of what's attractive, I get the sense that Gaga's sexuality is less about her fantasies than the pre-packaged bad-girl ones we, as a culture, already have. I like that she's not all about selling sex--she has a whole bag of shockable tricks--but at the height of her performance, she's still dichotomizing naughty and nice, even as she claims to speak for everyone.

In other words, Lady Gaga embodies a lot of what's good about feminism and bad about pop culture; she promotes a sense of joy about life, a hope for a more pleasurable future, with a call for freedom from the bullshit that we get from the "machine." Yet she's part of that machine — the machine that wants its women skinny, naked, vulnerable, sexed up. Gaga flaunts almost every inch of her ever-shrinking frame in music videos like Telephone; she professes to New York Magazine that "pop stars should not eat." She's a walking contradiction, undecided herself about the function of people like her: Are they here to entertain within the limits set up for them, or change the world in which they do their thing?

Gaga isn't an idiot nor a bimbo; she knows she's operating within a mainstream framework, and wouldn't have it any other way. She continues to perform avant garde acts in the center of mass media. But at this point, it's unclear what she plans to do with this knowledge. It's only been two years, not enough time to see if she'll change the way the industry treats and reacts to women, to reveal whether she'll think swallowing the poison of mainstream culture is worth it in the end, or to even know whether her self-objectification is ironic or not. Salon.com's Rebecca Traister said it best when defending Tina Fey: "Ideology and political purity are frequently the enemies of all that is hilarious in the world." In the end, our high hopes for social change cannot rest on a 24-year-old who's thrust in the spotlight - -and paid millions of dollars -- to, above all, entertain us. In the meantime, at least Gaga is inserting these issues into the fore of the cultural conversation, in a venue to which the whole world can't help but pay attention.

Nona Willis Aronowitz is co-author of "Girldrive: Criss-Crossing America, Redefining Feminism", and maintains a blog of the same name, covering pop culture, politics, and organizing. She has also produced for NPR, most recently for a midterm elections series called Pop + Politics with Farai Chideya. She's also currently working on a collection of her mother Ellen Willis' rock criticism,"Out of the Vinyl Deeps", due out in April 2011.

Also see Where Feminism Rocks by Margaret R. Saraco in the Spring 1996 edition of On The Issues Magazine.

See Desperately Seeking Madonna The Feminist by bell hooks in the Spring 1993 edition of On The Issues Magazine.

Visit The Café of On The Issues Magazine for new stories and updates.

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On The Issues Magazine The Progressive Woman's Magazine Winter 2011: Lady Gaga: Celebrity Feminist? by Nona Willis Aronowitz

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How did Lady Gaga get here in front of hundreds of thousands of people, just two years after her first album, The Fame, was released? People can't look away, and she won't let them. And with her lightning-fast ascension, she has become the focus of much discussion about how -- or whether -- it's possible to fit pop celebrity and feminism together.

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'I heard my body is a topic of conversation so i wanted to say, i'm proud of my body and you should be proud of yours too.

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Three years after entering the pop music scene, Lady Gaga became the most well-known pop star in the world. These thirteen critical essays explore Lady Gaga's body of work through the interdisciplinary filter of performance identity and cover topics such as gender and sexuality, body commodification, visual body rhetoric, drag performance, homosexuality and heteronormativity, Surrealism and the theatre of cruelty, the carnivalesque, monstrosity, imitation and parody, human rights, and racial politics.

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Erin Schell

If you want to get a bead on the state of feminism these days, look no further than the ubiquitous pop star Lady Gaga. Last summer, after identifying herself as a representative for "sexual, strong women who speak their mind," the 23-year-old Gaga seemed to embrace the old canard that a feminist is by definition a man-hater when she told a Norwegian journalist, " I'm not a feminist. I hail men! I love men!" But by December she was praising the journalist Ann Powers, in a profile in The Los Angeles Times, for being "a little bit of a feminist, like I am." She continued, "When I say to you, there is nobody like me, and there never was, that is a statement I want every woman to feel and make about themselves." Apparently, even though she loves men - she hails them! - she is a little bit of a feminist because she exemplifies what it looks like for a woman to say, and to believe, that there's nobody like her.

There is nobody like Lady Gaga in part because she keeps us guessing about who she, as a woman, really is. She has been praised for using her music and videos to raise this question and to confound the usual exploitative answers provided by "the media." Powers compares Gaga to the artist Cindy Sherman: both draw our attention to the extent to which being a woman is a matter of artifice, of artful self-presentation. Gaga's gonzo wigs, her outrageous costumes, and her fondness for dousing herself in what looks like blood, are supposed to complicate what are otherwise conventionally sexualized performances.

In her "Telephone" video, which has in its various forms received upwards of 60 million YouTube hits since it was first posted in March, Gaga plays a model-skinny and often skimpily dressed inmate of a highly sexualized women's prison who, a few minutes into the film, is bailed out by Beyoncé. The two take off in the same truck Uma Thurman drove in "Kill Bill" - à la Thelma and Louise by way of Quentin Tarantino - and stop at a diner, where they poison, first, a man who stares lewdly at women and, then, all the other patrons (plus - go figure - a dog). Throughout, Gaga sings to her lover about how she's too busy dancing in a club and drinking champagne with her girlfriends to talk to or text him on her telephone.

Lady Gaga is explicit in her insistence that, since feminine sexuality is a social construct, anyone, even a man who's willing to buck gender norms, can wield it.

Is this an expression of Lady Gaga's strength as a woman or an exercise in self-objectification? It's hard to decide. The man who drools at women's body parts is punished, but then again so is everyone else in the place. And if this man can be said to drool, then we need a new word for what the camera is doing to Gaga's and Beyoncé's bodies for upwards of 10 minutes. Twenty years ago, Thelma and Louise set out on their road trip to have fun and found out, as they steadily turned in lipstick and earrings for bandannas and cowboy hats, that the men in their world were hopelessly unable to distinguish between what a woman finds fun and what she finds hateful, literally death-dealing. The rejection by Gaga and Beyoncé of the world in which they are - to use a favorite word of Gaga's - "freaks" takes the form of their exploiting their hyperbolic feminization to mow down everyone in their way, or even not in their way.

The tension in Gaga's self-presentation, far from being idiosyncratic or self-contradictory, epitomizes the situation of a certain class of comfortably affluent young women today. There's a reason they love Gaga. On the one hand, they have been raised to understand themselves according to the old American dream, one that used to be beyond women's grasp: the world is basically your oyster, and if you just believe in yourself, stay faithful to who you are, and work hard and cannily enough, you'll get the pearl. On the other hand, there is more pressure on them than ever to care about being sexually attractive according to the reigning norms. The genius of Gaga is to make it seem obvious - more so than even Madonna once did - that feminine sexuality is the perfect shucking knife. And Gaga is explicit in her insistence that, since feminine sexuality is a social construct, anyone, even a man who's willing to buck gender norms, can wield it.

Gaga wants us to understand her self-presentation as a kind of deconstruction of femininity, not to mention celebrity. As she told Ann Powers, "Me embodying the position that I'm analyzing is the very thing that makes it so powerful." Of course, the more successful the embodiment, the less obvious the analytic part is. And since Gaga herself literally embodies the norms that she claims to be putting pressure on (she's pretty, she's thin, she's well-proportioned), the message, even when it comes through, is not exactly stable. It's easy to construe Gaga as suggesting that frank self-objectification is a form of real power.

If there's anything that feminism has bequeathed to young women of means, it's that power is their birthright. Visit an American college campus on a Monday morning and you'll find any number of amazingly ambitious and talented young women wielding their brain power, determined not to let anything - including a relationship with some needy, dependent man - get in their way. Come back on a party night, and you'll find many of these same girls (they stopped calling themselves "women" years ago) wielding their sexual power, dressed as provocatively as they dare, matching the guys drink for drink - and then hook-up for hook-up.

Lady Gaga idealizes this way of being in the world. But real young women, who, as has been well documented, are pressured to make themselves into boy toys at younger and younger ages, feel torn. They tell themselves a Gaga-esque story about what they're doing. When they're on their knees in front of a worked-up guy they just met at a party, they genuinely do feel powerful - sadistic, even. After all, though they don't stand up and walk away, they in principle could. But the morning after, students routinely tell me, they are vulnerable to what I've come to call the "hook-up hangover." They'll see the guy in the quad and cringe. Or they'll find themselves wishing in vain for more - if not for a prince (or a vampire, maybe) to sweep them off their feet, at least for the guy actually to have programmed their number into his cell phone the night before. When the text doesn't come, it's off to the next party.

What's going on here? Women of my generation - I have a Gaga-savvy daughter home for the summer from her first year of college - have been scratching our heads. When we hear our daughters tell us that in between taking A.P. Statistics and fronting your own band you may be expected to perform a few oral sexual feats, we can't believe it. Some critics of "hook-up culture" have suggested, more or less moralistically, that the problem is that all this casual sex is going to mess with girls' heads. But whatever you think of casual sex, it's not new. What's mind-boggling is how girls are able to understand engaging in it, especially when it's unidirectional, as a form of power.

Jean-Paul Sartre, taking a cue from Hegel's master-slave dialectic, proposed in "Being and Nothingness" that what moves human beings to do things that don't quite square with one another is that we are metaphysical amalgams. Like everything else in the world, we have a nature: we're bodily, we can't control what happens around us, and we are constantly the objects of other people's judgments. Sartre called this part of ourselves "being-in-itself." But at the same time we're subjects, or what he, following Hegel, called "being-for-itself": we make choices about what we do with our bodies and appetites, experience ourselves as the center of our worlds and judge the passing show and other people's roles in it. For Sartre, the rub is that it's impossible for us to put these two halves of ourselves together. At any given moment, a person is either an object or a subject.

