Lady Gaga popped up on American Idol last night, where she showed her commitment to nurturing the talent of the show’s budding performers by telling Scotty McCreery to orally pleasure the microphone and groping James Durbin in a way he found “awkward and uncomfortable.” (To be fair, she was just trying to get the guy to swivel his hips and got unnecessarily intimate about it.) She also showed her commitment to generating gobs of publicity for Lady Gaga by wearing shoes with penis-shaped heels—an odd fashion statement, you might think, for network television:

Ryan Seacrest discussed Gaga’s shoes — which appear to have an adult toy as a heel — on his radio show yesterday. “She came in broadcast standards-sensitive shoes,” Ryan explained to his co-host Ellen K. “wearing a very popular female tool on her feet.” The “Idol” host added, “Only Gaga can put herself into footwear that is a device of pleasure.”

TMZ is claiming that Fox tried to censor the shoes by slapping the AI logo over the offending penii. (Penes? Peeners? Pleasure sausages? Your call, I guess). It’s a bold claim, one you could only refute by glancing at a casual assortment of stills from last night’s show. You might even watch the damn thing. But TMZ clearly didn’t, which raises my respect for them ever so slightly. Apparently there are certain things that TMZ and I simply will not do.