I have never been sold on the idea of Madonna as a feminist icon. She lacks consistency, for my money, and there’s the fact that she has never said anything at all feminist.
Whenever she is included in the top 100 feminist quotes of all time, it is always for this: ”I’m tough, ambitious and I know exactly what I want. If that makes me a bitch, OK.” It’s worth noting here that there are people who further the cause without actually espousing it.
Women have to exist who defy feminine stereotypes just so we can begin Gloria Steinem’s process of ”unlearning” (sorry, I still have my feminist quote book open). If, as they get busy defying cliché, they screw other women as wholeheartedly as they screw men, that doesn’t negate their impact on the culture. It’s Thatcher territory, writ small: women have to behave atavistically and selfishly to get us over the hump of thinking of the sexes as inherently different. I think of Madge as an iatrogenic consequence of the movement as a whole, which is why, upon the occasion of her divorce, I feel moved to defend her.
According to the BBC presenter Jonathan Ross, Kabbalah was at the centre of Madge and Guy’s break-up. This remains to be substantiated; I think it unlikely, since she’s been into this mystic stuff since the turn of the century and, if this were an ideological dealbreaker for him, eight years is a long time to just live with it. (It has been pointed out, incidentally, that Ritchie’s career has suddenly caught fire, he’s directing a new movie, Sherlock Holmes, starring Robert Downey Jr. So maybe, here’s a theory, Kabbalah does work after all, but only if you don’t believe in it.)
To return to Madonna — this is the first cliché about the older woman, she goes mental and starts wanting to be a Buddhist nun, or drinking vinegar in water, or doing home-enemas in the name of inner purity. This fad has narrative power because it darts into the slipstream of convention: nobody ever talks about a young woman having any beliefs or ideas at all. If Madge had become political, or done a degree, or become a Protestant, that would hold no interest at all. The only thing that holds any interest for the mainstream press is if all sense and reason just dry up, like a brain menopause.
Moving on, the London-based Daily Mail quotes ”a friend”, who says that Madonna is planning ”a natural child with the new man in her life, Alex Rodriguez, despite her age”. The story continues: ”She thinks he’s physically a great specimen. And if she’s going to have another child, he would be the ideal man to bring one to her.”
Apart from the manifest unfriendliness of talking to a paper in the first place, does the friend even understand how babies are made? The friend seems to think that you just find a hunky, fast man and he catches you a baby. Strike two: that haunting figure of the gnarly old crone giving birth, grinning down at her child/prey, toothlessly.
On the same page Guy’s feelings about the split are given by ”friends” of his: he was sick of her, she was always too tired for sex and, on the rare moments she wasn’t, it was like ”cuddling up to a piece of gristle”.
I’m glad we had time to cover this, the outrage of the 50-year-old woman daring to think of herself as a sexual being, despite the fact that she’s, like, 50. Gym-fresh and you’re a piece of gristle: anything less, and you’re crawling with cellulite. The leap of imagination required to envisage one imperfect woman being attractive to a man is too great for almost all news sources.
None of this is unusual. It is, however, somewhat out of the ordinary to see all these ideas distilled in the story of one woman. I wonder if Madonna even exists, if she isn’t a computer-generated metaphor for the ”bad old lady”.
I wonder if she’s going to break out in syphilitic sores, like at the end of Dangerous Liaisons. –