It is painful for me to speak ill of Madonna. When I attempt to turn a critical eye on the 67-year-old pop star, the 10-year-old me suddenly appears, like a selfless soldier willing to take a bullet to save the one she loves. How dare you, little me says, eyes ablaze.
Ten is how old I was when the album and eponymous single “Like a Virgin” were released, in 1984. I did not yet fully grasp what the word “virgin” meant (my Catholic school upbringing in Canada never seemed overly invested in explaining things, especially to little girls) or understand why my friend Sandy got in trouble for describing the video — in which Madonna cavorts through the streets of Venice, Italy, as a lion following her around — in her fourth-grade school speech about Italy. It didn’t matter to me; all I knew was that Madonna, with her lace gloves and unapologetic attitude, was pointing the way. To where, I couldn’t have said, but I wanted to follow. She was everything.
That childhood passion is emblematic of the role Madonna has played in the lives of so many. Or roles. She has, it seems, long been a guide into any number of influential, progressive, sometimes shocking ways to be in the world, all a bit ahead of the mainstream even as whatever she did became the mainstream.
Now, on the eve of dropping “Confessions II” (a sequel to her 2005 record), her first full-length album in seven years, she is once again everywhere. But there is something different this time around. Instead of finding her exhilarating, I’ve begun to fear what she’s come to represent.
For those of us who grew up with her, and the generations who have come of age since, Madonna introduced, flaunted and shattered culture’s deepest taboos, particularly around sexual agency for women, religion and identity. Even single motherhood. She was foundational to my understanding of how to be an unrepentant woman in the world. She turned all that shameless thirst into empowerment. The fact she also looked so exciting decked out in lingerie, lace gloves, crucifix jewelry and rosaries as necklaces was proof that fun and agency not only could coexist but might even be one and the same.
For decades, Madonna gave voice and image to things many of us didn’t know we needed words for. I’m eternally grateful I grew up with her on the screen — even if it meant sneaking views of the “Like a Prayer” video, which depicted Madonna kissing a Black Jesus and which was so controversial that Pope John Paul II condemned it. Or being slightly confused when she hit peak controversy with the film noirish video for “Justify My Love,” which hinted at a ménage à trois and sadomasochism.
In 1990, she brought (or co-opted) the transgender ballroom scene into Middle American consciousness with the song (and video) “Vogue.” Two years later, she put out a massive coffee table book simply called “Sex,” which in hindsight seems like a fairly accurate prediction of the thirst-trap, OnlyFans culture we are now living in. At the time it had to be completely wrapped up to make it to bookstore shelves, despite its pedigreed photographer (Steven Meisel) and its coterie of the moment’s most storied celebrities and models. Six years later, she swapped leather for onesies, when she had a baby out of wedlock (unabashedly! with her trainer!) then posed for the fashion photographer Mario Testino in instantly iconic Madonna and child photos for Vanity Fair — all but anointing herself a second coming. She had girlfriends. She kissed Britney Spears onstage at the MTV Video Music Awards.
Then she pivoted again, introducing MTV audiences to kabbalah (and yoga arms!) with “Ray of Light.”
Everything she did felt new and pleasingly provocative.
And then things began to shift.
Her instinct for self-promotion spiraled. She photoshopped her own album covers on the paintings in Beyoncé and Jay-Z’s music video filmed at the Louvre, picturing the couple staring up at her work, and captioned it “Learning from the Master,” adding, “lol.” (Though she appeared to be joking, the backlash was crisp and justifiably brutal. Madonna then modified the original post.)
Increasingly, she began to look less like herself. Less Marilyn Monroe and more Betty Boop. Cartoonish.
Recently she appeared with the 27-year-old Sabrina Carpenter during a performance at Coachella, wearing nearly the same costume she’d sported 20 years ago at her first appearance at the festival — and twinning that of her fellow singer, a woman her daughter’s contemporary.
Madonna, who for so long was pushing the boundaries of what women could and should be able to do, has instead become the most powerful avatar of our terror of aging. Everything about her appearance signals that she has capitulated to some very punishing beauty standards that insist women’s value lies only in their performance of youth.
In this way she is, perhaps for the first time, commonplace. The past years have seen such an explosion of plastic surgery that untouched faces in the public eye, and increasingly out of it, are practically a rarity. On TikTok, 30-year-olds are congratulating themselves for not having work done. Under-40s are talking frankly about their experiences with face and neck lifts.
Is it even fair to call Madonna out for this? Perhaps not, but it doesn’t change the fact that what I wanted was for her to model how to be a woman remaining firm in her sexual agency and power even as she let her body go boldly into the realities of age. Because if Madonna can’t hold fast against the forces that demand that women stay appearing young, what chance do the rest of us have? After a childhood so influenced by her boldness, and years of being encouraged to express myself unapologetically, I confess I felt a sense of betrayal that she seemed to have finally succumbed to society’s expectations.
But as uncomfortable as it can be for me to recognize, I wonder if Madonna isn’t simply once again forcing us to confront some hard truths. That deep down, we are not perhaps as bold or fearless as we’d like to believe ourselves to be. That none of us want to age, or lose our beauty or the power that comes with it. That in the end, we are all vain creatures desperate to hold on to, by any means possible, a shred of youth.
Transgression is out; filler is in. Instead of being uniquely, aspirationally free, is she — are we all — trapped?
We can’t really criticize Madonna for clinging — performatively, defiantly, increasingly implausibly — not only to some enhanced mirage of her younger self, but also to a time when things seemed more exciting and the future a place to look forward to. We might instead recognize that in this refusal to allow her body to broadcast the truth of time, she’s instead continuing to shine a ray of light, so to speak, in places we’re all living in.
Glynnis MacNicol is the author of the memoir “I’m Mostly Here to Enjoy Myself” and the host of the podcast “Wilder: A Reckoning With Laura Ingalls Wilder.”
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