Lady Gaga as hermaphrodite

When it comes to balancing masculine and feminine I like the example of Lady Gaga. A few years back there was speculation that she might be a medical hermaphrodite. Let’s address her bisexuality and that rumor. She admits to the former in an interview with Barbara Walters and denies the latter. Of course this issue was addressed in the first minute of her video Telephone, where her clothing is stripped off and she gives a crotch shot to the camera in a see-through leotard. It is obvious she had no dick and one guard remarks to the other: “See, I told you she didn’t have a dick.”

The point is not so much that she is a medical hermaphrodite but that she has become a mythical or metaphorical hermaphrodite. The term comes from the offspring of Hermes and Aphrodite, Hermaphroditis. The latter is turned into a bi- or intersexual when Salmacis merges with him in a pool of water. Mythologically a hermaphrodite represents the union of male and female within any individual, mystically referred to as “the marriage of heaven and earth.” This also refers to the mystical marriage between an individual with God or deity. Some might contend that the former requires the latter, that we must balance the sexes within ourselves in preparation for the greater marriage of this balanced self with the divine. In modern mythology this story is played out in Peter Pan.
On a mundane level Gaga’s admitted bisexuality is an exemplar for breaking the convention of only engaging with the opposite sex. It also breaks the convention of monogamy. Granted both have significant survival and social functions in perpetuating and maintaining the species. But developmentally beyond this, when these functions have been satisfied for the species as a whole, is opening to a wider range of liberating love to more than one partner and more than one’s own sex. As we all know sexual love is quite powerful, especially when sublimated in tantric techniques beyond only physical ejaculation, to elicit higher centers of consciousness development. And within this methodology there is no restriction on polyamory or bisexuality. Liberation and unconditional love know no boundary.

So the rumor that Lady Gaga is a hermaphrodite is but an expression of the larger, cultural mythology that she is a child of the mystical marriage, a communicant and exemplar of marriage within herself and with the divine, and her message (Hermes) is love (Aphrodite). As she famously sings: "I want your ugly, I want your disease, I want your love. Love love love I want your love."