Katy Perry kissed a boy & he didn’t like it.
By: Yoselin Zavala Lopez
Tags: Katy Perry, Consent, Feminism, Intersectionality, Entertainment

Katy Perry kissed a boy & he didn’t like it.

Looks like some people don’t realize that they shouldn’t let the media or celebrities in general tell them what to do, especially if it goes against their own beliefs and value. These demands also come to show what type of “people” we look up to and how different identities produce different reactions from our society.

It hasn’t even been a week since the moment in which Katy Perry, the only female judge on this season of American Idol, planted a kiss on the lips of a contestant named Benjamin Glaze without his consent. “No way! Hold on!” is exactly how Benjamin responded when Katy kept commanding him to “Come here right now!”. Before he even had a chance to actually sing, he was being asked by the judges questions like “Have you kissed a girl and liked it?” and even though he responded that he had never kissed a girl because “I can’t kiss a girl without being in a relationship”, all three judges it would appear continued to pressured him to kiss Katy on the cheek. Right after Katy purposely moved her head to the side to kiss him on the lips, Benjamin looked shocked and fell to the ground while the judges acted like they had just won the lottery. It might actually have felt that way based on the assumption that they will do anything to provide their audiences with “great television”. On the contrary, many people, not just people who actually watch the show, saw this moment as an act of sexual assault.

In “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color”, Kimberle Crenshaw, an American civil rights advocate and leading scholar of critical race theory defines intersectionality as the different identities one has like race, class, gender, etc. that often shape one’s experiences. Therefore, there is no universal experience and each person, depending on their identity, has their own specific experience. Crenshaw further breaks down the concept of intersectionality into three categories: structural, political, and representational.

Crenshaw defines representational intersectionality as the way pop culture constructs the experiences of people of color which in turn often creates a stereotypical portrayal of people for audiences to grasp and believe and therefore conceals the real experiences of people of color. In terms of the controversy between Katy Perry and Benjamin Glaze, I will be focusing how pop culture and the media portrays different celebrities which ultimately prevents consequences from being enforced when moments like these happen.

While some people, like Benjamin, just felt uncomfortable for reasons like it was so unexpected or because it was a stranger in the sense that they don’t have that type of relationship, other people, including myself, felt uncomfortable for another more drastic reason. First of all, he didn’t consent to it and he was coerced and pressured into doing it. Second of all, if the genders were reversed and it was a male judge and female contest, there would be a completely different reaction from the media.

In “The Rules Of #MeToo Are Clear. Women Can Sexually Harass Whomever They Want.”, Matt Walsh, a reporter on the Dailywire, points out the contreversy around this event and how a double standard is clearly evident because of the reactions, or lack of, from this event. He explains “Imagine a male pop star demanding a kiss from a shy 19-year-old female and then smooching her on the lips without consent. The outrage would be deafening and immediate. He would certainly be fired from the show.” The fact that many people, including the male judges, didn’t react negatively towards the kiss just proves that some celebrities have this mindset that they can do what they want and have no regard for the consequences.

There are two main issues with what went on. One is that pop culture creates this image around celebrities in which they are seen as a higher class and more powerful than people who aren’t famous or even people on these shows that do in fact get famous or strive to be by winning these shows. The second is that women like Katy Perry who don’t realize what she did is seen to many people as sexual assault are not and possibly won’t me accepted by the #MeToo movement or any type of feminist politics.

What I believe should have happened was that women like Katy Perry should be held accountable for the same things we hold men accountable for. For the past few months, that is all we have been doing to men who have sexually assaulted women in our society, including Hollywood. The first time I read about what happened was in a tweet on Twitter and I honestly expected it to come up on every social media I had with people talking about it. Unfortunately, I was wrong.