When Beauvoir uses the term "bad faith" she's almost always lamenting our cleaving to gender roles as a way of dealing with what metaphysically ails us.

The Cartesian dualism that drives Sartre's understanding of human beings as metaphysically divided from themselves is decidedly out of fashion these days. Most contemporary philosophers of all stripes reject the idea that we possess selves that are made of more than one type of metaphysical stuff. But we shouldn't forget that the claim at the heart of Sartre's picture is thoroughly phenomenological: it's not so much that people are split as that they experience themselves as such. Notoriously, Sartre was convinced that we are inclined to deal with the schism by acting in "bad faith." On occasion we find ourselves pretending that we're pure subjects, with no fixed nature, no past, no constraints, no limits. And at other times we fool ourselves into believing that we're pure objects, the helpless victims of others' assessments, our own questionable proclivities, our material circumstances, our biology. Sartre's view gives us a way to understand how a girl might construe her sexually servicing a random guy or shaking her thong-clad booty at a video camera as an act of unadulterated self-expression and personal power. But this interpretation comes at the cost of an epistemic superiority complex, according to which young women are hiding from themselves the ugly truth about what they're "really" doing.

Leave it to Simone de Beauvoir to take her lifelong partner Sartre to task on this very point. If you have it in your head that "The Second Sex" is just warmed-over Sartre, look again. When it comes to her incredibly detailed descriptions of women's lives, Beauvoir repeatedly stresses that our chances for happiness often turn on our capacity for canny self-objectification. Women are - still - heavily rewarded for pleasing men. When we make ourselves into what men want, we are more likely to get what we want, or at least thought we wanted. Unlike Sartre, Beauvoir believed in the possibility of human beings' encountering each other simultaneously as subjects and as objects. In fact, she thought that truly successful erotic encounters positively demand that we be "in-itself-for-itself" with one another, mutually recognizing ourselves and our partners as both subjects and objects. The problem is that we are inclined to deal with the discomfort of our metaphysical ambiguity by splitting the difference: men, we imagine, will relentlessly play the role of subjects; women, of objects. Thus our age-old investment in norms of femininity and masculinity. The few times that Beauvoir uses the term "bad faith" she's almost always lamenting our cleaving to gender roles as a way of dealing with what metaphysically ails us, rather than, à la Sartre, scolding women for doing the best they can in an unjust world.

The goal of "The Second Sex" is to get women, and men, to crave freedom - social, political and psychological - more than the precarious kind of happiness that an unjust world intermittently begrudges to the people who play by its rules. Beauvoir warned that you can't just will yourself to be free, that is, to abjure relentlessly the temptations to want only what the world wants you to want. For her the job of the philosopher, at least as much as the fiction writer, is to re-describe how things are in a way that competes with the status quo story and leaves us craving social justice and the truly wide berth for self-expression that only it can provide.

Lady Gaga and her shotgun companions should not be seen as barreling down the road of bad faith. But neither are they living in a world in which their acts of self-expression or self-empowerment are distinguishable, even in theory, from acts of self-objectification. It remains to be seen whether philosophers will be able to pick up the gauntlet that's still lying on the ground more than half a century after Beauvoir tossed it down: whether we can sketch a vision of a just world seductive enough to compete with the allures of the present one.
Nancy Bauer is associate professor and chair of philosophy at Tufts University. She is the author of "Simone de Beauvoir, Philosophy, and Feminism," and is currently completing a new book, "How to Do Things With Pornography."

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Erin Schell If you want to get a bead on the state of feminism these days, look no further than the ubiquitous pop star Lady Gaga. Last summer, after identifying herself as a representative for "sexual, strong women who speak their mind," the 23-year-old Gaga seemed to embrace the old canard that a feminist is by definition a man-hater when she told a Norwegian journalist, " I'm not a feminist.

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Lady Gaga performs in Vancouver, Canada

Credit: Alfred Hermida on Flickr, under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0).

(WOMENSENEWS)-I first floated my idea of Gaga feminism at a conference at the New School in New York City in which a host of feminists, young and old, participated.

Gaga feminism is a politics that brings together meditations on fame and visibility with a lashing critique of the fixity of roles for males and females. It is a scavenger feminism that borrows promiscuously, steals from everywhere and inhabits the ground of stereotype and cliche all at the same time. Gaga feminism is also a feminism made up of stutter steps and hiccups.

While I am not proposing that there is some kind of clear feminist program for social change in the world of Lady Gaga, activists of all stripes and queer activists in particular have always looked to popular culture for inspiration and have refused facile distinctions between culture and reality. The Lady Gaga piece of my talk was an attempt to connect contemporary feminism to young people, and students in particular, by building upon the popular iconography in which many of them had already invested considerable hope. But, more than just a humorous ending to a lecture, the term "gaga" for me represented a set of wholesale changes that may be most obvious in the realm of gender norms but that also stretch to many other realms of everyday experience and that call for an improvisational feminism that keeps pace with the winds of political change.

Student Connection

At the conference, the students connected with the version of feminism that I linked to Lady Gaga, while old-school feminists like Susan Faludi wanted to brush this same version aside. And Faludi has not been the only feminist who is wary of the rush to find the political energy channeled by Lady Gaga.

Madonna acolyte and 1990s feminist icon Camille Paglia also shrugged off Lady Gaga's appeal in a widely read op-ed in the London Sunday Times Magazine in 2010. In her piece, Paglia asserts that Lady Gaga is simply the "diva of deja-vu" and a copycat who latches onto a generation of glazed-eyed Internet clones and exploits its incapacity to think or know anything without an iPhone app or Twitter feed at hand. Gaga, for Paglia, represents the end of culture, the end of civilization, the end of truth, values and meaning, the end of sex and the triumph of a robotic age emptied of human sentiment.

While some feminists, like Donna Haraway, have advocated for new forms of feminism capable of keeping up with technological innovation, Paglia argues that we have lost touch with what is real, true and good in our mania for media manipulation, video games and cell phones. If Haraway recognizes an interpenetration of humanity and technology in the digital age that is exciting and wondrous (even as it is also exploitative and dangerous), Paglia sees, predictably, a manufactured public realm populated by media puppets and their passive and stupid fans. If Lady Gaga's supporters have recognized in her a newish formula of femininity, phones and desire, Paglia sees only same-old, same-old or, in her words, "the exhausted end of the sexual revolution."

New Feminist Figures

Why are feminists like Paglia and Faludi so wary of new figures of feminist fantasy, women like Lady Gaga or Lil' Kim or Rihanna or Nicki Minaj or Jenni Rivera or even Ke$ha, women who use sex boldly in their music, who flaunt their bodies but who also remain insistently in charge of their mass media images? Women who, like Ke$ha, sing songs with titles like "Party at a Rich Dude's House" and rap about being young, drunk, lost and loving it? (My friend, theorist Micha Cardenas, is countering Gaga feminism with her own Ke$ha feminism!)

While it is easy to dismiss some of this material as just mindless pop, at the same time, we might want to look again at singers who, after all, appeal to large numbers of young female fans. Why can't these women be new figures of feminism? In the end, feminists like Faludi are committed to a reform model of feminism, to the idea of feminism as a politics built around stable definitions of (white) womanhood and as a ladies' club of influence and moral dignity.

Finally, the mother-daughter bond, which for Faludi is most successfully studied in the dynamic between Elizabeth Cady Stanton and her daughter Harriet, allows, according to Faludi, for the gains of one age to be passed on to the next. But never does Faludi question whether the gains of white women in one era actually benefit women of color in the next, or whether the goals of white middle-class women reflect anything beyond their race and class interests.
Judith Jack Halberstam is a professor of English and gender studies at USC where he teaches classes in queer theory, cultural studies, film and the arts. Halberstam also writes a blog at bullybloggers.com, has published four books and is a writer for outlets including The Nation and Bitch. When not writing and reading, Halberstam can be found in LA, complaining about the endless sunshine.
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Lady Gaga Embodies a New Model of Feminism

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Lady Gaga, and her beyond-categorization persona, can represent a new form of feminism, says J. Jack Halberstam in the book "Gaga Feminism: Sex, Gender, and the End of Normal." In this excerpt, Halberstam refutes other feminists' critiques of the pop singer's impact.

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Russian actor Konstantin Stanislaviski pioneered what became know as "methord" acting in which actors pull from their own real life experiences.

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is information and getting women to speak up for themselves, and she does this though showing her venerability not just using fashion and performance but also though lyrics and speeches, using her voice and platform to unite women to speak and that they do have a purpose.

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This book is a multi-faceted, interdisciplinary examination of the music and figure of Lady Gaga, combining approaches from scholars in cultural studies, art, fashion, and music.

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The Laugh of the Medusa Hélène Cixous, Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen Current issues are now on the Chicago Journals website. Read the latest issue.Recognized as the leading international journal in women's studies, Signs is at the forefront of new directions in feminist scholarship.

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There are a million reasons to love Lady Gaga. For one, her music resonates with so many of her fans; its messages of empowerment, self-love, and embracing who you are are hard to ignore, and even harder to not be affected by. She's also a fashion and beauty icon, a seriously talented actress, and an all-around badass.

But one of the greatest things about Mother Monster is the way she mobilizes her platform as a celebrity to speak out about the issues that are affecting the world today. Gaga, with her huge fan base, has one of the loudest microphones on the planet, and she uses it - often. She isn't afraid to get involved, and her passion for activism is continuously evident - just take these moments Lady Gaga inspired us to try to change the world for example.

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8 Times Lady Gaga Was a Role Model For Change

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There are a million reasons to love Lady Gaga. For one, her music resonates with so many of her fans; its messages of empowerment, self-love, and embracing who you are are hard to ignore, and even harder to not be affected by. She's also a fashion and beauty icon, a seriously talented actress, and an all-around badass.

