I know, what’s new, right? To give credit where credit is due though, Lady Gaga does do good work. She’s always doing something to combat bullying, her favorite cause, and she’s made a lot of strides. She even started her own foundation, remember?
That’s why it shouldn’t be a surprise that this past Saturday, Lady Gaga attended a conference for young women called “It’s Our Turn,” held at a school in L.A. She spoke about being bullied as a teenager, being bulimic, and, of course, being born this way.
On being bullied for her beliefs: “I started having trouble with girls in middle school,” Lady Gaga said. “I always knew that I wanted to do something very career oriented, and I always wanted to be a musician. “That alone set me apart. I had such strong convictions and I was pretty delusional, in the same way that I am now … in wanting to change the world and end bullying in America and do whatever I can to promote peace around the world. It might sound kind of silly coming from someone in red lipstick with a bunch of jewels on my jacket,” Lady Gaga said. “But that’s just the way I have always been.”
On confronting a bully: “It wasn’t until my senior year in high school when I finally confronted my main bully,” Lady Gaga said. “She was always kind of mean to me, but I was always trying to be nice to her.”
One day the bully was discussing her after-school internship and the young Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta asked, “Oh, hey, how’s that going?” only for the bully to reply, “Why are you talking to me?”
Lady Gaga recalled finally asking her, “What the f*ck is your problem?”
To this, the Brentwood audience laughed, cheered and clapped. “She couldn’t believe that I stood up for myself,” Lady Gaga said. “And I said, ‘I am always nice to you. What is your problem with me? Maybe if you just tell me, we can figure this out.’ And she said something like ‘Well, I just don’t know why you’re so serious about music.'”
“You don’t always know why people exclude you or aren’t nice to you,” Lady Gaga said. “But I will tell you to this day it helped me so much to stand up to that person.”
On being bulimic: “I used to throw up all the time in high school. So I’m not that confident. And maybe it’s easier for me to talk about it now because I don’t do it anymore. I wanted to be a skinny little ballerina but I was a voluptuous little Italian girl whose dad had meatballs on the table every night,” Lady Gaga revealed. “I used to come home and say, ‘Dad, why do you always give us this food? I need to be thin.’ And he’d say, ‘Eat your spaghetti.'”
On body image: “Every video I’m in, every magazine cover, they stretch you; they make you perfect,” Lady Gaga said. “It’s not real life. I’m gonna say this about girls: The dieting wars have got to stop. Everyone just knock it off. Because at the end of the day, it’s affecting kids your age. And it’s making girls sick.”
On worth: “I’m encouraging you to know what you’re worth. And know that no matter who has more money in class, who has more stuff, who has a country house – nobody is worth more than anybody else.”
I think this is a pretty classy thing for Lady Gaga to be doing with her time, and believe me, that sort of pains me to say. But if she can use all her craziness to reach out to some kids, then that’s what matters, right?
I agree. She is ok in my book, excessively large clit notwithstanding
I’m not a big fan of Lady Gaga. I think she is kind of pretentious and that her “music career” is mostly based on shocking people with what she does and wears rather than good music. I also suspect that the”bullying” an other problems she experienced may have been on the lower end of the severity spectrum. That said, life experience is how you experience it, and she seems to feel she had a terrible time and was bullied mercilessly, so that is where she is coming fom. In terms of how she thinks and how it informs her behavior, it doesn’t matter if it’s “true” or not. And as a person who was bullied for years in school, I think it’s admirable that she is trying to help, no matter how she is doing it.
When Gawker reported the bullying incident several people commented that were/were related to/befriended to people in Gaga’s class reporting that bullying as she described never happened. But, see, bullying was all over the press at that time, so Gaga jumped on the band wagon as many other celebrities did. And now, once again, anorexia is the trend of the week, so I’m not surprised Gaga has a story of her own for it. Who knows, next week she will talk about how she used to be suicidal/bicurious/too eccentric for this world – OH WAIT she’s already done that. I’m bored.
You can’t have a war on bullying. That’s not how it works.
Ask yourself: Who is standing up in defense of bullying?
A bully is someone who is either unaware they’re bullying, or who doesn’t care what a pop star’s charitable foundation has to say. Reminding kids not to be jerks to each other is great, and I support that, but wasting money and setting impossible goals like “end bullying in America” is duuuuuuuuuumb.