Madonna arrived at the O2 for her Celebration tour last weekend, and “Oh Madge,” the columnist Sarah Vine wondered aloud in the Daily Mail, “isn’t it time you grew up?” Madonna had already answered that, of course, by dressing in a broken mirror catsuit, a cowgirl corset and another corset, and by cavorting with topless dancers. It all amounted to a pretty comprehensive statement of: “Take your idea of what a grownup 65-year-old should wear and how she should comport herself, and shove it.”
If I were Madge, that would be the kernel of my celebration, an entire career lived as the lightning rod of the conundrum of female sexuality. Who gets to decide what it looks like, what is attractive, what is off-putting? Who gets to police what is too much, what is too old, what is too scary, what is too slutty? Is it men, and if so, which men? Just the loudest ones? Is it socially constructed by an unstable but vocal alliance of sexist men and disapproving women? Do feminists get a say, and if so, do we all have to agree first about where we stand on fishnet tights? Where do conical bras fit, in the long pantheon of “shapes you’re apparently pretending your breasts might be”?
Vine’s harshest take on the performance came when Madonna performed Erotica, recreating the notorious masturbation scene, surrounded by boxers (Queensberry rules, not the dogs) and with an alter ego dressed as her younger self. “I think we can all agree,” Vine concluded, that this “takes onanistic self-indulgence to a whole new level.” But do we all agree? Would it have been less self-indulgent not to have had a younger alter ego, or would she then have been pilloried for daring to still onanate, at her age?
At the risk of sounding too Barbie movie, hasn’t that been the ongoing discovery of Madonna’s entire career: that a woman in the public eye will be judged by an ever-changing standard – sometimes too strident, sometimes too provocative, sometimes too predatory, sometimes too thin, sometimes too fat, other times too muscly, very soon too old? It is not possible to meet a patriarchal ideal whose shape keeps shifting, and much of whose power, in fact, lies in its mutability. Quicker and more dignified just to smash the patriarchy, even if Madonna has been working flat out on that for 44 years, and it took us ages to notice, and you still wouldn’t say her mission has been totally accomplished.
Meanwhile, at the other end of the “What’s a woman supposed to look like?” spectrum, Pamela Anderson has kicked off a debate about ageing gracefully by going out and about without makeup. Jamie Lee Curtis called it an act of “courage and rebellion”, which is, OK, true, but also weird: it is objectively peculiar that a woman of 56 would be expected to camouflage in a predetermined way (too much makeup would also represent some obscure social challenge), and not to do that would be considered throwing down a gauntlet. In fact, the only real difference between Anderson and Madge is practical: it must take Pamela much less time to get out of the house. Philosophically, they are saying the same thing, which is: “Take your beauty ideal, and shove it.”
In the mid-90s, there was an interview between the magazine Blikk and Madonna that had been translated from English into Hungarian and back into English, except – in a very early example of the internet not being completely reliable – it actually wasn’t that, it was a parody by the cartoonist Garry Trudeau (creator of Doonesbury). Blikk’s spoof question was: “Madonna, let’s cut to toward the hunt. Are you a bold hussy woman that feasts on men who are tops?” Fake Madonna replied: “Yes, yes, this is certainly something that brings to the surface my longings. In America it is not considered to be mentally ill when a woman advances on her prey in a discotheque setting with hardy cocktails present.” It was, honestly, the first time I really understood the point of the world wide web, and the first time I realised what Madonna had actually done to culture, because the joke wasn’t on the bold hussy woman, here. It was on everyone but her, everyone who had ever thought to judge her, everyone who would ever judge her in the future. And it was really funny.
Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
