I will not be kissing anyone today since I have the Mouth of Crawling Lurgy Viral Grossness, but I leave this for any of you who kiss girls, even though no one in the video is kissing any girls either. Maybe your day will be better than that (grin), whomever you like to kiss.
Nice. I hadn’t watched the video, only heard the song everywhere. She’s pretty. And the attitude is just right. I had imagined her different. I’m glad this surprised me.
I used cherry chap-stick until I discovered the tacky strawberry-melon-candy-flavor lip gloss called Starburst Lip Smacker by Mars. I don’t leave the house without it.
I remember the first time I kissed a girl. I also felt like singing about it.
For some reason, it’s hard to imagine the Mouth of Crawling Lurgy Viral Grossness ever coming remotely close to you and Nicola. You’re funny.
I hope you feel much much much better by tomorrow or sooner. Only because I’m a good monkey, I can offer to take over some responsibilities and kiss a girl—most likely my wife—tonight. Someone has to do the kissing while you two are out of circulation.
Huh. I hadn’t heard the song or seen the video before, though I’d heard of it. I do know Jill Sobule’s “I Kissed a Girl,” which I think is a better song though the video is equally off-putting in a different way. The music doesn’t work for me either, it sounds like it was made by a machine, and it probably was; so does Perry’s vocal.
What I don’t get here is the Victoria’s Secret / soft-porn ambience. That’s just a blind spot of mine, I guess — Nicola wrote on her blog the other day that she’s never had a crush; I’ve never been an underwear fetishist, even on men. Or a clothing fetishist of any kind. I get the impression that for many straight men, the clothes and the high heels and the makeup and the big hair are Woman, which is why so many of them go for tranny hookers: Despite what so many straight men say about how much they love women, what seems to count for them is the outer shell, not the body / person beneath. Gay men’s fascination with drag, whether female or male impersonation, seems to me the same syndrome — costume is all. I don’t get it. Decoration is nice, but it never displaces the importance of people for me.
Perry’s video has just a bit of a ‘girls gone wild’ subtext, except that there is no kissing, as you mentioned, and of course the women keep their bodies covered. “I hope my boyfriend won’t mind,” indeed! He’ll want jpegs, that’s all. There might also be a camp or ironic element, though, sort of a mocking “I know what boys like” vibe.
Me, I’d rather be kissing someone, and I hope you get over the viral grossness soon! I know that feeling of being too grossly ill to touch. Failing someone to kiss, I’d rather see other people kissing. Christopher Hennessy has this clip at his writing blog, Outside the Lines, and it happens that I saw it just before I read this post of yours. The movie looks promising; I love to watch boys kissing. Or girls kissing. Or even boys and girls kissing — I’m so tolerant.
I’d say the music is indeed machine music. But I like it. It’s just club/sit-in-fast-food place music. We hear it when we go get pizza or beer or burgers. I hear it around the university a lot, too. It makes me smile to see so many straight girls moving and lip-synching to it.
Clothes… I started falling for my wife when she put on her pair of fluffy slippers after we escaped from a fancy dinner. She invited me to go for coffee at 5:00 a.m. and before we got off her car she said, “Do you mind if I change?” She looked so cute, with her fancy pants and coat and her fluffy things. I prefer t-shirts and jeans and second-hand anything. But I did go through a fetish phase, from satin to latex. Clothes can be fun. I’m just too lazy and cheap to really play with them these days. I’d rather buy food and books and other toys. But that’s such an interesting point, Duncan. That men are more obsessed with clothing than women. It’ll keep me thinking all night today. I’m going to a mostly-boys gay club with two of my pretty boys. I’ll be checking people out.
I love watching people kiss. I also love kissing, of course. I’m also very tolerant, as long as someone is doing it, I don’t care what the combo is. Also, kissing is one of the things I most miss about being a teenager, how we all spent soooooo much more time just kissing. I’ll look at the other video when I come back in the early morning. Cheers!
Ah, Karina, I wish I’d spent time in high school kissing. As a well-embedded closet case, I didn’t kiss or doing anything else sexual with anyone until I was nearly 21. After coming out I made up for lost time, and kissing was one of the most important parts. And I do love watching other people kiss, as long as they do it well. If I ever learn how to do it, I should make a video clip of favorite male-male kisses from movies. I’m sure you’ve seen the moment in Almodovar’s La ley del deseo, where Pablo (Eusebio Poncera) teaches Antonio (Antonio Banderas) how to kiss, “not like you’re cleaning out a drainpipe.”
I don’t think I meant to say that men are more obsessed with clothing than women. It looks to me as if women enjoy dressing up for its own sake, not only for the effect that it will have on sex partners, and men also love dressing up, even if in America the boy culture tries to scare them out of doing it. Those drooping hip hop pants that are meant to artfully show off the boy’s butt as often as not, the caps arranged at minutely casual angles, are among the ways they try to play with appearance without being called faggots.
