Gaga over the lady

The anticipated highlight of the show was a reheated argument. Before the MTV Video Music awards this year, all the talk was of whether pop princess Taylor Swift would address the debacle of 2009, when Kanye West barged on stage, interrupted her acceptance speech and said Beyoncé should have won her award. Would Swift refer to this lightly in song? (She would. Yawn.) Would Kanye refer to this lightly in rap? (Not directly. Sigh.) So far, so stultifying.

And then, there she was. Lady Gaga, the big winner of the night, striding on stage in a dress made of meat. Or what looked like meat. Either way, there was the impression of sinews, fat, of oozing, bloody discharge. What did the meat dress mean? Was it a comment on the treatment of women in the music industry? Was it another of Gaga's death references? Did it reflect the boundaries of the body — representing Gaga's own flesh, turned inside out and extending beyond all expected limitations? Or was it just an outfit worn to grab the maximum share of the world's attention?

Strong opinion

Gaga offered her own interpretation. She said: "If we don't stand up for what we believe in, if we don't fight for our rights, soon we're going to have as many rights as the meat on our bones."

The meat dress attracted attention at a time when Gaga's very unpredictability had begun to seem predictable, when her constant innovation had threatened to drag. It revived questions that have circulated since she first appeared on the charts just two years ago. Who is the 24-year-old pop star formerly known as Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta? Is she driven by ideas or neediness? Is she a feminist icon or just another derivative desperado?

According to Camille Paglia, cultural critic, Gaga is a "ruthless recycler of other people's work" and suggested there was an "essential depressiveness and spiritual paralysis" about her.

Paglia implies that to be a star, you have to look appealing. And one of Gaga's key attractions is precisely her dismissal of traditional, feminine appeal, of the need to be charming, of the values and aesthetic of other female singers: pretty faces and familiar costumes.

Rebel in a name

In some ways, Gaga's persona seems to question what's expected of women. It's there in the internal contradiction of her name: "Lady" with its suggestions of gentility, sweetness, high breeding; "Gaga" with its intimations of infantility and madness.

If the typically feminine woman is supposed to be simpering, weak, manipulated and essentially submissive, Gaga kicks against all these qualities.

One of the other qualities that is always considered central to being a woman is a desire for a partner, love, romance. As feminist writer Melissa McEwan notes, there have been rumours of boyfriends but "unlike Madonna, who has always lived with some guy, and everyone knows her boyfriend's name, Gaga is an entity unto herself. She's not famously partnered, which is remarkable."

Standing alone

Gaga has carved out a space where she can stand alone and that loneliness actually heightens, rather than diminishes, her power. This loneliness is also emphasised by her costumes, many of which act as exoskeletons, essentially cages within which she performs. Gaga's outfits are distancing. We never get to see or understand who she really is.

The stories that do emerge about life behind the costumes are often windy tabloid tales of exhaustion or weight loss. I hope the media doesn't succeed in destroying her.

I don't love Gaga but I do admire her. She makes us question what women are and should be. Most importantly, she couldn't care less what anyone else thinks. And, in terms of traditional femininity, nothing could be more radical than that.

Copying the originals

Her recent songs, I grant you, aren't terrible. Not the earlier stuff, of course: Love Game, Just Dance, Eh Eh. To love those is to love watered-down rehashes of those famous titans of the musical world, Whigfield and Ace of Base. Bad Romance and Telephone are fine, although they are unsatisfying, leading one to listen to them again and again in search of something that seemed to be there once. This is a brilliant tactic for success in the short term but makes the songs ephemeral.

Yet Stefani Germanotta's celebrity status (sorry, I just cannot make my fingers type the word "Gaga" in a sentence that is intended to have an actual point) has nothing to do with her music. It's about her persona, one that has been described, with no discernible irony, as "original", "feminist" and "iconic", with the latter two qualities being dependent on the first, which is precisely where the argument falls apart.

From her name (which she ripped from a Queen song) and her music to her every look, everything has been done before. Even the meat dress she wore was done by Elsa Schiaparelli almost 80 years ago. Now, lack of originality isn't a bad thing. But it is a problem when originality is supposed to be one's greatest quality.

I was with Germanotta last year for an article and I did not feel like I had spent 24 hours basking in the light of a modern-day icon at the end of it. I felt like I had been stuck with a difficult girl from my old schooldays. Which was precisely the case.

Despite Germanotta's fondness for focusing on her time living on the Lower East Side, she, like me, went to a stuffy school in New York's Upper East Side. Naively, I told her about this connection between us, thinking she might enjoy the common ground. Her response was to flounce out of the room and not talk to me for an hour.

She repeatedly told me how smart she is, which she proved by tapping her head every time she said the word "smart" and at the end of the day, Madonna, whom Gaga was supposed to meet later (the meeting of icons), bailed. I always liked Madonna.