Has There Ever Been a Pop Diva More Openly Promiscuous Than Ke$ha?
[There was a video here]
Pop star/Dr. Teeth impersonator Ke$ha has a reality show on MTV called My Crazy Beautiful Life. It is not beautiful, nor is it particularly crazy in the scheme of reality TV, but I do find her sexual frankness to be radical for a woman in her field.
While female sexuality in pop has been pronounced for decades, it has translated to the real lives and/or personas of its sources in vaguely fictive terms (see Lil' Kim), in serial monogamy (see Madonna) or with qualification (Pink, whose most recent album features the song "Slut Like You," explained to Glamour that she's in fact a "reformed slut"). Ke$ha, who snarls lyrics like, "Don't be a little bitch with your chit chat / Just show me where your dick's at," and writes songs about her vagina ("Wham bam, thank you, man / Get inside my fucking gold Trans-Am") is, at a minimum, committed to giving the illusion that she lives as she sings/whine-raps. Though given the continued cultural disdain for female promiscuity and her rock-star status, there's good reason to believe that she's harvesting all the dick that she brags about.
She spent the bulk of last night's episode of My Crazy Beautiful Life attempting to get laid, and when she finally did, it was with a nameless dude whose beard she fetishized. Afterwards, she mocked his spooning preference (or is it an orientation?). She recently told Jimmy Kimmel that instead of having a boyfriend, "I just have, like, boys around the world." Ke$ha doesn't always own her persona and she's self-consciously brash for the sake of it, it seems (she told Conan O'Brien, "I’m, like, a wild person"). But her shamelessness and commitment to being a slut, no reform necessary, is bold and, from where I'm sitting, admirable.