What I meant was that men tend to mistake the clothing/costume/decoration for the body, so that a certain combination of clothes, hair, and makeup becomes “woman” for them. Or “man” — the quasi-working class costume that gay men love, or even more, the full-leather carapace of a leatherman. And the whole bodybuilder thing, it seems to me, is an attempt to clothe/costume the body in muscle. (It’s a kind of transgender in my opinion: the boy feels that his inside doesn’t match his outside, so he tries to change his outside with hormones [steroids] and other kinds of modification.)
I love clothes too, and if I had more money I’d spend more on them than I do. But as Erasmus said, “If I have a little money I buy books; if there’s any left I buy food and clothing.” I am as interested in texture as in appearance, though the two go together. I bought a silk shirt a couple of years ago but haven’t found the right occasion or place to wear it.
And speaking of music, when you were linking my blog, did you ever look at the Big Mama videos I posted in September? No kissing, alas — Koreans aren’t into kissing iconography as much as Westerners, not yet anyway — and they’re very straight, but the music is lush, and the first one, for “Break Away” has a surprise ending that makes a nice comment about appearances.
Here I go, missing another interesting conversation. I blame the Lurgy, which is still with me although (I hope I hope I hope) just about ready to move along and find some other poor schleb to turn into a non-kisser.
I have to say I don’t particularly like this song or the video, but it just seemed so appropriate to post that I couldn’t resist. At the Hot Flash dances I go to, the women scream with delight and wave their hands when this song comes on. So it’s got something going on, I guess, or maybe it’s just that none of us are yet jaded on hearing about girls kissing in pop music (grin).
Girls or boys in their underwear don’t really do it for me as erotic images either. I’m not so much about object as action… I like to see the tension between people, and I like TV/movie sex that balances between real and supercharged-fantasy stuff. Because real sex often just isn’t that interesting or erotic to watch, IMO. But so much movie sex is just silly and unconvincing.
Some of the best sex I’ve seen on screen is in Queer As Folk between Brian and Justin (Gale Harold and Randy Harrison). I always believed those two were absolutely hot for each other in those moments. I wish I could say the same for the women in that show…huge sigh of disappointment, with enough left over for pretty much everyone in The L Word, who all look like they intend to apologize to each other as soon as someone says “Cut,” except for Katherine Moennig who plays Shane.
Having said all that, I do love it when people dress up with the intention of strutting their stuff, whatever their stuff may be. But it’s not the clothing itself, it’s that sparkle in the eye that gets me every time.
Duncan, I saw the Were the World Mine trailer, now I have to watch the movie. Thanks for the tip. It’s what my friends and I we were talking about last night during one of their smoking breaks. That we should all just be undeniably bisexual (I think we are, to some degree or another, but we deny it) and poly and whatever and then the entire world would be okay. There wouldn’t even have to be a debate over gay marriage. There would be so much more kissing going around.
I also watched the Big Mama videos. I *love* them. The twist in “Break Away” is so satisfying! And I linked to your blog again, Duncan. I hadn’t meant to un-link, I just lost too many bookmarks after my blog got hacked about a month ago. I’ve been slow at rebuilding some of its corners, like the link section. Now we are back on track. I hate feeling I’ve lost a chance to be exposed to recommendations by someone with wonderful tastes, such as you.
Back to the “I Kissed a Girl” song… We went to three places last night and they played it in all three at least once. And I grinned and danced thinking about this post. I also talked to my wife about it. She *hates* the song passionately. She says it’s so heterocentric and shallow. I think she’s just being cranky, since she has no problem whatsoever with t.A.T.u. She even made me go to one of their concerts and the girls said, “We’ve been singing this song for 5 years now, so we’re tired. We’ll let you sing it.” Ugh… They don’t just lack real-singer talent, but are also lazy! It was a terrible concert. I wanted to smack them around. Anyway, this isn’t about t.A.T.u.
“I Kissed a Girl” may be heterocentric on the surface. But it has so many levels. I got so brave, drink in hand, lost my discretion plus It’s not what, good girls do, not how they should behave say straight women are only straight because they’ve been taught to be discrete about those other feelings they also have. Hard to resist so touchable, too good to deny it followed by Katy Perry’s expression of OMG-I-just-had-an-orgasm as she sings Ain’t no big deal, it’s innocent is priceless. Maybe I’m reading too much into this. But I view pop culture with fascination and a certain respect. Pop culture=Trojan horse. I believe Madonna is one of the great iconoclasts and feminists. Even when I don’t like some of the stuff/attitudes she puts on sometimes, I thank the Universe I lived during her times. Some theorists have gone as far as to say that if Virginia Woolf and some other great women were alive today, they would be Madonna. That’s how gender-bending, mind-opening, women-affirming, sexually-liberating and timeless her contribution to culture has been.
And just because I’m lately obsessed with my crush addiction, I’ll say that my favorite lines in this song are It’s not what, I’m used to, just wanna try you on. I’m curious for you, caught my attention. That’s something I feel so often: the craving to “try someone on” even though we may not be right together, but just the masturbatory idea of “us” becomes—for a moment—the perfect fit for my curiosity and it sure occupies my attention. It’s only my “discretion” that keeps me from pursuing those impulses. So I’m like the straight girls represented by this song in more than one way.
