Culture counter: Lolitas of the world unite, make out (YaleHerald.com)

Time of publication: 21.04.2003

BY MICHAEL ALEXANDER

You've got to hand it to the porn industry; they've always been on the cutting edge of media innovation. Who popularized cinema with strip-nickelodeons (no, not Rugrats, you dirty, dirty people)? Who got VHS into every house in America? Who still has the only profitable Internet media business around? That's right, pornographers, and it seems they've been prescient again, because pop culture has finally gotten around to co-opting that most cunning of pornographic inventions, the fake teen lesbian.

Yes, I can only be talking about t.A.T.u. (derived from a Russian slang term meaning "this girl loves that girl"), the sapphic sensation that, after conquering their native Russia with videos of their rampant making out in plaid skirts, learned a smattering of English and shot up the U.K. charts, finally crossing the Atlantic and winding up on TRL and every late-night talk show in America. Witness "All The Things She Said," in which not only do the girls spend a minute straight with their tongues down one another's throats in schoolgirl uniforms, but somehow manage to be soaked with rain and in prison at the same time. "Naughty, Wet, Lesbian Schoolgirls in Prison XIV," here we come! Oh, the music? They play semi-catchy but ponderous Eurodance, with some canned guitars in the choruses. Does it matter? To paraphrase Charlie Sheen in Being John Malkovitch, "Who cares, they're lesbian schoolgirls. I love that shit!"

Created by former psychiatrist-turned-Svengali Ivan Shapovalov, who scoured Russian high schools for a couple of girls who'd fit his plan (reportedly, he "auditioned" 150 candidates for the roles, some of whom claim all sorts of sexual advances), t.A.T.u. is the product of a brilliant shower of lies. From the early days, in which he claimed he had stumbled on Julia and Lina's "relationship" long after deciding on the two to the desperate attempt to bolster their same-sex-relationship credibility by having them announce, "We have sex three times a day," Shapovalov has managed to toy with the truth more than any 10 high-profile court cases you could name. Eventually, of course, mounting evidence of their obvious straightness, most notably the torrent of sightings in Russian papers of the two with their boyfriends, has driven him to give up on actually saying they're an oversexed couple. In a delightfully perverse turn of events, now the two are exclaiming "Everyone thinks we're lesbians!" and getting away with it because, well, it doesn't matter what they say as long as they keep pawing at each other on Leno and making out on video.

Before anyone sends hate mail, I have no issues with homosexuality in pop music, or anywhere, for that matter. Listen to all the Sleater-Kinney or Indigo Girls you want, and more power to you (and them!), but really, this just trivializes an entire sexual orientation in exactly the same manner that so-called "lesbian porn" does. Shapovalov, in his later, more-honest-because-it-can't-hurt interviews, called the group an "underage sex project" designed to appeal to men who find young girls attractive. That doesn't exactly bode well for the purity of his aims. Apparently, the queer community agrees: A search on sites like gay.com found as many editorial diatribes against the group's just-for-men image as there were calls to castigate networks for censoring footage of them kissing. Admirable positions, though as battles for free speech and equality sometimes are, it's a shame they have to be attached to something so crude.

The marvelous thing about t.A.T.u. is that nobody saw it coming. In an over-exposed teen pop world where sheer trashiness seemed to have reached, if not its maximum, at least the inescapable asymptote of diminishing returns, it seemed unlikely that anything could beat "I'm a Slave 4 U." Remarkably, there is a new low, and it pays. Even more remarkably, for once the American mainstream, so long the champion of culture-debasement, is not the culprit. This is no case of cultural imperialism; this was so unbelievably tawdry that it couldn't be born here. If someone had tried this in Alabama, the Religious Right would have torn them to pieces before they got too big to be touched. Why Russia, though? My personal theory: revenge for the Cold War. Think about it, people. After collapsing under its own weight trying to beat the U.S. containment game, an embittered Russia learns all the tricks of our favorite game of all: packaged titillation and disposability. A decade later, Mother Russia unleashes a cultural weapon so powerful it actually dethrones America as World's Most Tasteless Country. Insidious!

We've dropped the ball, folks. While in America porn's enduring influence on the mainstream had been relegated to bad stand-up comedy about Ron Jeremy and web browsing, Russia listened to history. If I'm right, the future will see pornography return to its proper place as cultural vanguard. In no time at all, we could see schoolgirl-teacher duos, plumber-housewife twosomes, even sorority supergroups, all brilliant testaments to the pop cultural truth that there is no Ultimate Low. Godspeed to them!

Thanks to russkayatatu.
Source: YaleHerald.com

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