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Up until recently I didn't know much about Lady Gaga. But when I watched her perform on The Today Show I came away saying, "What a brilliant businesswoman." The thing that caught my attention as she started her first set was the song she chose. It was the Gershwin standard, Someone to Watch Over Me.

At first it seemed an odd choice given that she was surrounded by tens of thousands of screaming fans -- most of whom had probably never heard that particular song. But the effect was to have me actually stop and watch her perform. It helped me get past the bizarre outfits I've seen in the past, an even more bizarre (to me) YouTube video, and what I would describe as an odd affect and really listen to her voice.

Lady Gaga didn't need to win over existing fans -- she wanted to win over new ones. I have no doubt that's precisely what that choice of song was designed to do. She wanted to win over people who had preconceived notions about her. She wanted to get their attention and make them focus on her talent, not just her tactics.

And Lady Gaga's got talent, that's for sure. She's also an astute businesswoman. Here are a few things we can all learn from her:

1. Do the unexpected. Lady Gaga's choice of an opening song was so unexpected it got my attention. What might you do that is unexpected, yet within the realm of acceptability for your corporate culture, that would cause others to pay closer attention to you, your ideas or your product? Doing the same things, in the same way -- no matter how valuable -- can cause you to be overlooked in the long-run.

2. Craft your brand. We're all brands. There's a word on the street about all of us. It's what people say about us when we leave a room or hang up the phone. Lady Gaga shows us that a clearly defined brand is a memorable brand.

OK, so she looks like a cross between Madonna, Marilyn Monroe, and Elton John. There's still no mistaking it's Lady Gaga. What are the key elements of your brand? How would you complete this sentence: "There goes a woman who ____________________." Fill in the blank with the words you want people to use to describe you.

3. Focus on what you do best. Branding and gimmicks only go so far. You've got to have the goods. Lady Gaga is a great songwriter, singer and performer. What are the two or three things you do best and how can you parlay them into more money, job satisfaction, recognition or anything else that's important to you?

4. Express your gratitude -- publicly when possible. At every opportunity during her appearance on the Today Show Lady Gaga thanked the people who contributed to her success. She even sent pizza over to the die-hard fans who spent the night on the street waiting for a good spot to watch the concert. When was the last time you either publicly or privately thanked those who helped you get to where you are? The best way to ensure future support is to positively reinforce past support.

5. Be strategic. You can bet that everything Lady Gaga does, says, or wears is part of a strategic plan to market her brand. Clearly, it's working. You need to have your own strategic plan in place to achieve your goals. Being strategic means you think about where you are, where you want to be and how you're going to get from one place to the other. Write it down. Talk to trusted friends and colleagues about it. Then be certain to act in ways that are deliberate and strategic.

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Up until recently I didn't know much about Lady Gaga. But when I watched her perform on The Today Show I came away saying, "What a brilliant businesswoman." The thing that caught my attention as she started her first set was the song she chose. It was the Gershwin standard, Someone to Watch Over Me.

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They're just two rings but they make strong statements in regards to women empowerment, charitable giving and personal expressions of love.

First, the two limited edition rings were created in response to 2020 being a leap year, when tradition says it is acceptable for women to propose to their partner on February 29. However, Bea Åkerlund, highly regarded fashion activist and celebrity stylist, decided that it's time to buck tradition, saying everyone should get what they want in love whenever they want it.

Klarna x Bea Akerlund limited edition rings
Klarna x Bea Akerlund

Åkerlund, who works under the name, B. Åkerlund, along with Klarna, an online financial services company based in Sweden that provides credit for online and mobile purchases, partnered in this project. They both say that a person's decision of how they love or who they love is personal and shouldn't be "dictated by outdated rules or traditions." So she designed these non-traditional engagement rings to empower women to make their own choices when it comes to love.

"The idea behind the collection is to inspire us all to fearlessly love on our own terms and fight for someone you love," Åkerlund said in an email. "The thinking behind the design was to empower women of 2020 to rewrite their love story no matter what traditions. With this in mind, I created a pair of rings inspired by a suit of armor and the opposition of experiences that come with love."

The two rings - the Knight Finger and Unification - were launched Wednesday with the goal of "empowering everyone to propose when and how they want," said David Sandström, CMO of Klarna, which provides credit starting at no interest, for online and mobile purchases.

"We believe everyone should get what they want in shopping and in life." says David Sandström, CMO of Klarna, which provides credit starting at no interest, for online and mobile purchases. "That's why we have designed a pair of limited edition rings that symbolize the beauty of getting what or who you love, without rules standing in your way."

Second, there's a charitable component as all proceeds from the sale of the rings will go toward Dress for Success, an international not-for-profit organization that empowers women to achieve economic independence by providing a network of support, professional attire and the development tools.

Åkerlund, who is known for her innovative, over-the-top style and her work with A-List celebrities, including Madonna, Lady Gaga and Beyoncé, said she came up with the design through self examination and her observations of the relationships of others. "I started to think about what love meant to me and how we all strive to find our significant others in life. That's how the knight in shining armor idea was born."

The Knights Finger is a long ring designed for the length of the finger that has a rough texture and a striking appearance. It is pavé set with 246 rose crystal stones with an additional four white crystal stones that stand alone. "My aesthetic has always been more is more," Åkerlund said.

The Unification ring features a single crystal stone and has a sleek, open contemporary design, rounded on one end and with a pyramid shape on the other. These are fashion jewels that make a statement as non-traditional engagement rings.

Both rings by the B. Åkerlund x Klarna collaboration, are made of gold vermeil, which is sterling silver plated with gold. They are priced at $950 for Knight Ring and $500 for Unification, and are now available for pre-order on hbx.com as part of an exclusive partnership with online retailer, Hypebeast.

"It was important to design a collection that was accessible for most and keeping true to the Klarna DNA. Pink was an obvious choice and gold made it very smooth," Åkerlund said.

"Life is full of principles and expectations on who to be and how to act. These rings were designed to inspire us all to fearlessly love on our own terms and cast aside traditions of the past to define our own futures." Åkerlund said. "It's an honor to fight for someone you love."

In addition to her work with some of the biggest names in entertainment, the Swedish-born Åkerlund moves freely among fashion, film, music and art. She is also the original founder and creator of the showroom, The Residency Experience, in Los Angeles where she curates and selects emerging and established designers from around the world.

... Read More

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Fashion Activist B. Åkerlund Unveils Two 'Leap Year' Rings For Women Empowerment

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They're just two rings but they make strong statements in regards to women empowerment, charitable giving and personal expressions of love. First, the two limited edition rings were created in response to 2020 being a leap year, when tradition says it is acceptable for women to propose to their partner on February 29.

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Following the news that payment provider Klarna is collaborating with stylist and fashion activist Bea Åkerlund to launch a new ring collection, today Lady Gaga has shown support for the collaboration by proposing to herself on Valentine's Day with the Knight's Finger ring.

The 'Knight Finger' ring was recently launched by Klarna, together with fashion activist Bea Akerlund, with the idea to give the finger to outdated traditions in society. With this year being a leap year, it is traditionally the only acceptable time for women to propose to their partner on 29 February.

In support of female empowerment, her actions are synonymous with Klarna's belief that everyone should get what they love. All proceeds from the sale of the rings will go to Dress for Success, an ​international not-for-profit organisation that empowers women to achieve economic independence.

In an exclusive comment to Klarna, Lady Gaga explains: "F​or my entire career, I've taken pride in using my voice to stand up for what I believe is right. So I am excited to work with my friend B. and Klarna to celebrate how far we've come as a culture, and call out the work we need to continue to do."

"The idea that a woman can only propose to a man one day every four years is so completely ridiculous! Anyone who knows me knows that I believe any person of any gender identity should be able to express any act of love to anyone else on any day of any year."

Klarna CMO, David Sandström said: "Just like Lady Gaga, we at Klarna believe that if traditions go unchallenged, the status quo prevails. The K​night's Finger ring was created as a symbol to enable everyone to express love on their terms to whom they wish."

Designer of the 'Knight finger' ring, fashion activist Bea Åkerlund added: "Lady Gaga is a knight in shining armour, defeating all that stands in her way. She is truly an inspiration in creating her own rules to express her true self. It's an honor that she chose to put my ring on her finger."

The limited edition genderless ring collaboration between Klarna and Bea Åkerlund is only available via registration to a waitlist.

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Lady Gaga shows support for Klarna and Bea Åkerlund collaboration by proposing to herself - TheIndustry.fashion

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Following the news that payment provider Klarna is collaborating with stylist and fashion activist Bea Åkerlund to launch a new ring collection, today Lady Gaga has shown support for the collaboration by proposing to herself on Valentine's Day with the Knight's Finger ring.

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﻿ 100% of the proceeds of this ring go towards women empowerment initiatives, is this something you're really passionate about?

Yes I am very passionate about helping people, and if I can help an organization get awareness & financial aid for a good cause, I am all in.
How does this activism fall into your everyday life?
My motherly instincts always kick in, and I strive to make a difference in the world with everything I do.
What made you want to do this collaboration?
I love designing and feel like that is something I want to explore more in the future. So, the combination of designing rings, while working with a strong message/important cause, made me go all in.
How did you come up with the concept of the design of the ring? What inspired the design of the ring?
I actually designed 2 rings... One is the knight finger ring for the daring, and the second is the unification ring for the more traditional look. We knew we wanted an empowering engagement ring that made women feel confident to propose to men with. My thought process was that we all search for our 'Knight in shining armor' and the collection was born & inspired by that.

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﻿ 100% of the proceeds of this ring go towards women empowerment initiatives, is this something you're really passionate about? Yes I am very passionate about helping people, and if I can help an organization get awareness & financial aid for a good cause, I am all in.

