It was her daughter, Lourdes’s, envied-child-of-the-famous story braided into Madonna’s tragic history of having lost her mother as a child—and the moral was that if you didn’t like someone, you were just jealous. Except the book seemed oddly bullying in itself (the Roses were named after girls who went to school with Lourdes, after all). And the protagonist was the blandest, most passive good-girl on Earth, the opposite of Madonna: Patient Griselda Madonna, not Susan.
This was something new. Madonna had always been preachy (which kind of worked during the sadomasochism-is-freedom stage, when she chanted, “I ain’t your bitch/don’t hang your shit on me”), but now she’d turned downright sanctimonious—and worse, Millennium Madonna, unlike earlier Madonnas, was chiding her former selves instead of shedding them, turning those baby Madonnas (skanky, effervescently selfish visions!) into lessons. For a while, I wavered between Madonna Love and Madonna Hate. I did not much like British Madge, but I was okay with the pathos of the Guy Ritchie
Swept Away
era—there was something affecting about
Madonna’s failure to be a movie star (her bossy self always poking through), and all those quotes about learning to compromise. That wasn’t very Madonna, but it’s not like I wanted Madonna to have a bad marriage. And who doesn’t want to share, to grow? It’s good to be unselfish! The selfless Madonna is less inspiring than the selfish one in so many ways.
But soon the bad Madonnas were pouring out in a rush: Lady of the Countryside Madonna, Tone-Deaf Antiwar Madonna, and particularly Hard Body and Plastic Surgery Madonna of the Purple Bodysuit. There were elements of this stream of Madonnas that I admired and feared, kind of the same thing when it comes to Madonna. There was Never Grow Old Madonna, turning fifty. There was Healthy Yoga Madonna, which I couldn’t trust, because she was hard to distinguish from Baby-Cheeks Botox Madonna. There was Momma Madonna, to whom I was sympathetic, and I didn’t have a problem with the Malawi thing per se, although it didn’t look great from the outside.
But then, the world had changed.
For one thing, there was Angelina Jolie, who had emerged as an alternate Madonna, the Gallant to Madonna’s Goofus, her cultish sanctimony somehow more earned. In every other previous iconic face-off—Madonna versus Cyndi Lauper, Madonna versus Britney and Christina—Madonna won, or, in the strange case of Britney Spears, seemingly sucked out her soul live onstage, a vampire-lesbian smooch that left poor Brit stumbling away into young motherhood and nervous breakdowns. (What kind of amazing celebrity act is it when you kiss Christina Aguilera and no one even notices?)
So yes, there was something amazing about her ability to suck the soul out of Britney Spears and also to survive the desire of all horses to kill her, à la
The Ring
.
And yet, I finally had to face the fact that the Madonna I had loved for years—who’d become to me, of course, not a real person but an abstraction, which I’d like to believe was her aim all along—was giving me chills of discomfort, just as she was returning to my city.
And of course, it was a new city as well, a Times Square filled with people rearranging the deck chairs.
So I wandered over to Love Saves the Day on Second Avenue, where Madonna’s Susan traded her pyramid-embroidered coat for those tempting boots. (Why do all New York girl-fables center on footwear?) It was gone: closed shop in January. I checked out her recently purchased redbrick Upper East Side mansion in its peculiarly staid uptown location between Lexington and Third Avenue—and then went over to the Kabbalah Center, likewise quiet, with a maid mopping up as I flipped through the sequel to
The English Roses.
(Just as grating as the original.) And I called some people who I felt could argue me back into my more welcoming self.
“I totally love and worship Madonna,” music critic Rob Sheffield tells me. “She brought New York to the rest of the country—the rest of the world, I guess.” Long before he became a critic, Sheffield saw
Desperately Seeking Susan
at a mall in suburban Boston, and it defined Manhattan for him: “When you’d walk past one of those scenes, you’d feel ‘Madonna has trod here.’”
Every time I start in on my troubles with her persona, Sheffield steers me back to her music. She propagated a unique fantasy, he says, “different from the punk idea, which was that you could become a decadent figure of cinematic tragedy, of sinister charisma.” Madonna may have had punk trappings, might have dated Basquiat and mimicked Blondie, but her take on urban squalor was optimistic: not the “beautiful loser” but the disco winner. And while other disco stars longed to do gospel or soul instead, Madonna was a rare devotee: “She never stopped loving that particular sound.”
