The Current State of Madonna

How Madonna's Approach to Aging has Taught me Invaluable Lessons

Do you remember Madonna’s Sex Book? That image of her standing in a semi-squat on a window sill, bottomless, ass cheeks like steel cantaloupes, so beautiful you really imagined what it might be like to bury your face in them, her right hand cupping one cheek with vigor, about to reach under to catch a feel between her legs, cooch pressed up against the glass, wife-beater pulled up just so, like a comical twist on misogyny (no one was beating this bitch), black motorcycle boots about to stomp? Those were the days, truly, when Madonna was our symbol for progress, for female independence, for us to tell every conservative, every religious institution, every misogynistic prick, that if we wanted to wear our skirts so short, a tampon string might peek out, then so be it, that if we wanted to be Boy Toys and have a few unhinged romps, and then wear a belt around our naked bellies to advertise it, then so be-it, that if we wanted to dangle oversized crosses from our necks and let them rest between our cleavage while shaking our asses in blasphemy, then so be it. Madonna’s Reign was our Age of Aquarius. 

I learned to tell Papa to shut the fuck up and stop preaching— I was keeping my damn baby—sixteen or not (I wasn’t actually a teen mom); I learned that I could strike a pose, there’s nothing to it, if it felt right even in a goddamn bank line; I learned that I had the right to love sex without shame, to wear leather hot pants to a club, ass cheeks out, to make out with my gay friend, just to see, and to join a drag queen in a ceiling cage in a club for an innocent dirty-dance. And of course, The Queen of Transformation instilled in me the confidence to create myself in the image that I desired. Thank you, Madonna!. 

The current state of sixty-four-year-old Madonna, however, has perplexed and saddened me. It is a bit fascinating as well, that is as a study in aging, alternative family life, and how too many fillers can really go wrong. Before she erased most of her Instagram, I’d scroll for hours, mesmerized by images of her ass in the shape of a deformed peach on steroids, popping, shaking, gyrating and breaking through fishnets and leather hot pants, her strange face peering into the phone’s camera from under a leather cap, lips filled, balloon-like, on the verge of explosion, cheekbones, unusually wide, eyes pulled up so taut, it seemed someone stapled the skin of her face behind her ears, working hard to be alluring as she would stick her forefinger in and out of her mouth repeatedly like a porn star who forgot her lines. And then, as if it couldn’t get any more disturbing, her adopted teen son would appear, eyes twinkling as he danced around his mother with the enthusiasm of a showgirl on a cruise line. Just another day in the life of Madonna and Family. 

And yes, I admit that I loved the bizarreness of these familial scenes. They would sometimes instill in me a momentary desire to slip on my S&M pleather panties, tape on my titty tassels, handcuff myself to a kitchen chair and twerk, while my kids made me grilled cheese in the background, but overall, they just saddened me and they still do. And it isn’t because Madonna no longer looks like herself or because she is a public hyper-sexualized sixty-something-year-old woman. It is because these images feel so inauthentic and desperate, as if Madonna The Great, the woman who led us into divine independence with a Fuck-the-World  attitude, is now begging the world to accept her, to deem her relevant, to perceive her as they did in the 80’s; in other words, she seems to have let society disempower her at a time when she should be her most powerful. Madonna, the Queen of Reinvention, cannot successfully reinvent herself in her older years, and instead, has regressed, trying to step into the identity of her twenties, and that is always dangerous. Perhaps she cannot find relevance for herself as a sixty-four- year old woman. Perhaps being so powerful for so long fooled her into believing she is immortal, or perhaps she is losing her mind.

Either way, I have been in deep contemplation. Does our youth-obsessed society weigh so heavily on older celebrities  (and the common person) that instead of stepping into their wisdom and  full selves, they lose their way, and at sixty-four, end up humping their car door with their tongue out on an Instagram Reel? Is this where we are all heading? Turning into satires of our former selves? I was hoping Madonna would continue to lead the way, would show me pieces of the older woman I could be, but instead, she has become a red-flashing warning telling me to: know when it’s time to leave the party, make sure that at sixty-four, Instagram isn’t my diary, date people who are not the same age as my children (I’m married, so that’s a non-issue), check in with friends to make sure that whatever face work I may decide to get is not turning me into an alien version of myself, and most importantly, to make sure that I embrace my essence and determine my own relevance, and not to let society do that for me.

Despite my disappointment in Madonna, I will continue to defend her when my daughter tells me that she reminds her of the women from the Grey Gardens documentary I made her watch.