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In Nancy Bauer's view, most feminist philosophers are content to work within theoretical frameworks that are false to human beings' everyday experiences. Here she models a new way to write about pornography, women's self-objectification, hook-up culture, and other contemporary phenomena, and in doing so she raises basic questions about philosophy.

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Lady Gaga - Poker Face (Official Music Video)

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Oprah's 2020 Vision Tour Visionaries: Lady Gaga Interview

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Lady Gaga - Swine ( Audio ) Official ARTPOP

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"I wrote a song called 'Swine'; the song is about rape," Gaga said about the ARTPOP track. "The song is about demoralization. The song is about rage and fury and passion, and I had a lot of pain that I wanted to release."

Stern dug deeper and Gaga expanded on the topic. "I wasn't even willing to admit that anything had even happened," she said, as it wasn't until years later that she came to terms with what happened. "I saw him one time in a store, and I was paralyzed by fear."

Stern asked, "Were you afraid to go to your father because you thought your father would kill him?" to which Gaga says she cannot reply.

In the end, she found solace in the fact that she was helped through therapy, maturation and more positive relationships, like her collaborations with Tony Bennett: "He wants nothing from me but my talent and my friendship... I think we should all be each other's Tony Bennetts."

Here is Gaga and Stern's discussion:

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Lady Gaga Discusses Rape During Howard Stern Interview

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"I wrote a song called 'Swine'; the song is about rape," Gaga said about the ARTPOP track. "The song is about demoralization. The song is about rage and fury and passion, and I had a lot of pain that I wanted to release." Stern dug deeper and Gaga expanded on the topic.

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Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta and Womenhood

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Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta and Womenhood

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Gender, power and technology in Lady Gaga's 'Telephone'

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A chapter that I published in 2014, "Who's Calling? Lady Gaga's 'Telephone', Female Vocal Empowerment and Signification", examined the ways in which women's historical relationship with telephone technology was highly inflected by cultural

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Lady Gaga - Born This Way (Official Music Video)

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Extension of GAGA: Joanne

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Extension of GAGA: Enigma

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Lady Gaga has certainly been the recipient of more than her fair share of censure. Daring to be different in a world governed by conformity and pre-determined boundaries can automatically get you ostracised, especially if your antics challenge the norm and give root to the dreaded question - 'Can I also be different?'

Image credit: Creative Commons

Fight it as much as you will but society still largely conforms to the idea of the perfect girl and perfect boy, of what they should look like, how they should speak, who they should interact with, and the many other frustrating factors of 'shoulds' that are forced on us from the very minute we hit puberty. Lady Gaga was no exception to this erroneous rule. Born into an upper-middle class family of entrepreneurs, she spent her childhood indulging in privilege at an upper-east side mansion in Manhattan, not realising that one day she'd be hit by a spell to stand for a greater cause and message.

Being enrolled in a private Christian school among the crème-de-la-crème of Manhattan's elite, Gaga's budding desire to shock her peers led to a series of isolated lunches, name-calling, and black-eyes. A teenage Gaga realised very early on that the worst attacks come from within a closed society that is candidly intolerant of those brave enough to challenge the system.

Following this, Gaga indulged in the somewhat predictable nuance of the life of a rebel - running away from home, camping out in a tiny bedroomed apartment, dancing tables to make money, and consuming a whole lot of drugs. However, her break came when she caught the attention of the iconic R&B star Akon, who signed her on to his own label.

Since then, it's been platform after platform for the iconic Lady Gaga, open to professing her 'uniqueness' to the world, and all the happier to show the finger to those who chastised her for it.

"I could give you a million reasons why you don't need to cater to anyone or anything to succeed. Be you, and be relentlessly you. That's the stuff of champions," she said, as a pointed message to those body-shaming her following her Super-bowl performance.

Wrongly accused of being a symbol of 'self-objectification', Gaga on the contrary had an important social message for every meat-outfit she sported or for every body part she flaunted. In an interview with Ellen DeGeneres, Gaga answered the widely-speculated question of why she wore an outfit made of meat for her popular shows. In this particular instance, she had appeared at the show with four servicemen and women who had been dismissed from their jobs for being homosexual, although the 'official' reason on paper was deigned something else entirely. To Gaga, her dress had been a part of a statement:

"If we don't stand up for what we believe in, if we don't fight for our rights, pretty soon we're going to have as many rights as the meat on our bones."

As this dynamic woman turns a year older today, we examine why, against all odds, Gaga is the embodiment of a powerful and inspiring icon for the youth of today.
"Being a lady today means being a fighter. It means being a survivor. It means letting yourself be vulnerable and acknowledging your shame or that you're sad or you're angry. It takes great strength to do that."
A popular article by Judith Jack Halberstam, a Professor at USC, first suggested the idea of a 'Gaga feminism' - a new era of contemporary feminism, which as she defines it, "is a politics that brings together meditations on fame and visibility with a lashing critique of the fixity of roles for males and females." While most old-school professionals in this field have strongly devalued it for 'encouraging objectification' that they believe Gaga represents, it has still made quite a mark on the younger generations of women, who have looked towards Gaga's casual dismissal of propriety with great motivation.

Adherents to this kind of contemporary feminism also go beyond the bounds of glass-ceilings, wage-gaps, and professional bias. They extend their activism to the throes of everyday life, of women being objectified and judged every day, for the way they dress, the way they speak, and even the company they keep. Gaga's purposefully flamboyant actions of wearing ridiculous meat-plastered outfits, declaring her bisexuality, and her warped presentation of beauty has paved the way for young girls to finally believe that they don't have to conform the incredibly difficult beauty standards that society has been inflicting on them. Her dramatic statements have helped them nurture a confidence to speak for what they believe in without fear of reprimand.
"I heard my body is a topic of conversation so I wanted to say, I'm proud of my body and you should be proud of yours too. No matter who you are or what you do."
Body shaming is one of the greatest and most subtle ways of wrecking an individual's confidence. An analysis by the Centre for Advancing Health states that students who are made to believe that they are overweight are likely to be more prone to depression and suicide-attempts. Gaga has been a victim of body-shaming for almost all of her career. But as she has stated in countless interviews, she couldn't care less. Her philosophy is that you are the only one who has a right over your own body and by default, the only one who has an opinion on it as well. This brave and self-taught philosophy has been reflected in her music and on her person, both of which has inspired young girls to rise up in the fight against body-shaming and embrace and love their bodies and selves, just as they are.

Lady Gaga may have been called a number of things - some kind and some not - in her journey to stardom. But she knows better than anyone else who she is and what she represents, a blessing she wants to pass on to the rest of the women across the world. Simply put, her message is this - just own it!

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Lady Gaga as a symbol of contemporary feminism and an active voice against body-shaming

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Lady Gaga has certainly been the recipient of more than her fair share of censure. Daring to be different in a world governed by conformity and pre-determined boundaries can automatically get you ostracised, especially if your antics challenge the norm and give root to the dreaded question - 'Can I also be different?'

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I think you could totally focus on Lady Gaga but try to stand back and be objective about her work.  Don't take that word 'empowerment' for granted, the idea of female sexual empowerment is often used to sell us things, underwear for example, pole excercise classes...do some work on that phrase, try google scholar or JSTOR and see if you can find academics writing about the idea of female empowerment - what does it actually mean?.  I think unpacking that idea of female sexual empowerment could be a section of your essay.  Also it is worth thinking about Ga Ga as a performance -her whole identity is a performance...Your lead question might be something along the lines of 'In what ways does Lady Gaga embody ideas of female sexual empowerment?' it's not very snappy but maybe it's an ok working question! 

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PinkNews - Gay news, reviews and comment from the world's most read lesbian, gay, bisexual, and trans news service

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Lady Gaga is rumoured to be releasing a new Chromatica single, "Free Woman", on the album's original release date.

Gaga stans have proven time and time again that when it comes to sleuthing, don't ring up the FBI or the Secret Service, call them instead.

First, it was "Babylon", then "Rain On Me" featuring Ariana Grande.

Now the latest rumoured single from Chromatica is a track called "Free Woman", which fans are scrambling to verify ahead of its alleged arrival on Friday, the album's original release date.

Lady Gaga teased a song about being a 'free woman'.

Gaga first mentioned the supposed title in her recent PAPER magazine interview.

"In 2020, what does it mean to be a free woman?" she asked.

"Can I feel free on my own? Do I need to be loved in order to feel like I've conquered it all?"

Journalist Justin Moran noted that the question prompted "a song that answers this question and sees her challenging the need to be with a man - or anyone at all - in order to survive."

Gaga continued: "It [the song] came from thinking on some days I was going to die. I was like: 'I'm going to die soon, so I better say something important.'

Now I listen to it and know that I'm going to live.

Now, further evidence. According to Reddit detectives, a URL that directs the user to Gaga's French store contained the words "Free Woman".

wtf @ the link on Gaga's official french shop to buy Chromatica : "lady-gaga-free-woman" https://t.co/mMDxho4oMi

- balenciagaga (@monsthairBACKUP) April 5, 2020

The website redirect, coupled with the mentioning of "free woman" in the interview, confirms the song's existence, detectives say.

Other Reddit sleuths pointed out that "https://smarturl.it/freewoman" redirects to Google, "just like how it happened with 'Stupid Love' one day before release", although this is not, of course, stone cold evidence.

And the alleged Friday release date stems from "insider info" from the pop culture forum ATRL.

'F' is for 'Free Woman', maybe, fans say.

But the plot thickens. Investigators also believe that DJ Zedd, who worked with Ariana Grande for "Break Free", is the producer for "Free Woman".

The producer tweeted on Wednesday evening a single letter: "F."