Sheffield’s never heard of
The English Roses.
As for Kabbalah, he points out, “You know, if she made bad records about being spiritually awakened, that’s one thing—but she made a really good one, the
Ray of Light
album.”
This is the way writer Wendy Shanker sees her, too: as a spiritual figure. Shanker’s written an upcoming book about finding a guru,
concluding that it is Madonna. (“I hope she thinks that’s cool and not weird.”) Like me, Wendy identified strongly with Madonna’s vision of freedom, after a “conversion” experience at a Blonde Ambition concert; her most cherished memory comes from a brief job at MTV, when she found herself assisting the singer, yelling at the head of the network: “Madonna is going to do what Madonna wants!”
But unlike mine, Shanker’s loyalty never faded. “Yeah, I think the Kabbalah stuff is crazy. But is that the craziest thing a celebrity has ever done? So Madonna wants to drink expensive water, so what? She wants to help a child, she pays for ten thousand orphans to get food! I don’t know why people hate her so much.”
It’s the body, we conclude simultaneously. That aging/ageless body. “It’s shocking to look at this picture on my wall, compared to the way she looks now,” admits Shanker, describing a 1990
Harper’s Bazaar
portrait above her desk. “Somehow, she seems to stress people out. She still seems to have something to prove.”
It’s true. Maybe it’s because I’m getting older along with her, but watching Madonna strut past fifty—hips grinding in high heels, posing legs spread—brings out anxious, contradictory emotions. It’s become taboo to criticize stars for plastic surgery—both because it is their choice and because they have no choice—but each time I glimpse that grinning mask, I wonder why it’s impossible for Madonna, with all her power, her will to shock, to ever stop “giving good face”? I try to persuade myself to admire her most New York qualities (ambition, workaholism); I tell myself she’s a dancer, and this is what dancers do. But I feel exhausted just witnessing the effort it must take to maintain this vision of eternal youth.
Two days later, I find myself doing my daily Google search. Two workers died in an accident at her stage in France; she’s broken up with Jesus Luz; also, the Poles are protesting because she’s performing on a Catholic holiday. She’s collaborating with the New York artist Marilyn Minter! A greatest-hits album drops this fall. And bloggers are examining her upper arms for indications of “bingo
wings.” Then I follow pointers on Twitter and find myself watching a YouTube clip of “Hung Up” from the 2006 Confessions Tour—one of many recent songs, I suddenly notice, studded with tick-tock sounds and countdowns—with Madonna doing seductive pelvic pops, then reaching out, drawing from her fans the eerie chant “Time goes by! So slowly . . .”
And hearing the roar of the faithful brings me back, all over again. Because, perverse as it sounds, the tougher Madonna gets, the more she invokes protectiveness and a kind of pride. In the eighties, during those endless debates about date rape and porn, she was our sacrificial anti-victim, jumping into the slut-pit before she could be thrown, magnetizing contempt: She’d play the tease, the porn star, the dominatrix, eager to control that imagery rather than let it swallow her. She predated and predicted
Girls Gone Wild
culture, blogs, reality TV, the whole exhibitionistic brand-me wave of modern female culture; she surfed over and then tried to surf past it. If she’s hardened in the process, maybe that’s because she was the first to step up and take it; she was a shield. Now she’s catalyzing a new set of insults, that cougar-MILF catcall, with its attendant put-downs—she’s “desperate,” “pathetic,” “trying too hard.” And maybe she is.
Sometimes I think she is. But while other female icons fade, fold, or fossilize into camp, for better or worse, Madonna seems determined to do something unsettling and new: spin to the center of the dance floor, till the end.
About the Contributors
LAURA M. ANDRÉ
received her PhD from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she paid tribute to the Pepper’s Madonna as often as she could. After a brief stint as a university professor, she now owns her own business and works for a bookseller specializing in rare and contemporary photography books. She has written for the anthologies
Ask Me About My Divorce: Women Open Up About Moving On
(Seal Press, 2009) and
Queer Girls in Class: Lesbian Teachers and Students Tell Their Classroom Stories
(Peter Lang, 2010). With Candace Walsh, she recently edited the anthology
Dear John, I Love Jane: Women Write about Leaving Men for Women
(Seal Press, 2010), and she is currently editing an anthology about women and mental health called
It’s All in Her Head: Women Making Peace with Troubled Minds
. She lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
LESLEY ARFIN
is the author of the drug-addled memoir
Dear Diary
. She has written for
Jane, Paper
,
Jezebel.com
, iD,
NYLON, Russh,
and is the former editor-in-chief of
Missbehave
magazine. She has also written many things on the Internet, which you can find by googling her name. Lesley is currently working on a television show and by the time this comes out, may or may not be based in Los Angeles.
