Girls Just Want To Be…With Girls

There’s a thing that still happens at parties when Katy Perry’s 2008 chartbuster I Kissed a Girl starts playing. Some women act like an electric current has pulled them together, in some intense, inchoate emotion. Maybe it’s something they have only fantasised about, or experimented with secretly. Nobody will be scoring them on a quiz. In the song itself, a girl kisses another girl just to try it, she likes it, and hopes her boyfriend won’t mind it. Perry got some hate for ‘trivialising’ queer female sexuality, ‘performing it for the gaze of men’. But that’s not why women are still dancing excitedly to her tune.
It connects with something that’s shifted this century. From California, Kuala Lumpur and Amsterdam to India, many women coming of age now are less likely to see sexual identity as the iron cage in which their elders grew up. They are more open to the concept of sexual fluidity.