Lemondrop

Lady Gaga, with her epic style and one liners ("I never thought I'd be asking Cher to hold my meat purse!"), certainly knows how to get people talking about her.

Sunday's VMAs were no exception. She changed costumes at least three times and ended the night with a real-life version of the "meat dress" she wore on the cover of Vogue Hommes Japan. (Can you imagine how ridiculous that would have seemed if she hadn't won Video of the Year? Then you're just a girl dressed in slowly rotting top round.)

But she did win, rightfully so, and when she was asked by the vegan Ellen DeGeneres "Why?", as in "Why on earth are you wearing a dress made of meat?", her response was this:

"It's certainly no disrespect to anyone that's vegan or vegetarian. As you know, I'm the most judgment-free human being on the Earth. It has many interpretations, but for me this evening it's [saying] if we don't stand up for what we believe in, if we don't fight for our rights, pretty soon we're going to have as much rights as the meat on our bones."

Oh OK, Gaga. And what is it that you believe in?

Camille Paglia asked the same question in her scathing profile in the Sunday Times, disparaging her pre-packaged misfit personality, her generic self-esteem messages to her "little monsters," and her constant ripping off of Madonna. She also takes issue with her sexiness.

Gaga isn't sexy at all -- she's like a gangly marionette or plasticised android. How could a figure so calculated and artificial, so clinical and strangely antiseptic, so stripped of genuine eroticism have become the icon of her generation?

Burrrrrn. Gaga's comparisons to Madonna are constant and often quite accurate, but maybe not in a way that would please the Lady. Madonna helped a lot of us get to know the Madonna-Whore complex, as we watched her grapple with wanting it all, and wanting it all at the same time. She taught us that it was okay to be a lady in the streets and a freak in the bed. (Thanks to Ludacris for phrasing that perfectly.)

Madonna's cone bra, drinking-milk-from-a-saucer outrageousness had a clear message behind it: "This belongs to me, thank you" sexuality. I know, it seems archaic and obvious now, but that's because of Madonna. Gaga's style, while sexy, seems to exist in a vacuum, not at all related to actual sex. Or meat. Or messages.

You always believed that Madonna, no matter what crazy outfit she was wearing, would end her evening by having some hysterically awesome liberated sex.

So what is Gaga's message, really?

She seems to be ushering in a new dichotomy of Style vs. Substance, and what she's teaching us is that it's okay to lead with your style and retrofit substance in there somewhere. Her message is that you don't have to have a message, and if you insist on having one, just make it random and provocative?

I genuinely believe that Gaga is a weirdo, but I don't know if she knows why she's weird. I certainly don't know what makes her weird, other than her constant desire to show us that she is. Her songs, while infectiously insanely amazing, certainly don't speak to any message, other than that you should dance and that sometimes love is hard.

She feels like a girl playing dress up, and while there's absolutely no harm in that, harm comes when you decide to project some depth onto your costumes. I worry for a generation of kids growing up with such in-your-face attitude and so little to actually say. I wish Lady Gaga would take a break from telling me that I am a beautiful little monster to make more songs I can dance to mindlessly.

Because seriously Gags, did you really dream up a meat dress because you feel it reflects the human struggle for basic rights?

To paraphrase Sigmund Freud, sometimes a meat dress is just a meat dress.

Emily Gordon is a Lemondrop contributor, blogger and journalist who lives in Los Angeles.