CHRISTINE BACHMAN
is a recent graduate of Middlebury College and currently works in the nonprofit sector in Boston. At Middlebury, she majored in Sociology and Women’s and Gender Studies, and plans to attend graduate school to continue her studies in the Sociology and Queer Theory fields. She is deeply passionate about queer theory, queer culture, and feminism, and wishes to thank her parents for raising her in a world that constantly tests the boundaries between queer and normative.
JAMIE BECKMAN
is a New York City–based freelance writer and the author of
The Frisky 30-Day Breakup Guide
. She has written about relationships, health, and lifestyle trends for magazines including
Glamour, Redbook, Men’s Journal, Men’s Health, First for Women
, and
Better Homes and Gardens
, and websites such as SheKnows and The Frisky.
ERIN BRADLEY
is a writer and journalist living and working in New York City. She’s written for and appeared in publications including
The Daily Beast, Nerve, Playboy, The Morning News
, and
College Humor
. Her book,
Every Rose Has Its Thorn: A Rock ‘n’ Roll Guide to Guys
is available on
Amazon.com
.
LISA CRYSTAL CARVER
wrote a few books (
Rollerderby
, etc.) and a couple thousand articles, toured several countries (Suckdog), had a couple kids and husbands and houses, tried out a dozen different drugs and philosophies and pretty much each branch of the sex industry, bought and scratched or sold again many thousands of pieces of music . . . all this would have been so-o-o different had she accepted that full scholarship to be a history major twenty years ago.
GLORIA FELDT
is a women’s activist, speaker, and bestselling author of four books. Her latest,
No Excuses: 9 Ways Women Can Change How We Think About Power
, has been called “indispensable”
by Gloria Steinem. The former president of Planned Parenthood Federation of America, she teaches “Women, Power, and Leadership” at Arizona State University. Find out more at
www.GloriaFeldt.com
and follow her @GloriaFeldt and on Facebook. She’s married to Alex Barbanell; they share a combined family of six children and fourteen grandchildren.
MARY K. FONS
is a full-time freelance writer, a nationally ranked slam poet, and has been a proud Neo-Futurist since 2005. She holds a B.A. in Theatre Arts from the University of Iowa. She is an original ensemble member of Chicago’s Gift Theatre Company, Marc Smith’s Speakeasy, and the Islesford Theater Project. A Green Mill slam champion, Mary teaches poetry workshops to high schoolers throughout Illinois and writes, directs, and performs approximately twenty-five weeks a year in Chicago’s longest-running late-night performance art extravaganza,
Too Much Light Makes The Baby Go Blind.
A Driehaus grant recipient, and a LaMaMa E.T.C. Playwright Retreat participant (2010), Mary has performed her original work from D.C. to NYC, to Seattle and plenty of venues in between. She also cohosts the nationally-aired PBS program
Love of Quilting
and is creator, co-producer, and host of “Quilty,” an online quilting show for rookie quilters at
QNNtv.com
. For the blog and more on Mary, visit
www.maryfons.com
. She wears her “Boy Toy” belt unironically.
STACEY MAY FOWLES
is a writer and magazine professional living in Toronto. Her first novel,
Be Good
, was published by Tightrope Books in 2007.
This Magazine
called it “probably the most finely realized small press novel to come out of Canada in the last year.” In fall 2008 she released an illustrated novel,
Fear of Fighting,
and staged a theatrical adaptation of it with Nightwood Theatre. The novel was later selected as a National Post Canada Also Reads pick for 2010. Her writing has appeared in various magazines and journals, and has been anthologized in
Nobody Passes: Rejecting The Rules of Gender
and Conformity; First Person Queer; Yes Means Yes;
and PEN Canada’s
Finding The Words
. Most recently, she coedited the anthology
She’s Shameless: Women Write About Growing Up, Rocking Out and Fighting Back.
She is the former publisher of
Shameless
magazine, and currently works at
The Walrus.