I never cared a lot for this song, and when I saw the video here, I had some of the same thoughts as Duncan. But it did get me to remember the first time I kissed a girl, and then I remembered feeling it was a little wrong — but oh-so-right at the same time. Too bad for me she thought it was wrong (even tho it was her idea), and I didn’t try it again for a few years.
I don’t think most people listen to all of the words anyway. It’s got to be a good thing that there is a pop song out there with a girl telling everyone how much she liked kissing a girl.
I agree with Jennifer, that most listeners don’t pay much attention to lyrics, and that what probably registers most is that here’s a song about a girl kissing a girl. I’m glad that such a song is out there, but this particular one just doesn’t work for me musically, but that doesn’t mean other people shouldn’t like it.
I’ve got to get my guitar fixed so I can start playing Jill Sobule’s “I Kissed a Girl” again; it also works nicely as a song about a gay man kissing a girl, and I used to play it a lot. I’ve kissed a few girls in my time, and I liked it, though I never felt any wish to go any further than kissing them. But Karina, I disagree that we’re all “undeniably bisexual” or that we should be. Woody Allen used to say that being bisexual would double your chances of getting a date; I’ve always thought it would double my chances of rejection. 9-) Maybe more to the point, Margaret Mead used to say that being exclusively heterosexual is as sick as being exclusively homosexual — which is true, zero equals zero, but notice how the idea that being exclusively homosexual is sick is still in there. If we’re really going to respect human diversity, we’re going to have to recognize that people really are different from each other, and that they don’t need to be all the same. I think it’s highly unlikely that people could ever be attracted to everyone, and though I think it’s a nice dream I’d settle for a world in which people respected their own and other people’s different attractions. That is hard enough to achieve.
But enough carping from me. I love pop culture too, my primary music is 60s pop, from British invasion to Motown and Stax-Volt to one-shot garage bands (have you ever run across the Nuggets collections) and early metal, and on to disco and punk and on and on. You should see my record collection, which is as catholic as my library — I still have the 1700+ lps I bought between 1965 and 1990 or so. I respect Madonna more than I enjoy her most of the time, but while I’m touting my own blog you might find this old post on her “American Pie” video interesting, if you haven’t already read it. Raymond Williams, the great Welsh Marxist historian and critic, has some interesting things to say about pop culture, and I hope to read more of his writings about it.
I hope that when Kelley’s feeling better she might look at the Big Mama videos I mentioned earlier — they’re such gorgeous music.
The first time I heard this song was on a Starbucks produced “Hear” cd. It was the theme music for a movie at Sundance. It is the type of song that resonates so I can’t help my mind bursting into it whenever I see someone kissing. Then just a few weeks ago on DWTS, I was totally blown away as I watched the same girl from your video perform the song live. What were they thinking or what is going on people? Have we really reached that world where “If all men were brothers, would you let one marry your sister”? I think so. I hope so. And I love when the pollsters say that across America larger and larger percentages of people are more interested in the economy than who is kissing whom.
I don’t have a strong opinion about this song one way or the other. However, I LOVE that it’s out there – that any song is out there that acknowledges that two girls MAY kiss. If I had heard such a song when I was a teenager I would have known that there were other girls that wanted to kiss each other!! It makes me very happy that they’re out there now . . . very, very happy.
Duncan, I’m back and working through the Pile of Life that has accumulated in my absence. The Big Mama videos are on the list! I’ll let you know.
I definitely listen to lyrics, it’s an essential part of the overall music experience for me. Nicola doesn’t, and thinks it’s weird of me (grin).
A big yes to a world where we could just all be differently human.
Rhbee, Robin — makes me happy too! I don’t have to personally goob on a song to feel like it’s good for it to be out there. And it’s pretty good to dance to.
Jennifer, the first girl I ever kissed was when I was about 3 or 4 (her name was Catherine, last name withheld out of respect for the fact that maybe she wouldn’t want to be outed for playing doctor with another girl about a million years ago…). The second girl was Nicola. That one seems to have been successful so far (grin).
Okay… I have to say I *heart* diversity. When me and my friends talked about the possibility of a world where everyone was bisexual, we were really just looking for shortcuts. Did someone once said that short cuts are the best way to get lost? If not, I’ll say it now. I agree, differently human is awesome.
Also: Wow. Nicola was the second girl you kissed? That’s definitely a success. Esmeralda was my tenth, which is good: they all get their own fingers.
Esmeralda kissed way too many girls before me. I must be immune to cooties. Or she is. The number made me feel… appalled? grossed out? amused? fascinated? curious? ______?
To Kiss and Tell
rolls real well
along the seam
that seals my mind.
But instant thoughts
like kisses soft
and lips so warm
rush fools into kisses that tell
far too well,
That instant thoughts can have lasting
effect
on those who’s minds let kisses dwell . .
Nice. And true.