FREE WOMAN IS COMMING ? pic.twitter.com/B9gcj8V4qO

- #StupidLove #LG6 (@Milly96487002) April 9, 2020

Fans frantically connected it to Gaga, who whipped followers into a frenzy when she infamously tweeted the same letter in August 2019.

f

- Lady Gaga (@ladygaga) August 25, 2019

She later explained that she tweeted it as part of a "social experiment", and fans are now suggesting the letter stands for, yup, "Free Woman".

But there is a clear and notable difference between the two tweets that, Gaga experts stress, cannot be ignored. Gaga's tweet was lower-case, and Zedd's upper-case, hurtling the link between them into jeopardy.

Is this just Zedd doing his own "social experiment"? Will this entire article be meaningless come Friday when Gaga doesn't drop any new music?

Nevertheless, no matter how strong your belief, we must all join hands and form a prayer circle and believe this song will, in fact, be released.

Chromatica delayed while Gaga fights coronavirus.

Fans hopes for the hotly-anticipated release of Chromatica - the singer's sixth studio album - were hollowed when the coronavirus paralysed all aspects of modern life.

As the outbreak bears down on the world, Gaga announced the album's postponement so that she could - being the hero we well and truly do not deserve - raise funds for the World Health Organization's relief efforts and research.

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Lady Gaga fans are convinced a new Chromatica single is coming this week, so we guess now's as good a time as ever to freak out

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Lady Gaga is rumoured to be releasing a new Chromatica single, "Free Woman", on the album's original release date. Gaga stans have proven time and time again that when it comes to sleuthing, don't ring up the FBI or the Secret Service, call them instead.

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1. Intro & intro to lady Gaga

2.  How does she
Not just one label. - Pushing boundaries
lyrics in songs
fashion - ring
activist - using her voice

3. How she isn't
Music video - bad romance. telephone
Look at sources

4. Conclusion

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Gaga: Five Foot Two | Netflix Official Site

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She's an artist and icon who pours her heart into her work. An intimate look at her life, beyond the glitter and glam. Watch trailers & learn more.

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For all the reinvention and rejuvenation Lady Gaga has shown over the past few years - her acclaimed acting debut in " A Star Is Born," her duets with Tony Bennett, her show-stopping concerts, ranging from innovative Las Vegas residencies to a stellar 2017 Super Bowl halftime performance - it's hard to escape the fact that her last few albums have been wildly uneven. "Artpop" was a musically anemic debacle that included a (since-removed) duet with R. Kelly; "Joanne" was a hesitant move into singer-songwriter terrain, half of which didn't even sound like her; and although the "Star Is Born" soundtrack and its hit "Shallow" brought her an Oscar and Grammys and returned her to the charts' upper reaches, the songs essentially are performed by Ally, her character in the film, rather than Lady Gaga. The songwriting drought is something Gaga seemed to acknowledge in the setlist for her stunning SiriusXM concert at New York's Apollo Theater last year, which featured exactly one song from each of her last three albums - and 11 from her first three, "The Fame," "Fame Monster" and "Born This Way."

So "Chromatica" isn't just an album that's being launched into a world very different from the one in which it was created (as the coronavirus pandemic gripped North America and Europe, Gaga decided to delay the album from its original April 10 release date), it's also a reboot for the singer's musical muse. Her status as a world-class singer and Olympic-level performer is beyond question - but can she still make an album filled with songs that measure up to that talent?

Let's just say that Gaga has doubled down on the answer to that question, returning to the dancefloor that spawned her and emerging with her best album since "Born This Way" - and possibly, song for song, her best yet. "Take me on a trip, DJ, free my mind," she sings in the "Alice in Wonderland"-themed opener, "Alice," and follows with punch after punch after punch, packing 13 solid songs into just 43 minutes (along with three orchestral interludes that split the album into loose chapters); it's compact and concise, with only one song breaking the four-minute mark, seemingly - and successfully - designed to leave the listener wanting more.

But even though nearly every song on "Chromatica" has a four-on-the-floor, butt-thumping beat, the songs themselves are remarkably varied in many other ways. It's pure, joyous dancefloor pop - the acoustic instruments and country flourishes of "Joanne" and "A Star Is Born" are nowhere in sight; there isn't even much piano - but with a melodic sophistication and emotional depth that her more recent songs have lacked. And there's enough musical ear candy to keep fans engaged for months, particularly snapshots from the history of club music: There are flashes of '70s disco, house, new wave and electro (particularly on the bouncy "911," with its vocal nod to Lipps Inc.'s 1980 smash "Funky Town" in Gaga's trademark robo-dominatrix voice), and vintage Madonna looms large over the entire album - in fact, one could say this is the album Madonna fans have been wishing (in vain) that she would make for many years.

Although there are a couple dozen sonic cooks in the kitchen - hitmakers Max Martin, Justin Tranter, Ryan Tedder, Skrillex, Rami Yacoub and others all make drive-bys - the album's songwriting and sonic foundation is in longtime collaborator Bloodpop (who's also crafted hits for Justin Bieber, Britney Spears and Madonna) along with Ely Rise and Tchami. They give the album consistency and sonic unity, even as the songs wander thematically and melodically all over the map.

And even though "Chromatica" uniformly feels good, with lyrics about freedom and release and love and self-empowerment, the occasionally dark subject matter is reflected in melancholy melodic and musical touches. "Free Woman" has a liberating and empowered feel and a rousing chorus, but Gaga said in a recent interview it's about not letting a past sexual assault define her. "Fun Tonight" is about breaking up a toxic relationship - the exact opposite of what the title makes it sound like it's about - and never quite bursts into the ecstatic drop that its music seems to suggest is coming. "Plastic Doll" ("I'm no toy for a real boy") features an almost Taylor Swift-ish segment of mean-girl mockery in the middle.

Indeed, "Chromatica" is a very female and feminine work - when Elton John suddenly appears on track 13, as the only male voice on the album, the first reaction is "What's he doing here?" (that's no slight to Elton's stately vocal performance). And while Ariana Grande and K-pop titans Blackpink light up the songs where they contribute, it's Gaga's show all the way.

At the time of this article's publication, a Gaga rep had not confirmed whether or not this album was altered, musically or lyrically, out of respect for the pandemic (the line "We can party like it's B.C." on the thumping closer, "Babylon," takes on a presumably unintended "before coronavirus" double meaning). But it's safe to say that "Chromatica" will be the soundtrack for countless quarantine parties in the coming weeks. Gaga is a remarkably strong artist, personality and persona, but her past few albums often seemed uncertain - even "Born This Way" sometimes felt like it was going off the rails. But now she sounds like she knows exactly who she is, what she wants to say and how she wants to say it - and with "Chromatica," she's laid a rock-solid foundation for the next phase of her remarkable career.

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For all the reinvention and rejuvenation Lady Gaga has shown over the past few years - her acclaimed acting debut in " A Star Is Born," her duets with Tony Bennett, her show-stopping concerts, ranging from innovative Las Vegas residencies to a stellar 2017 Super Bowl halftime performance - it's hard to escape the fact that her last few albums have been wildly uneven.

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Lady Gaga - G.U.Y. (An ARTPOP Film) (Broadcast Edit)

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"I consent to being nude with everyone in this room," Lady Gaga says, before slipping off her custom Versace robe emblazoned with her name on the back in crystals. "I believe we're making art, this isn't pornography." With nothing on - not even her signature towering heels - the 5'2'' pop star walks confidently onto set for our cover shoot and positions herself inside a cage with hundreds of cameras attached to its frame. The countless lenses focus on her naked form, prepped to capture all angles of her body, as she holds one still pose and patiently waits for further instruction. "Three, two, one." Flash. Every camera goes off in unison like lightning.

The scene is immediately jarring: A global icon, whose career has been closely documented by cameras, sometimes against her will, and whose art has frequently centered on the violence of paparazzi culture, submitting herself to the same technology that's made - and challenged - her for the past 10 years. She calls for her longtime manager, Bobby Campbell, to play a song off her sixth studio album, and asks him to turn it up: "Louder, please." Amidst a flurry of wild animal noises, references to partying in "BC" and fierce house beats, Gaga warns listeners to "battle for your life" on the track, as she mouths each lyric to herself. It's the only song played all day, and she requests for it to be queued back to back.

In control of all of the cameras is Belgian artist Frederik Heyman, who needs every inch of her body 3D-scanned in order to later create a computer-generated Gaga avatar in various digitally constructed environments. This multimedia cover shoot is in conversation with the visual language being honed by Gaga and her team for her new album, Chromatica, out April 10. It's named after a world "that celebrates all things" - where, according to Gaga, "No one thing is greater than the other." On set, Gaga works from this same headspace, treating everyone in the room as a collaborator, especially when it comes to styling. She specifically rejects wearing head-to-toe designer clothing, instead opening up conversation for "a more fucked-up" fashion direction. "It doesn't need to go together, it just needs to be upsetting," she says, pointing lovingly to a pair of flame-printed panties.

All clothing and accessories: Balenciaga

When Heyman describes his plan to depict the pop star as a contrasting half-human / half-android figure, Gaga, ever the artist in control of her nuanced brand and vision, quickly challenges the intent behind this idea. "I don't like futurism for the sake of it," she respectfully asserts more than once. Gaga is also fixated on a much deeper truth at the heart of Chromatica's ethos. "A robot puts me above people," she muses. "Do you think a robot me is better than a human me?"

WHEN WE MEET AGAIN at Gaga's Los Angeles house the next day, her hair is dyed hot pink, and she's wearing a matching magenta shirt pierced with dozens of safety pins, fishnet stockings, underwear and massive black Demonia platforms. She walks into her private at-home recording studio - whiskey in hand - and informs me that somebody else had been using the space, so she'll need a few minutes to reset her sound system. Expertly navigating an intimidating maze of knobs and plugs, Gaga preps the room to play her new, unreleased music. This is the same studio where she completed Chromatica, and, she tells me, it once belonged to experimental rock musician Frank Zappa. Gaga's been living in Zappa's former LA home while her Malibu spot is under repair for damage caused by the California fires. She hasn't been back since leaving.

