I’m not up-to-the-minute on what pop stars are saying and doing, but even I know about Lady Gaga’s meat dress.
And I love a good visual, but when I heard her reasons behind wearing the meat dress (and the meat bathing suit she wore in Japan) I couldn’t help but think . . . she just wanted to wear meat.
Here’s the explanation she gave Ellen Degeneres: “If we don’t stand up for what we believe in and if we don’t fight for our rights pretty soon we’re going to have as much rights as the meat on our own bones. And, I am not a piece of meat.”
Get it? Meat on our bones? I’m not just a piece of meat?
Even Cher was looking at her like, what the what? And Cher has been known to accept an award wearing two feathers and a sequin.
The meat dress was just an indication of Lady Gaga’s success. (The meat hat, meat boots and meat purse were an indication of her ability to coordinate an ensemble.) You know you’ve made it when you can wear something that you got out of your refrigerator. Also, when you can get Cher to hold your meat purse for you while you get a trophy.
If my mother were alive, she would say, “She’d be a pretty girl, if she would just stop wearing meat.”
In a fine example of wishful thinking, PETA says that if it were a real meat dress, it would have been infested with maggots by the time she walked onto the VMA stage to accept her award.
I’m not planning on wearing a meat dress anytime soon, but reading PETA’s explanation about how fast meat can be infested with maggots (one minute, one fly) made me want to be a lot more careful with the meat that we eat. I always knew we’re not supposed to let meat thaw out on the counter, but I thought it was just because it was unsightly, not because we could be eating fly larvae with our steaks.
I don’t think PETA wanted to be helpful; I think they just wanted to gross us out so much that we’d rethink those burgers we were going to throw on the grill tonight.
And I don’t know what Gaga was thinking. She needs to come up with a better explanation – something symbolic – and it better be good, or no one’s going to want to go to her house for dinner, no matter how famous she is.