Or: Bi-sexuality makes strange bedfellows!
You really do have to hand it to Katie. The day before the deadline for Brian Lambert's contest to out-Katie Katie, she sets the bar even higher. What a competitor! Here's the lede from her column today (Sunday):
Imagine that you hear that your 18-year-old daughter was kissing another girl at a party last weekend. What races through your mind? "O my gosh, she's exploring same-sex attractions. She must be a lesbian."
Which, of course, to Katie is a fate worse than death, right Spotty?
You would think so, grasshopper. And yet. It turns out that girls are doing it to turn on guys:
Hold up, Mom and Dad. You're showing your age. Chances are, your daughter's not fixed on the pretty young blonde she's locking lips with. There may be something entirely different and unexpected going on.
"Girls making out with each other to turn on guys is the latest craze at high school and college parties," according to the online magazine Salon.com.
We have trouble right here in River City, all right.
It turns out that Katie has found another room in the dark basement of our souls:
What is fueling this trend?
One factor is the huge popularity of Girls Gone Wild, a DVD franchise that films alcohol-addled females' sexual encounters with other women at college drinking revels. Same-sex kissing has been glamorized by celebrities, including Madonna and Britney Spears.
One of the biggest influences, however, may be Internet pornography, which has dramatically altered young people's ideas of mainstream sexual behavior.
"Girls aren't kissing other girls because they want to," Pamela Paul, the author of "Pornified," told Salon. "They're doing it because they want to appeal to boys their age. And for boys their age who've developed sexually alongside Internet porn, their sexual cues are affected by the norms and standards of porn. And that's girl-on-girl action."
The result? Rampant cultural confusion.
That must be it, of course. Katie is afraid that this experimentation is going to turns young women into lesbians, or maybe even worse, bi-sexuals:
Female bisexuality is "the erotic new trend (everyone's trying it)," announced Marie Claire magazine in 2006.
A 2005 survey by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention appeared to confirm this. It found that while 1.3 percent of women identified themselves as homosexual, 11.5 percent of women ages 18 to 44 -- and about 14 percent of women in their late teens and early 20s -- report at least one sexual encounter with another woman.
It has to be a pretty titanic force to turn Katie into a feminist, even for a day. But it looks like that's what happened; Katie ends her column with a quote from Salon (and not from somebody she actually talked to, naturally):
It's sad to see that this is what it's come to -- that guys will raise the bar and girls will scramble to meet it. Women just want to know what they have to do to get these guys to fall in love with them.
It has to be even more titanic for Katie to quote, with evident approval, a lesbian:
Chicago Tribune sex columnist Jenni Spinner, who is a lesbian, maintains that Perry's "I Kissed a Girl" song [identified by Katie as part of the phenomenon] "sets gay rights back." In nearly every "gay dance dive," she has complained, "the joint has been infiltrated by a gaggle of giggling straight girls, playing gay for a night because it amuses them."
But you know, Katie, this kind of confusion has been around for a while.
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