"This isn't Joanne," Gaga jokes up front, previewing new material that stands in contrast to her stripped-down fifth studio album, which saw her venture into folksy Americana influences à la "Million Reasons." Gaga then cues up the first song she wrote for Chromatica: lead single "Stupid Love," a relentless, driving disco-pop tune that revels in the joyful foolishness of loving someone. "I want your stupid love," she repeats passionately on the chorus - a similar sentiment to 2009's "Bad Romance," only Gaga's outlook now is much healthier and more independent. "Nobody's gonna heal me if I don't open the door," she sings, later doubling down: "Now it's time to free me from the shame."

When Gaga plays her new music inside the studio, she blows out of her seat and dances wall to wall as if performing for an arena of thousands, only she's just a few feet from me. Even a private show from Gaga somehow feels massive. Working through the "Stupid Love" music video's choreography, she holds direct eye contact - pointing and lip-syncing - before swiftly spinning around and watching her reflection in the recording booth window. By the end of each track, she's completely out of breath. It's immediately clear that these songs are something of an antidepressant for Gaga - the lyrics and melodies have temporarily relieved her from excruciating pain and the trappings of fame, as she's previously tweeted about.

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Gaga is well aware that "Stupid Love" leaked in January, long before she'd even filmed its video or planned for anyone to hear it. She jokes that when hackers typically find her material, they'll leak their favorite, which validated her decision to make the track open the Chromatica era. Many fans figured she'd rush it out, but Gaga wasn't interested in releasing anything half-baked. "There was a minute where me and my manager, Bobby, were talking, 'Do we change the single?' We'd just spent months and months developing this video and choreography. And I said, 'Nope!' You know why? Because the song, when it's mixed, mastered and finished with the visuals, and everything I have to say about it - when all those things come together at once, that will be the art piece I'm making. Not a leak."

As expected, Gaga's final "art piece" is wildly ambitious, with an iPhone-shot music video that saw 50 dancers film for two days straight in the hot, dry California desert. In it, her "Kindness Punks" - dressed in that same bubblegum-pink shade Gaga wears in her studio - rush to break up a fight between different tribes segmented by colors. Gaga presents as a warrior leader, with the Chromatica symbol on her forehead like a third eye and accessories that resemble armor, from a massively spiked belt to a full-face shield. In addition to the "Kindness Punks," of which Gaga is a member, there are the "Freedom Fighters" in blue, "Junkyard Scavengers" in black, "Government Officials" in red, "Eco Warriors" in green and "Cyber Kids" in yellow. By the end, they all ultimately find mutual peace and dance together as a full spectrum.

This experience, Gaga says, further proved her newfound appreciation for the power of nature over technology. Prior to filming, Gaga rehearsed for three days and her dancers immediately followed with five of their own. Her longtime choreographer, Richard Jackson, who's responsible for movement in everything from "Telephone" to "Applause," had the challenge of creating and teaching dances that would last the duration of "Stupid Love" without stopping. Gaga gushes, "I want you to imagine people dancing for eight to 10 hours straight. I watched them work so hard - the blood and sweat. Scrapes from dancing in the desert or getting poked in the eye from a stud that knocked them in the face. They're breathing in sand, they can't see. The conditions alone were ridiculous."

After extensive rehearsal, a drone was finally used to film the scene on-site, though it didn't have nearly the same drive as Gaga and her dancers. "The damn thing lasts three-and-a-half minutes" before dying, Gaga laughs. "I was like, 'Oh, are you tired? Was that choreography too hard for you?' And I had another epiphany: I said, 'I can't even rely on this drone to capture this shot for me. But these dancers behind me? Their bodies are killing them, they all feel like fainting. That is more powerful than anything. The human spirit is remarkable.' I told the dancers before we left for the desert, 'This might be the hardest thing you've ever done, and if it's not, I did it wrong. But you can do it, and when you look back on this time, you'll remember how strong you are.'"

WHILE RECORDING Chromatica, Gaga says she often "couldn't get off the couch" because her head-to-toe body pain was so extreme. But BloodPop®, the hit producer whom Gaga describes as the "center" of her new album, would consistently empower her to push forward and create. "He'd be like, 'Come on, let's go. We're going to make music.' And I'd be maybe crying or venting about something that was happening in my life over some pain or depression I was feeling." Together, they co-wrote songs that temporarily brought Gaga joy. "I'd start out the day so down and I'd end up dancing, looking in the mirror, practicing my moves, singing along," she says. "Every day was an enlightening experience, but it had to happen every day."

Gaga was 19 years old when she was raped repeatedly by an unnamed man she knew in the entertainment industry - an incident she openly discussed during Oprah's 2020 Vision tour. The musician developed PTSD as a result, exacerbated by her decision not to seek treatment early on. "I did not have a therapist," Gaga told Oprah in January. "I did not have a psychiatrist. I did not have a doctor help me through it. I just all of a sudden became a star and was traveling the world, going from hotel room to garage to limo to stage. And I never dealt with it." Instead, Gaga said she "used to cut" herself as a means to cope with everything that triggered her pain. "I have scars," she told Oprah.

After years of having avoided processing her rape, Gaga's body finally said "enough" in 2013. Little Monsters will recall a video capturing the exact moment Gaga's hip broke while she was performing "Scheiße" in Montreal during her Born This Way tour. She let out a bloodcurdling shrill, slowly lowered herself to the ground and somehow still mustered the strength to complete the song's difficult choreography. All remaining tour dates were then cancelled, while Gaga privately recovered.

In 2017, Gaga was diagnosed with a condition called fibromyalgia, which leaves her with chronic full-body pain as a trauma response, recreating the illness she says she felt after being raped. "The debate around fibromyalgia, we could have it for hours," Gaga says, matter-of-factly. "Some people believe in it, some people don't. Essentially it's neuropathic pain: My brain gets stressed, my body hurts." For the past few years, Gaga has been rightfully angry at having limited solutions for living comfortably with the pain. "[I'm] angry at my body, angry at my condition, angry that when I'm stressed my body hurts," she says.

"I know what it's like to be in pain. And I know what it's like to also not let it ruin your life."

She describes something called "radical acceptance" as a means for getting her through this dark period, "where you have to 'radically accept' that you're not going to feel well every day, maybe a little bit. Some days are way worse, some days aren't. But you know what I can do? I can go, 'Well, my hands work; my arms work; my legs work, even though they are sore; my back works; my brain works; my heart works; I'm taking breaths, my lungs work.' You can just be grateful for what you can do."

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Still, Gaga acknowledges the idiocy of unwavering happiness (and the fact that pop, and the mainstream music market at large, is often designed to sell that lie). "Give me a break, [happiness is] not that simple," Gaga says. "I have clinical depression. There's something going on in my brain where the dopamine and serotonin are not firing the same way, and I can't get there. If someone says, 'Come on, just be happy,' I'm like, 'You fucking be happy.'"

OF COURSE, you could say Gaga's music has been "making the world dance and smile" since day one. Often, the exuberance she makes people feel is rooted in her embrace of inclusivity and equality - steady themes throughout Gaga's career, from her early opposition to the US military's discriminatory "don't ask, don't tell" law (repealed in 2010) to her LGBTQ epic, Born This Way, released in 2011. "No matter gay, straight or bi, lesbian, transgender life," she sings on the title track, which ultimately inspired the creation of her Born This Way Foundation "for a kinder, braver world." But another recurring motif has always been a fixation on the future. In the Nick Knight-directed music video for Born This Way's title track, Gaga births a new, "infinite" race that "bears no prejudice, no judgment, but boundless freedom." As the character "Mother Monster," she's soaked in extraterrestrial pregnancy slime, living on G.O.A.T. (a "Government-Owned Alien Territory" in space), and describing the "mitosis of the future" in relation to her fantasy anti-hate militia.

Today, Gaga says she lives in Chromatica, which, unlike G.O.A.T., isn't a fictional location at all. "It's a perspective," Gaga corrects, pointing to her heart. "It's right here. I might sound silly, but I'm on it right now - I'm not on another planet. If you see and listen to Chromatica, and you want to live there, too, you're invited. But I do want to be clear that it's not a fantasy." Gaga earnestly explains that it's as if she "deleted Earth" and "replaced it with Chromatica" in her mind, making this abstract, arguably absurd process seem realistic. Admittedly, I want to be in Chromatica with Gaga, too. Maybe I am?

She came up with the name alongside BloodPop®, who previously worked with Gaga on Joanne, as well as with artists like Justin Bieber, Grimes and Madonna, among others. Together, they felt Chromatica represented, in its simplest form, "a spectrum of people" that "all shared the same perspective" and always believed in "kindness over war." But Gaga wanted its ethos to dig even deeper. "It became not just about saying all people are included (all colors, all races, all ethnicities, all gender identities, all sexual identities, all religious identities)," she says. "It's saying there are more colors and more kinds than we could possibly fathom. We're all so different and that's the perspective."

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Referencing close friends who have struggled with finding healthy ways to work through their own pain, Gaga explains what made her realize just how difficult it is to honestly process your past. "I can't tell you who, but I've met people who have said to me, while sucking down bottles and bottles of wine and doing drugs, 'I will never do what you did. I will never take care of my heart and my emotions the way that you have.' And it really made me think about what a step it was for me in my life to decide to get healthy mentally."

Gaga continues, "I want my legacy to be the most beautiful diary that I ever could've made. And diaries are meant to be true. I think when we start lying to ourselves in our diaries, we start to create secrets within ourselves that don't help us. I like to look myself squarely in the eye now."

