“Do you see, do you see, do you see how you hurt me baby, so I hurt you too, then we both get so blue.” – Joni Mitchell, “All I Want”

“You walk around like you’re oh so debonair/ You pull ‘em down and there’s really nothing there/ I wish you would just be real with me” – Katy Perry, “Ur So Gay”

I’m not sure we knew what to make of Katy Perry.

She’d kissed a girl over the summer and liked it. What were we suppose to make of that? Lindsay Lohan was purportedly kissing girls as well, so maybe this was something cultural, but Katy was really on about the inebriating freedom of just-a-little-deviance. The gay community was already skeptical over a song entitled “Ur So Gay,” which had her responding to the difficulties inherent in a hipster-chic boyfriend. She claimed it wasn’t about a real person, and to dispel allegations of homophobia, explained that by gay, she meant homosexual. Oh. The rest of us were just confused about what “you’re so gay and you don’t like boys” meant. It sounded militant. There was something weird about this pop star.

Over the past few years female pop singers have become increasingly aggressive in their attitudes about boys. Call it the Hillary Clinton effect—women have ceased to play idealizations that coincide with the hyper-real misogyny hip hop is continuously pardoned for. Exit Jessica Simpson and Jennifer Lopez, who were just looking for Christian love and a rich man who could appreciate a fine ass, respectively.

We wanted women who would call these men out for the shit they talked about doing. Even Miley Cyrus started playing the role of jilted ex. So at first Katy Perry looked like the first pop star to consciously address female empowerment in the form of emasculation.

As far as I can tell that’s what she thought too. “I Kissed a Girl” had the desired effects of making drunk girls kiss other girls at parties, and my mom giving up trying to be hip. We were experiencing a brief flirtation with the idea of non-binding sexual roles; Katy was just being wild. And for the people who were paying attention, she was being independent. This was something she was doing to satiate her own lubricous urge regardless of consequence, including the reaction of her boyfriend, who she discarded as a passive afterthought.

But that wasn’t—of course it wasn’t—the whole story. Katy Perry had been in LA for 7 years before she dropped an album and scored a major hit. In 2001 she released a record called Katy Hudson, which was more in line with the ethical tutelage of her parents, both pastors. She spent the intervening time with The Matrix and Glen Ballard—who I’m told is a major player—releasing singles to minor fanfare. It was probably The Matrix, the genius force behind Avril’s anti-conformo mall punk back when Sum 41 was still a band, who taught her about appealing to the zeitgeist. By 2008 she’d shed the Christian Rock image entirely. Blender named her an artist to watch, and announced her renunciation of wholesomeness. “I did lots of bad things as a kid,” she told them.

This was reinforced in her album, sort of. She laid claim to a fake ID she’d lost in Vegas during a night of drinking, probably wasn’t a virgin, and for the born-agains, yes, she had in fact kissed a girl. If that wasn’t enough, she had attitude. Aside from the vitriol she spent on her gaywad hipster boyfriend and others like him, she seemed tough. Her delivery was deep, and loud, recklessly confident, sexy while it barked commands at boys. I assume it was these factors that cemented her record deal. This was the voice that would sell the wildness that outpaced the men in her life. Instead of responding to misogyny, she would castrate it by displacing the superiority of its purveyors. Crowds would respond.

“I Kissed a Girl” succeeded on all counts, but was also the only song that lacked a boy as a central character. It was more difficult for her to take command in the presence of an actual guy. When I started paying attention, “Ur So Gay” began to look like a different song; it was actually coming from a place of hurt. So I focused on the rest of her lyrics; they were angry, they were cutting, they were distanced, sometimes they were clever, but at their core they all dealt with the same question: why do I keep falling in love with boys who don’t love me back?

Yikes. Capitol Records has hidden this quality as best it can with videos that accentuate the scathing humor of her aggression, but eventually everybody will catch up to the self-expression behind her persona. She’s a girl, a charismatic romantic who wants to believe that its possible to feel independent and in love, so she puts up with the distant narcissists she’s attracted to in the hopes that she can get them to change. That isn’t appealing to knee-jerk feminism, but wise women will tell you there’s more to being a feminist than refusing to compromise She’s addressing the full dynamic of real human relationships, and all the injustice that comes with it. I hope she finds what she wants, but I’m glad she’s being honest.