Read Madonna and Me Online

Authors: Laura Barcella Jessica Valenti

Madonna and Me

Table of Contents
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Praise for
Madonna & Me
“For someone who has spent the past thirty years defending Madonna to whoever would listen, Madonna & Me is like a homecoming. Reading these smart, funny, and moving essays by women who were influenced by the material girl brought me right back to my school years, when I was touched by Madonna for the very first time.”
—DEBBIE STOLLER, co-founder and editor-in-chief of
BUST
magazine
 
“Sure, one Madonna gave birth to Jesus—but our Madonna gave birth to femme-inism. If you’ve forgotten why you should worship Madge, this hilarious, provocative collection is like a prayer to the patron saint of girl power.”
—JENNIFER BAUMGARDNER, author of
Manifesta: Young Women, Feminism and the Future, Look Both Ways: Bisexual Politics
, and
F’ em!: Goo Goo, Gaga
, and Some Thoughts on Balls
 
“When I first heard the song ‘Everybody’ in 1982, I ran right out and bought the ‘cas-single.’ Now, thirty years later, I greedily read everything about Madonna I can get my hands on. Madonna is one of those rare public figures who elicit a lifelong, intensely personal fixation, making this collection of essays a giddy pleasure. By turns hilarious, thought-provoking, and touching,
Madonna & Me
is a fitting salute to the smart, brash, occasionally infuriating provocateur, who is always offering us something new.”
—JANCEE DUNN, music journalist for
Rolling Stone
,
Vogue
, and
The New York Times
, and author of
Why Is My Mother Getting a Tattoo? And Other Questions I Wish I Never Had to Ask
 
“Finally, an anthology that speaks to the blisteringly potent influence Madonna has had on women of our generation.”
—JULIE KLAUSNER, author of
I Don’t Care About Your Band
“Madonna & Me is a collection as saucy and savvy as Madonna herself. In heartfelt and incisive ways, the contributors engage with an icon who deeply impacted the identities, sexual and otherwise, of an entire generation of girls.”
—JILLIAN LAUREN,
New York Times
-bestselling author of
Some Girls: My Life in a Harem
 
“Though it was written entirely by women,
Madonna & Me
can easily hold the interest of non-Madonna fans and even male readers, which is (sadly) no small feat. Highly recommended for anyone interested in music, pop culture, women’s lives, and smart personal essays with heart.”
—SCOTT LAPATINE, founder and editor-in-chief of Stereogum, named one of
Entertainment Weekly’s
Best Music Websites
 
“The writers in
Madonna & Me
explore all that Madonna has meant to more than one generation of feisty, feminist, powerful women. They dive into her music, persona, and legacy, expressing themselves in ways that would surely give even Her Madgesty food for thought.”
—RACHEL KRAMER BUSSEL, editor of
Women in Lust and Best Sex Writing 2012
 
“In
Madonna & Me
, editor Laura Barcella shows how Madonna has become a cultural benchmark for women of varying backgrounds. Reaching far beyond pop-culture critique, the essays in this book examine Madonna—both the woman and the legend—as an allegory of the modern female experience.”
—STEVE LOWENTHAL, music writer for
SPIN and the Village Voice
, and founder of
Swingset
magazine
Foreword
Jessica Valenti
 
 
 
 
 
