Alanis Morrisette & Sex With Women

I'm so naive...I thought Alanis would play a song.

Instead, I cringed through this smarmy "Alanis Morrisette Discusses Her Lesbian Days With Howard Stern" clip on Gawker. Howard hammers on about Alanis' hookups with women and tries to box her into easy-for-straight-folks-to-understand stereotypes, like when he asks, "What type of women were you attracted to? Ultra-femme? Or butch?" Alanis just laughs at him.

True, Howard asks very personal, raunchy questions of all his guests. And I'll confess this interview made me particularly defensive because I love Alanis. But I think Howard deserves to have none of his stupid questions answered: When he calls her hookups with women "your lesbian phase," Alanis giggles and says, "It's funny you call it a phase...it's a self-defining thing." He then asks, "I want to know what brought you to a woman. Were you fed up with men?" and she laughs at that, too.

Alanis does a pretty great job of razzing him right back, I've got to say. "I think it's a rite of passage to experiment with your sexuality at some point," she says, and Stern insists, "I'm not experimenting with a dude!" Then Alanis points out, "Well, it might be different for a guy, there's more homophobia going on."

It's hard to tell if Alanis laughed at Howard so frequently because of this rather awkward "frank sexual discussion" in front of her bandmates or because she thought (like me) that his line of questioning dense. In any case, Alanis is a good sport, and the Stern folks are clearly on her side regarding her breakup with actor Ryan Reynolds. So I just rolled my eyes at the whole thing.

Of course Alanis could've deflected this entire line of question about where she meets women by saying, "Um...during spin-the-bottle...didn't you see me on Sex & The City?"