By Elif Gorgulu
Lady Gaga won the Oscar for Best Original Song for her song “Shallow” in the 91st Academy Awards. This is a huge moment in an artist’s career, especially for one like Gaga. However, I could not help but notice the media coverage surrounding her performance during this awards season, and especially her performance with Bradley Cooper during the Oscars. This incredible woman that worked day and night to come where she came is now reading headlines surrounding the nature of her relationship with her co-star and is being pit against Irina Shayk instead of being celebrated as a self-made artist with kindness, charisma, uniqueness and talent. This made me ask the essential question of why society wants to pit one woman against another and why we women endorse this behavior and sometimes initiate it. Gaga is a woman that started to play the piano at the age of four and gained early admission to NYU’s Collaborative Arts Project 21. She has won nine Grammys, a BAFTA, three BRITs, two Golden Globes, thirteen MTV Video Music Awards, broke several Guinness World Records and is officially an Academy Award Winner. She is an icon of both fashion and political activism, especially when it comes to LGBTQ+ rights. This woman is a significant figure for our generation and someone that we should all look up to. Sadly, when she won her first Oscar after years of hard work, all we did was to build up conspiracy theories on how she is in love with someone else’s man and is trying to break up Bradley Cooper’s family.
What we as a society do not get is that men and women can just be friends or work together or do both without falling in love. Every friendship has the potential to be platonic. The looks they gave to each other might as well be the looks of two professional actors that have chemistry performing a legendary set for their adoring fans. Just two professionals, well-equipped to maintain that professionalism for the sake of their craft. Now, personally I have not watched A Star Is Born but I am aware that it is a love story between their characters. I am also aware that fans really do want to see Ally and Jack end up together in life. However, there is a thin line between shipping people and being offensive. Bradley Cooper is a man who is in a committed relationship with Irina Shayk. He shares a daughter with Shayk and just because Lady Gaga’s relationship did not work out, this does not mean that she ended it for a co-star and friend. Life is not a movie. Us women are unsuspectingly conforming to this societal norm that commands us to be ok with being pitted against one another. Whenever people create a love triangle, the woman is always the one that is to be blamed. We constantly want to go against the patriarchy, but at the same time follow the rules that were imposed to us by the very same institution. When women get even the slightest success, we immediately try to find ways to bring each other down. I believe that if we expect men to change their ways, we should also change our own. The world is not going to get better if we keep trying to drag each other down while trying to bring each other up. Concentrate on Gaga’s Oscar win rather than mocking her or building up rumors about her personal life. If us women want to have a say in this world, this is one of the things that we need to work on amongst ourselves. We need to stop dragging down each other and start lifting each other up.