The most shocking thing Madonna has ever done, as she once said herself, is just to keep on publicly being Madonna. She won’t give up. She won’t fade away. She won’t be shamed, at the age of 64, into retirement; she is still jumping on every TikTok trend, still pumping out sexually suggestive clips to promote her upcoming world tour.
And if there’s something faintly spooky now about the tautness of her face, then she is arguably doing what she has to do to remain relevant and marketable inside an industry that holds women to impossible standards. Admittedly, it all looks faintly exhausting. But the pressure to keep on keeping on at whatever we do, in the teeth of ageist assumptions, is coming for us all soon enough.
