It’s not every day I get reminders of why I am not a fan of Lady Gaga, but today is one of those days. See that tweet up there? Yep! (Here’s a link for you to click so you can see I didn’t make this shit up.) To be honest, there’s a lot of reasons why she’s deeply problematic. A lot. But I won’t get into those today - we’ll just talk about this tweet.
As a witch, I’m used to celebrities, authority figures, and famous people of varying stripes making fools of themselves and parading their ignorance, especially when it comes to witchcraft. This phenomena, while sad and problematic, is nothing new. However, since Gaga is an artist whose personal brand is supposed to involve ‘accepting difference’ and ‘yay tolerance’ and ‘be yourself,’ I find Gaga’s Valentines’ tweet to be especially disturbing and worth commenting on.
There are real practitioners and thriving contemporary communities who embrace these modes of spiritual and energetic expression as a significant aspect of our lives. With one tweet, Gaga erases us. For most people, when they think of witches, witchcraft, and vodou, they think of spells and magic that is mostly focused around revenge, hexing, cursing, making someone else suffer for some sort of injustice they carried out towards us. Of course, my problem is not that some magical practitioners do choose to hex and curse - I have certainly done a few bindings in my day (2 in 14 years), and would enact a curse or hex if myself or my family were in danger of physical harm (and I’d call the police, obviously). My problem is that the depiction of witches in popular culture continues to be an essentialization - it shows only the potentially opportunistic, vengeful, and aggressive practices and masquerades them as This Is All Witchcraft Ever The End. Curses and hexes are not represented as the minority, last resort which they usually are, and instead as the end-all-be-all of witchcraft and magic.
Gaga has a lot of power. She has a million trillion fans, on twitter and otherwise - so whatever messages she chooses to send out get internalized, loved, accepted as truth by her fanbase. I’m sure if she told her fans to boycot something, to believe something, to buy something, they would do it in droves. Her tweet shows that she has Gaga-approved this bullshit essentialist attitude about witchcraft and magic. Her tweet tells her followers and fans that it is okay to erase real, thriving communities of magical practitioners, past and present. Her tweet casts those who look to magic as a form of spirituality as other. Her tweet comes from a secular, Western occident and others the unknown as savage, silly, laughable, primitive, superstitious.
The tweet is also deeply ethically problematic in a variety of ways. The behaviour and mindsets she encourages with that tweet - mostly directed at young teenage followers - is that it’s okay to curse and hex people because they broke up with you (because of course we are always the completely innocent party in an altercation). What kind of attitude does that encourage? Unhealthy, insecure, immature attitudes, in my opinion, and that’s not what someone of her stature should be prescribing, especially to young people who believe that what Gaga says is gospel, even if it’s bigotry and ignorance disguised as ‘cute LOL!1’
