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If you've avoided hearing the song to this point (by not owning a radio or television, ignoring your teenage daughter singing it to herself at breakfast and ignoring the news segments about Lavigne's possible plagiarism) I'm going to insist you listen now.

Better yet, watch the video. We're going deep into this thing and I want you with me on it.

There. Now you have some idea why this thing is driving me mad.

I'd like to move right past whether Lavigne swiped the song from The Rubinoos. Largely because I don't particularly care.

What is most fascinating to me is what the song is saying (if it can be said to be saying anything) and how it's saying it.

Lavigne is in sort of a strange position - and has been for a few years. Her music and the way it was initially marketed ("Sk8er Boy," anyone? How about a t-shirt and skinny tie?) won her an audience of adolescent and early-teen girls (and their creepy older brothers). Finding this a bit confining, she began sexualizing herself more and more . She posed topless with a bottle of Jack Daniels in Blender magazine (before she could legally drink in the states). She pulled some wild tour antics (including performing in a Hooters girl uniform). She gave a lot of cameras the finger and insisted she was an effing rock star. But in the end she was still, largely, performing for those girls in skinny ties whose parents let them stay up past their bedtimes just this once.

So her new tact? Screw it. I'll just write "Hey Mickey, You're So Fine," perform with back-up dancers and make some real money.

Which is fine. A pop star changing her image doesn't really bother me. Jewel in hot pants, singing club music? No skin off my nose. We're not exactly talking Dylan going electric here.

But this song dances along an interesting edge. While she busts out the F-bomb in an early verse (for no apparent reason and in a way that makes you just want to pat her on the head and say: "Okay, we get it. You're baaaaaad.") she also avoids all but the vaguest and most innocent of sexual innuendo in a song that is, after all, about stealing another girl's boyfriend.

This is as salacious as Lavigne gets in her explanation of why the guy she's singing to should leave his girl for her:

"Don't you know what I can do to make you feel all right?"

Um...no. We don't. Why don't you tell us? Slowly?

Let's get real here, Avril.

"Girlfriend" is, with lyrics like "She's like, so whatever/you could do so much better," already a sort of rallying cry for young girls who want to cut each others' throats over boys. This is never clearer than in the video's (unintentionally) hilarious casting of Lavigne as both the naughty, taunting temptress AND the girl whose boyfriend is stolen. It's almost a surreal, pointed political statement - steal another girl's boyfriend and you're really just cheating yourself. If only anyone involved with either the song or video had thought that deeply about it.

But having created this sort of amoral pep-rally song for adultery-minded young girls and a video in which girls cruelly taunt and assault each other over boys, having dropped the F-bomb to prove she's as bad-to-the-bone as any rapper getting bleeped on the radio, Lavigne stops short of actually asking, as the Pussycat Dolls once put it, "Don't you wish your girlfriend was a freak like me?"

It would be easy enough (if a bit cynical) to believe that Lavigne is worried about getting too suggestive for the parents who are, after all, going to have to let their kids buy this record. But that's just the sort of demographic she's seemed to be trying to shake in the last few years.

The next best explanation is...well, she's Canadian. They're just too polite for that kind of thing.

But there was another Canadian pop princess turned angry young woman who released a jealous, other-woman song in the mid nineties. And she made it very clear why she was the better, naughtier choice.

A side-by-side comparison is instructive:

Alanis Morissette: "An older version of me/Is she perverted like me?/would she (expletive deleted) on you in a theater?"

Avril Lavigne: "Cause I can/cause I can do it better."

Alanis Morissette: "And when I scratch my nails down someone else's back/I hope you feel it/ well, can't you feel it?"

Avril Lavigne: "There's no other/so when's it gonna sink in?/She's so stupid, what the hell were you thinkin'?"

The winner and still champeen: Jagged Little Pill.

And thank God. Women my age grew up adoring Alanis Morrissette - her rage, her soulfulness (as indicated by harmonica), her daddy issues and unabashed kinkiness. And they were much more interesting for it.

If Alanis wanted to steal your boyfriend she wouldn't need three minutes, backup dancers and a hand-clapping chorus to explain her position. You'd just never see the guy again and be left to assume he'd been kidnapped, taken across the border and his organs harvested.

Similarly, she wouldn't spend thirty seconds worrying about her teen fanbase, whether it's confining, how she needs to write for them. She wouldn't have to convince us she's a rock star. She'd just be one.

I'm not saying Avril Lavigne needs to be Alanis Morrissette. I'm saying I think she might be happier if she let herself be.