WHEN GAGA LOOKS BACK on the evolution of her music career, she sees a clear development of influences. She starts by referencing her rape as a life-altering experience that set the tone for how she created art as a young adult. Not long after, she "went on tours and became very traumatized by the pace of fame and everything I had to do - what was required of me physically and mentally changed the way I wrote. Relationships, family, friends, isolation, traveling all the time, no sleep." Through it all - the inevitable extreme highs and lows of a superstar who's been built up and torn down by the public - Gaga says she doesn't regret anything she's ever made.

I was like, 'I'm going to die soon, so I better say something important.' Now I listen to it and know that I'm going to live."

The topic of comes up, specifically Gaga's contentious 2019 tweet, "I don't remember ARTPOP," which sent fans into an absolute frenzy in defense of her underrated, critically slammed 2013 effort. As it turns out, Gaga does, in fact, recall her sometimes controversial third album. "I think it's funny that I'm not allowed to have a sense of humor," she says. "The internet is essentially a big joke, but if I tell one everyone freaks out. I don't regret my art, and I wouldn't suggest anyone do." Though ARTPOP couldn't possibly compare to the colossal success of Gaga's first two albums, it's certainly her most experimental to date. (Justice for "Sexxx Dreams," the hit single that never was.) "I look back at ARTPOP and look at music today, and I see a lot of things that were very..." Gaga pauses to find the right word. "Futuristic. Or they were ahead of their time, and I'm okay with saying that."

There was a period where Gaga says she was more "introspective" and therefore wanted to make music for herself, starting with ARTPOP and then with Joanne. Both albums were polarizing, vastly different projects for longtime fans to initially digest, but they froze an honest moment in time for an artist being pulled in two directions: by the immense pressures of fame, as well as her own need for self-fulfillment. " Joanne was exactly what I wanted to do," Gaga affirms. "The way I wanted to do it, the way I wanted it to sound, and so was ARTPOP - everything about it. Every album has been exactly what I wanted to make at that time. It's just there was a period where I think I forgot about where I was, and maybe that's why it's been so important for me with Chromatica to reestablish where I am for myself. So that here can mean something very powerful."

Clothing: Charlotte Knowles, Shoes: Area

One such message led Gaga to collaborate with a fellow female pop star, who has similarly experienced immense trauma while in the public eye. Their song together is a monster of a dance tune, but its message is about submitting yourself to devastation ("It's coming down on me, water like misery") - a flawless dance floor crier as a "celebration of all the tears," Gaga describes. "I sat with her and we talked about our lives. It's two women having a conversation about how to keep going and how to be grateful for what you do." Without being prompted, Gaga raises the inevitable criticism that celebrities face when they say "it's hard to be famous." She knows that "75% of the world rolls their eyes," but Gaga counters: "Yeah, you can be in a mansion, but you can still be six feet under in one."

Elsewhere in Chromatica, Gaga explores topics like her antipsychotic medication ("My biggest enemy is me, pop a 911") and the undeniable force of femininity ("I'm not nothing without a steady hand"), the latter of which acknowledges both her own strength as well as that of the community who has "cheer[ed] her on" and helped her "become a woman." Specifically, she calls out trans women and gay men for helping her cope with PTSD and move past any spirals associated with reliving her pain. "In 2020, what does it mean to be a free woman?" Gaga questions, prompting a song that answers this question and sees her challenging the need to be with a man - or anyone at all - in order to survive. "Can I feel free on my own? Do I need to be loved in order to feel like I've conquered it all?" Speaking to the track's origin, Gaga says, "It came from thinking on some days I was going to die. I was like, 'I'm going to die soon, so I better say something important.' Now I listen to it and know that I'm going to live."

IF CHROMATICAis a mindset where "kindness rules all," created as a gift "for the world," Gaga says it was crucial for the collaborative process to also mirror these values. Gaga flags the difficulty of consolidating more than two years of music-making with tons of different producers into one interview, and instead proposes that she create an Excel spreadsheet for me detailing exactly who worked on what. Above all, Gaga wants to talk at length about BloodPop®, her other "nucleus" on Chromatica. "We combined," she says of working with him on this project. "I'm overwhelmed by the amount of love he had to offer me. I could not have made this album without him. He was the world's most incredible alarm when the ambulance was coming."

From start to finish, Chromatica is firmly rooted in classic house, with crisp, clubby dance breaks that all sound like they're competing with each other to be the biggest on the tracklist. Sonically, it's perhaps Gaga's most focused, consistent album to date, with all these producer contributions laddering up to the same fearless electronic tapestry, weaving in unruly breakbeat outros, emotional power-pop melodies that send a dopamine rush through the brain and tons of slick, shiny synths. You can weep to these songs just as much as you can sweat to them, and Gaga seems to be encouraging both at once.

Tensions can easily rise in-studio, but Gaga proudly attests that she experienced the opposite while recording Chromatica. "I think the only day me and BloodPop® ever had a fight was when I was trying to learn a jazz tune because I was going to see Tony [Bennett] really soon. He was like, 'We have to finish this!' and I was singing a Cole Porter record in the corner," she laughs. "And that wasn't even really a fight." Rather, BloodPop® was more focused on bringing people together through this process. "It was like some really talented, wonderful men all joined arms with BloodPop® in front of all of them and he was like, 'Do you remember how much you've changed the world? Do you know how much you have to offer people?' He reminded me that every day, no matter how hard it was."

Order Lady Gaga's Transformation Issue Here and the Special Edition Here

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As expected, Gaga's final "art piece" is wildly ambitious, with an iPhone-shot music video that saw 50 dancers film for two days straight in the hot, dry California desert. In it, her "Kindness Punks" - dressed in that same bubblegum-pink shade Gaga wears in her studio - rush to break up a fight bet...

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Lady Gaga has been one of the biggest cultural icons on the planet for the best part of ten years now and there are few stars who are as outspoken and articulate as she is.

Before she was starring in Academy Award-winning movies, Gaga was a loud and provocative pop star who didn't shy away from singing about sex in her songs.

This was hardly anything new in music but, for some reason, it stirred some people the wrong way, including one male journalist who felt that he had to ask her about the lyrics.

In a clip dating back to 2009, Gaga is asked if she was scared "her provocative lyrics would overshadow her talent". Her response to the question has since become something of a legendary moment for the musician.

I'm not scared... Are you scared?

You see, if I was a guy and I was sitting here with a cigarette in my hands grabbing my crotch talking about how I make music because I like fast cars and f**king girls, you'd call me a rock star.

But when I do it in my music and video because I'm a female and I make pop music, you're judgemental and say it's distracting. I'm just a rock star...

The moment has been shared online by the Twitter account Lady Gaga Facts and has gone viral all over again.

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Resurfaced interview of Lady Gaga shutting down a sexist interviewer has gone viral

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Before Lady Gaga was starring in Academy Award-winning movies, she was a loud and provocative pop star who didn't shy away from singing about sex in her songs. In a clip dating back to 2009, Gaga is asked if she was scared 'her provocative lyrics would overshadow her talent.'

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What is meant by mainstreaming sexuality?

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What is meant by mainstreaming sexuality?

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Lady Gaga delivers a powerful speech at Joe Biden's Final Rally

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14th November 2020

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Growing up, I was always told I was a rebel. People would say things like, "You're defiant," and "Why are you dressed that way?" But I continued to do what I wanted and wear what I wanted-because, clearly I haven't changed. For a long time, though, there was a shame that I carried with me. I'm an Italian Catholic-I grew up with a lot of guilt. But what I've started to realize is that my rebelliousness, if you want to call it that, is something that was passed along to me by a long line of tough people-and tough women-in my family.

My mother and my grandmothers are without a doubt the most powerful female forces in my life. My mother grew up in West Virginia, in an Italian family. Her father was an extremely hardworking man; he worked in insurance. My grandmother's parents died when she was young, so she had to raise her sister. She really held down the fort. My father's father's family came over from Italy through Ellis Island. They lived in New Jersey. My grandfather was a shoemaker, and my father's mother worked with him when she wasn't home with their kids. They had two children. They lost one of them-my father's sister, Joanne, who I'm named after.

Joanne died when she was 19. I called my album Joanne because Joanne's presence was always important to me. The best way to describe my relationship with her is that it's like the relationship someone might have with an angel or a spirit guide or whatever you think of as a higher power. Joanne died of lupus, which is an autoimmune disease, and from what I know of the history of my family, one of the reasons her disease may have worsened was that she was assaulted when she was in college. She was sexually assaulted and groped. Joanne passed away in 1974, 12 years before I was born, so I learned about her mostly through stories and pictures. But I also learned about her through the rage of my father and watching him pour a drink every night and through seeing my grandparents cry at the Christmas dinner table when it was clear that there was an empty seat they wanted to fill.

"Health, happiness, love-these are the things that are at the heart of a great lady, I think. That's the kind of lady I want to be." -Lady Gaga

To me, Joanne was my hope and my faith. I always felt that I had somebody looking out for me, and I looked to her to protect me. As I've gotten older, I've also really looked to her to help understand myself. I thought about Joanne as I was watching the news during the election about the scandal surrounding the Access Hollywood tape. Here we were, in 2016, and the fact that the sort of language that was being used to talk about women was everywhere-on TV, in politics-was eye-opening. I felt depressed and hurt by it because that's what that kind of language does. Then I watched our incredible first lady, Michelle Obama, talk in New Hampshire about how hurt she felt seeing it too. She talked about how women are often afraid to say anything because we're worried that we will appear weak-that we'll be told we're being over-the-top, dramatic, emotional. But we're not. We're fighting for our lives.