THERE’S SOMETHING ABOUT Madonna.
For nearly thirty years Madonna has fascinated people on a global scale—especially drawing the attention (and sometimes ire) of women, who seem to love and hate her in equal amounts. Me, I’m not so sure.
My first glimpse of the pop icon came in the form of her “Papa Don’t Preach” music video in 1986. I was eight years old, too young to fully grasp the meaning behind the song—and the fabulous “Italians Do It Better” T-shirt—but even then I could glean that she was singing about rebellion in the face of paternalism. (Though naturally it would take more than a decade and a few women’s studies classes before I used that word to describe it!) It was a seductive message, one that resonated with a burgeoning feminist—oh yeah, and millions of other girls and women.
In the years that followed, even though my musical tastes were more hip-hop than pop, I kept coming back to Madonna. I bought
her records and sometimes emulated her style. The funny thing was, save for a few songs, I wasn’t really all that crazy about her music. It was her—her persona, more accurately—that drew me in. I wasn’t necessarily rocking out to her, but I was watching.
I think what made Madonna endlessly fascinating to me—and still does—is her ability to be a pop-culture chameleon. And unlike current celebrity reinventions, it never seems to matter if Madonna is sporting lace gloves, a spiked bra, a cowboy hat, or a dominatrix whip—all of her selves appear authentic. (All right, maybe not that faux-European accent she had going for a while—but hey, give a girl a break.) Or perhaps it wasn’t that these identities were authentic, but that they were so obviously created and carefully formed that the ease with which she slid into each incarnation of herself was amazing in and of itself.
It’s also hard not to love the way Madonna confounds expectations: She’s survived and thrived in an industry that reviles both female aging and sexuality that isn’t male-controlled. There’s something appealing and awe-inspiring about the way Madonna simultaneously titillates and terrorizes the public—after all, there’s little that American men fear more than a sexually powerful woman. Even when it’s playful, or a performance! (See Emily Nussbaum’s essay “Justify My Love,” page 268, and Laura Barcella’s “My Pocket Madonna,” page 86, for more discussion about male Madonna-fear).
That’s why it’s no surprise that, as this anthology indicates, there’s such a wide range of women’s thought around Madonna. Madge—arguably the most well-known female musician in the world—embodies feminist issues from performativity and sexuality to celebrity and power.
Take the 1990
New York Times
op-ed, where firebrand Camille Paglia called Madonna “the true feminist”:
“Madonna has taught young women to be fully female and sexual while still exercising total control over their lives. She shows girls
how to be attractive, sensual, energetic, ambitious, aggressive, and funny—all at the same time.”
Of course, instead of Paglia seeing this as in line with feminist thought, she saw Madonna as the antidote to American feminist whininess. She argued that feminism had a “man problem,” and that unlike Madonna—who let men be masculine—feminists “fear and despise” the masculine. “The academic feminists think their nerdy bookworm husbands are the ideal model of human manhood,” she wrote. (An odd stance when one considers the gender–bending and androgyny Madonna so often embraced, but that’s a discussion for another essay!)
Bell hooks sees Madonna as someone whose performance of sexuality means little to women of color. In her essay “Madonna: Plantation Mistress or Soul Sister?” hooks wrote that though she sometimes admires Madonna for creating “a culture space where she can invent and reinvent herself,” the singer co-opts black culture and engages in a public sexuality that’s mired in white privilege. (More than one writer in these pages also explores these themes—see J. Victoria Sanders’ essay “The Black Madonna,” page 55, Jamia Wilson’s “Are You There God? It’s Me, Madonna,” page 43, and Maria Raha’s “Borderline,” page 216)
Hooks writes, “In part, many black women who are disgusted by Madonna’s flaunting of sexual experience are enraged because the very image of sexual agency that she is able to project and affirm with material gain has been the stick this society has used to justify its continued beating and assault on the black female body. The vast majority of black women in the United States, more concerned with projecting images of respectability than with the idea of female sexual agency and transgression, do not often feel we have the ‘freedom’ to act in rebellious ways in regards to sexuality without being punished.”
When it comes to Madonna, there’s nary a woman who lacks for an opinion. For me, though, I think something different
every time I read something new about her, any time I hear a new album or see a new video. I love that while other pop culture divas have honed their performances and public identities to the whims of the time, Madonna has created her own narratives and set the pop culture agenda. I hate that without her performance of sexuality (be it consumer-driven or self-created) we wouldn’t be so entranced with her.
But maybe my ever-changing mind on Madonna and what she means for women and feminism is part of the point. She’s not stagnant, so why should any of our thoughts about her be? Whether you think Madonna is an appropriator or an inspiration, perhaps what makes her so outstanding is that one person can mean something so different to so many people.
That she doesn’t just make us dance and sing around with a hairbrush (guilty as charged) but that she makes us angry, that she makes us horny, that she makes us think.
Introduction
Who’s That Girl?
Laura Barcella
 
 
 
 
 
I’d love to be a memorable figure in the history of entertainment in
some sexual, comic, tragic way. I’d like to leave the impression that
Marilyn Monroe did, to be able to arouse so many different feelings
in people.

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