Katy, Kanye, and Alien Sex: E.T. as a Religious Experience

Alien abductions are religiosexual fantasies about perfect beings — beings without sex organs; the Greys are the angels of a technology worshipping civilization, their divine nature evidenced not just by advanced technology and enormous, sterile intellect, but also by physical form: an enormous head and smooth, sexless, undifferentiated bodies. An explosion of intelligence and an implosion of genitalia. The ideal of a culture that fetishizes science and finds the body profane; God is not made in our image but through our image, as an inversion of its unholiness. So the fantasy’s content focuses on the filthiest orifice of all: the anally probed asshole; the divine is alien to us, but this act of submission, of prostation (lol), allows us to feel the divine within our own absences – the difference must therefore be stretched open wide as possible. Religious experience is a metal rod up your ass.

Katy Perry and Kanye West understood this relationship perfectly: technology, aliens, sex, and religion fused together in the hit song E.T. Kanye explicitly tells us to “step into the fantasy,” to imagine this extraterrestrial experience, champion lovers with different DNA. But fantasy is not personal; fantasy is necessarily social, as the idea of an alternative world can only be a negative reflection of the actual¹. And the fantasy about to be described to us, the one we are invited to partake in, is not merely a fantasy but the fantasy — and the song’s incredible success testifies to its resonance. Kanye, appropriately, casts himself in the role of alien for this song, a futuristic lover who is “reverend.” 

Katy, however, plays the role of abductee – a sexist cultural trope² – and the video has her floating around in space wearing ornate, exotic, religious-looking outfits. This abduction is being cast as a religious event, made even more apparent when she wonders at her extraterrestrial lover, “Could you be the devil? Could you be an angel?” But the listener, like Katy, already knows the answer. This being is a different-dimensioned angel who will “lead [her] into the light.” She is ready for abduction, ready to be kissed, and, as Kanye expresses in his second verse, she is ready to be disrobed and probed³; Kanye abducted her, and will “tell [her] what to do.” The Alien is sexual and divine, the abduction is religious, and our relationship is that of a slave to master. 50 Shades of Kanye.

E.T. is the 20th and 21st centuries’ anthem. Alien abduction fantasies popularized themselves with the rise of military technology – the one good thing world war gave us – and on a similar timeline Barbie was invented, the ideal human form. But she was not ideal for any positive attributes, but for her absences: no anus, vagina, or nipples. Shes just missing grey skin and giant eyes. We are in the world of futuristic, Kanye West alien sex, the ultimate form of release: ejaculating into a test tube with a probe up your ass, being raped by something that can’t even have sex⁴.

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¹A simple daydream of a different boss is not only a reaction to the attributes and behaviors of the current boss, but the new and improved boss is already dependent on social concepts, ie, the concept of a good boss. The concept of a workplace. Both of which, in turn, are situated in a particular form of social organization.

²Clearly this song, as a product, was made with the social psyche in mind – whether it manifested itself through conscious or unconscious means.

³He both cannot (no cock) and will not sully himself with flesh-to-flesh contact. The appropriate artifact is a futuristic metal dildo.

⁴I say it a lot, but I think I’ve actually lost my mind this time.