Staff Photographer
One would have to be a determined news avoider not to know that Madonna has turned 50. Never mind that life expectancies have risen in the developed world, and living to one’s half-century is not the achievement it once was; this is Madonna’s half-century, and attention must be paid.
The interesting thing, however, is how vitriolic this attention is, and where it is coming from.
Take Camille Paglia, for instance, writing in Salon two weeks ago of the “horrifying pictures of Madonna’s wan face looking as resculpted as a plastic doll”, and of the “brassy” cover image for Madonna’s latest CD, Hard Candy, “with that ostentatiously exposed crotch and hard-bitten face lolling its tongue like a dissolute old streetwalker . . . still hammering at sex as if it’s Madonna’s last, desperate selling point.”
Or Julie Burchill (not one, it is true, to be relied on for a consistent or fair point of view), who began by inveighing against Madonna’s “vile veiny hands, that sad stringy neck — yuck!” then proceeded to bring up the crotch shots in Madonna’s 1992 book, SEX. “Visions of that greasy muff, which one could easily have fried an egg on without benefit of oil, haunt me till this very day.”
Germaine Greer, writing in the Sun British, called her the “elderly mother of Lourdes, nearly 12, Rocco eight, and David Banda, nearly three”.
What has Madonna done to deserve this?
Perhaps the answer lies in the hopes they had 20 years ago. In 1990, Paglia wrote that Madonna “has taught young women to be fully female and sexual while still exercising total control over their lives”. Madonna, proclaimed Paglia, “is the [real] future of feminism”. Now they feel betrayed by what that future held: Catholicism replaced by Kabbalah; one-night-stand babies by marriage and stately homes. So Paglia castigates her for not maturing gracefully and Greer for never being what she seemed.
In fact, she’s doing what they liked her for in the first place, going her own way, fighting her own fight, mores be damned. Trouble is, it’s their mores she’s breaking. —