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Lee DeWyze is officially the winner of the ninth season of American Idol.  The triumph of Lee, the third scruffy, low-key, guitar strumming, regular Joe white guy in a row, over the dreadlocked and husky voiced Crystal Bowersox will no doubt cause a certain amount of consternation amongst the incredibly devoted Idol commentators and fanbase.

Many will blame tween girls and their mothers for voting with their eyes instead of their ears, and many will claim that Crystal deserved the win. But Idol is a voting show, a show about giving the people what they want. And if “the people” are young girls and middle-aged women, why shouldn’t their desires count?

Christina Aguilera is staging a comeback.  Though a tremendously successful pop artist from the late 90s through the middle of the last decade, Aguilera has not released an album since 2006, and the music scene has acquired new stars in her absence. With her new disc, Bionic, coming out next month, she needs to do something big to recapture the public’s attention in a crowded market.

In her recently released video for the album’s first single, “Not Myself Tonight,” Aguilera uses a common tool of the female pop star who wants some extra press: getting sexy with another woman.

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Last week, I wrote about Ricky Martin’s declaration of himself as “a fortunate homosexual man” on his official website, arguing that the coming out of a major figure, even one past the prime of his or her cultural relevance, is always a positive step for queer visibility and therefore queer rights. And yet, it is important not to overpraise those like Martin, who spend the peak of their career denying their homosexuality and then choose to come out once their greatest successes have already passed. Though we should not look down on or attack Martin, who is perfectly entitled to live his life as he chooses and had very good reasons for not being open about his sexuality earlier on, we must recognize that celebrities hiding their sexualities until a big reveal after their heyday is not the best way to move forward as a culture.

If you’ve been on the internet in the past several hours, you may be aware that Ricky Martin has officially come out as gay. As with many official coming outs of the past few years, the vast majority of the reaction has been made up of “duh” and “who cares? His career is already over,” with a decent amount of support and congratulations mixed in.

But dismissing this moment as insignificant or as a desperate ploy for relevance, or even as merely a personal achievement deserving of praise is missing the point. Ricky Martin came out because he felt he needed to, but why? Why is the coming out story so important for our culture to tell?

Lady Gaga certainly isn’t the first female pop star to get experimental with her fashion choices. Madonna had her cone-shaped bras, Cher her feathered headdresses, Cyndi her neon hairdos. Right now, we’re definitely at a high point in the history of female singers’ creative sartorial decisions, with Rihanna going military-bondage chic, Katy Perry aiming for 1950s pin-up girl, Ke$ha choosing to bathe with glitter instead of soap, and Beyoncé wearing whatever she pleases.

But even amongst this wide array of exciting fashion, Gaga stands out. Unlike her contemporaries, Gaga isn’t trying to be pretty.

A few days ago, I wrote a blog post about Susan Boyle that provoked quite the response. I’m not going to complain about the series of outraged comments I received from Boyle fans, bizarrely personal as some of those comments were, because as someone who writes on a public website, I have intentionally opened myself up to the feedback of anyone with access to a computer. It would be unreasonable to expect to become a blogger without encountering some negative opinions of one’s ideas and writing style, just as it would be unreasonable to expect to become a popular singer without encountering negative opinions of one’s talents and image.

But as some of the comments were genuinely provocative, I’d like to discuss them further.

I was really hoping that as a culture we were just going to let this one go, but as I just read a series of blogs and gossip sites attacking someone for criticizing Susan Boyle’s album, I guess we’re not yet done with this particular sob story.

For the uninitiated (and extremely lucky), Susan Boyle is a singer who shot to instant fame when a YouTube clip of her audition for Britain’s Got Talent went viral last April. Though she ultimately finished the competition in second place, her debut album, I Dreamed a Dream, was released in November and immediately sold an obscene amount of copies, breaking all sorts of records and becoming 2009′s highest selling album in the world.

Why has this shy, middle-aged Scottish woman so captured our society’s attention? Basically, because she isn’t very pretty.

The Super Bowl, with its bulky men hurling themselves at each other and its scantily clad cheerleaders bouncing on the sidelines, doesn’t seem to be in danger of garnering a reputation as sexually progressive. But as time goes on, it becomes more and more apparent that the sports and entertainment executives responsible for planning and marketing this huge cultural event are deathly afraid of even the smallest hint of sexuality-based controversy, as if the tiniest step away from safe, controllable heterosexuality could bring the biggest game of the year crashing down.

If you were conscious during 2004, you might recall that viewers of that year’s Super Bowl became briefly acquainted with Janet Jackson’s breast. The colossal controversy that ensued, based on the idea that there are few things as potentially scarring as a glimpse of the naked female body, was apparently enough to keep even today’s Super Bowl planners cowering in terror.

Since 2004, here are the acts who have performed at the Super Bowl halftime: Paul McCartney, The Rolling Stones, Prince, Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers, Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band, and The Who.  All male, all over 50, and all decades beyond the height of their musical relevance. Prince, the most sexually suspect of these middle-aged targeting acts, performed covers and less provocative songs like “Purple Rain.” His pants fully covered his backside.

Allowing a woman, a young man, or anyone whose music has the slightest chance of being sexually daring is presumably too much of a risk to take, despite the fact that in previous years, Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, No Doubt, and TLC had all performed without causing international controversy. One overblown scandal concerning a female and a young sexual male (Justin Timberlake), and the Super Bowl is unwilling to try again.

Besides halftime, the major non-sports-related Super Bowl topic is the commercials, which people watch and analyze as if they were miniature tv shows. This year, CBS made the questionable decision to break its policy of not selling ad space to political groups by airing a commercial from the controversial conservative organization Focus on the Family. …