Being a lady today means being a fighter. It means being a survivor. It means letting yourself be vulnerable and acknowledging your shame or that you're sad or you're angry. It takes great strength to do that. Before I made Joanne, I took some time off. I made music with Tony Bennett. I did "Til It Happens to You" with Diane Warren. But I was able to get off the train of endless work I'd been on, which was quite abusive to my body and my mind, and have some silence and some space around me. I wanted to experience music again the way I did when I was younger, when I just had to make it, instead of worrying what everybody thinks or being obsessed with things that aren't important.

Fame is the best drug that's ever existed. But once you realize who you are and what you care about, that need for more, more, more just goes away. What matters is that I have a great family, I work hard, I take care of those around me, I provide jobs for people I love very much, and I make music that I hope sends a good message into the world. I turned 30 this year, and I'm a fully formed woman. I have a clear perspective on what I want. That, for me, is success. I want to be somebody who is fighting for what's true-not for more attention, more fame, more accolades.

I look at my mother and the way she has loved my father through his pain, and I look at my grandmothers and what they've been through-the three of them are like a trifecta of strength. Health, happiness, love-these are the things that are at the heart of a great lady, I think. That's the kind of lady I want to be. You know, I never thought I'd say this, but isn't it time to take off the corsets? As someone who loves them, I think it's time to take them off.
Plus, watch Lady Gaga give details about her new album Joanne here:
This content is imported from YouTube. You may be able to find the same content in another format, or you may be able to find more information, at their web site.
This article originally appeared in the December/January issue of Harper's BAZAAR, available on newsstands November 22. Hair: Frederic Aspiras for Amika; Makeup: Sarah Tanno for Marc Jacobs Beauty; Manicure: Naomi Yasuda for Dior Vernis; Production: Roger Dong for GE Projects; Prop styling: Jill Nicholls. Lead image: Carolina Herrera gown, $7,290, 212-249-6552; Gladys Tamez Millinery hat, $560, gladystamez.com.

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Growing up, I was always told I was a rebel. People would say things like, "You're defiant," and "Why are you dressed that way?" But I continued to do what I wanted and wear what I wanted-because, clearly I haven't changed. For a long time, though, there was a shame that I carried with me.

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Lady Gaga: “I found a way to love myself again”

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Lady Gaga wants to make it clear that despite her massive accomplishments in music, the industry of today is disappointingly more sexist than you might imagine. In fact, she'll even tell you it's still very much "a boys club."

As she was honored at this year's Billboard Women in Music event for her success as a recording artist, the 29-year-old took it as an opportunity to address the unnecessary difficulty of being a female singer-songwriter in 2015.

"What I really want to say is that it is really hard sometimes for women in music," Gaga said, before prompting thunderous applause with this truth bomb: "It's like a f---ing boys club that we just can't get in to."

With six Grammy wins and over 25 million album sales under her belt-all achieved in a short seven years since her 2008 debut-you'd think the pop star would have seen accelerated change for women in music throughout her career. Sadly, that hasn't been the case.

"I tried for so long, I just really wanted to be taken seriously as a musician for my intelligence more than my body ever in this business," the "Til It Happens to You" songstress explained. "You don't always feel like when you're working that people believe that you have musical background, that you understand what you're doing because you're a female."

Regardless of the adversity she's faced, Gaga remains hopeful that the female voice will soon be celebrated more in song-since it's a point of view domineering male music execs will just never understand. And also because, you know, equality.

"Tonight is so important because women provide a wisdom to music that is very unique and special," she continued. "It is a perspective that no other person can have because we bear life. And we go through things that no one goes through and more importantly, because it's right because we're all equal."

Amen, Mother Monster.

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Lady Gaga Explains Why "It Is Really Hard" for Women in the Music Industry

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Lady Gaga wants to make it clear that despite her massive accomplishments in music, the industry of today is disappointingly more sexist than you might imagine. In fact, she'll even tell you it's still very much "a boys club."

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Lady Gaga - The Chromatica Interview with Zane Lowe

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Lady Gaga's new album Chromatica is a personal look into her journey of healing in recent years.And one of the most empowering and intimate explorations of this process is in the lyrics of her song "Free Woman."

Gaga told Zane Lowe that the song is about how she moved forward after being sexually assaulted by a music producer when she was younger. She explained she felt "woman" needed to be in the title for that reason. "I tend to aspire for things to be genderless, just because I think that it's significant," Gaga said. "But with that song in particular, I felt a need to reference my gender. Because even though I really have a tremendous disdain for people that attribute a gender, or sexual identity to your personality...it was so important for this to be 'Free Woman,' because I was assaulted by a music producer."

This content is imported from YouTube. You may be able to find the same content in another format, or you may be able to find more information, at their web site.

She continued, "I was sexually assaulted by a music producer. It's compounded all of my feelings about life, feelings about the world, feelings about the industry, what I had to compromise and go through to get to where I am. And I had to put it there. And when I was able to finally celebrate it, I said, 'You know what? I'm not nothing without a steady hand. I'm not nothing unless I know I can. I'm still something if I don't got a man, I'm a free woman.' It's me going, 'I'm free,' but it's not just because, 'I'm a free woman. Look at me. I found gratitude and everything is zen.' It's, 'I no longer am going to define myself as a survivor, or a victim of sexual assault. I just am a person that is free, who went through some fucked up shit,'" she said. "I say, 'This is the dance floor I fought for. That's what I'm living for. Light up my body and kiss me too hardly. I walk the downtown, hear my sound.' This is my way of saying, 'I'm making a dance record again, and this dance floor, it's mine, and I earned it. And all that stuff that I went through, I don't have to feel pain about it anymore. It can just be a part of me and I can keep going.'"

Gaga said this realization had a huge impact on her. "I can't tell you how healing this was [to] me. I could cry about it, except I'm actually feeling so much more healed now that that laugh-away-from-the-tear feeling is not even as much there. When I first started talking about this album, I would cry in between every interview. And now I go, 'Well, it turns out if you believe in yourself, sometimes you're good enough.' And it turns out that's possible. And I would love for people that listen to this record to feel and hear that."

Here, the lyrics to the song via Genius.

Intro:
(I'll remember that, I'll remember that)
(I'll remember that, that I)
(I'll remember that, I'll remember that)
(I'll remember that, that I)
I walk the downtown, hear my sound
No one knows me yet, not right now
But I am bound to set this feeling in motion
I walk the downtown, hear my sound
I say that I want it, want it (Be free)
Don't fight it, fight it
But if I'm gonna go for it
I'll remember that, that
I say that I want it, want it (Be free)
Don't fight it, fight it
But if I'm gonna go for it
I'll remember that, that I
I'm not nothing without a steady hand
I'm not nothing unless I know I can
I'm still something if I don't got a man
I'm a free woman, oh-oh (Be free)

Post-Chorus:
Oh yeah
(Be free)
This is my dancefloor I fought for
A heart, that's what I'm livin' for
So light up my body and kiss me too hardly
We own the downtown, hear our sound
I say that I want it, want it (Be free)
Don't fight it, fight it
But if I'm gonna go for it
I'll remember that, that
I say that I want it, want it (Be free)
Don't fight it, fight it
But if I'm gonna go for it
I'll remember that, that I
I'm not nothing without a steady hand (I'm a free woman)
I'm not nothing unless I know I can (I'm a free woman)
I'm still something if I don't got a man
I'm a free woman, oh-oh (Be free; c'mon, woo)

Post-Chorus:
I'm a free woman
I'm a free woman (Be free)
I'm a free woman
I'm a free woman, oh-oh (Be free)
Oh yeah (I'm a free woman)
I'm not nothing without a steady hand (I'm a free woman)
I'm not nothing unless I know I can (I'm a free woman)
I'm still something if I don't got a man
I'm a free woman (Oh), oh-oh (Be free)

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Lady Gaga's 'Free Woman' Lyrics Reflect on Healing After Her Sexual Assault

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Lady Gaga's new album Chromatica is a personal look into her journey of healing in recent years.And one of the most empowering and intimate explorations of this process is in the lyrics of her song "Free Woman." Gaga told Zane Lowe that the song is about how she moved forward after being sexually assaulted by a music producer when she was younger.

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43 Pages Posted: 2 Jul 2018

Date Written: May 7, 2018

Abstract

Do policies and institutions that promote women's economic empowerment have a long-term impact on intimate partner violence? We address this question by exploiting a natural experiment of history in Cameroon. From the end of WWI until 1961, the western territories of today's Cameroon were arbitrarily divided between France and the United Kingdom, whose colonial regimes opened up divergent economic opportunities for women in an otherwise culturally and geographically homogeneous setting. Women in British territories benefited from a universal education system and gained opportunities for paid employment. The French colonial practice in these domains centered around educating a small administrative elite and investing in the male employment-dominated infrastructure sector. Using a geographical regression discontinuity design, we show that women in former British territories are 30% more likely to be victims of domestic violence than those in former French territories. Among a broad set of possible channels of persistence, only one turns out statistically significant and quantitatively important: women in former British territories are 30% more likely to be in paid employment than their counterparts in former French areas. These results are incompatible with household bargaining models that incorporate domestic violence but they are accommodated by theories of male backlash.

Keywords: colonization, female economic empowerment, intimate partner violence

JEL Classification: J120, J160, N370, Z130

Guarnieri, Eleonora and Rainer, Helmut, Female Empowerment and Male Backlash (May 7, 2018). CESifo Working Paper Series No. 7009, April 2018, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3198483

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43 Pages Posted: 2 Jul 2018 Date Written: May 7, 2018 Do policies and institutions that promote women's economic empowerment have a long-term impact on intimate partner violence? We address this question by exploiting a natural experiment of history in Cameroon.

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Lady Gaga - Hey Girl (feat. Florence Welch)