14 DAY TRIAL // Madonna Louise Ciccone is 56 years old. She’s (almost) the same age as my mother, and I can promise you I would positively die of embarrassment if, come tomorrow, my mom decided she wanted to wear the outfits Madge puts on in public, to bare breast and other parts of her body on red carpets, or to date guys younger than me even.
But my mother is not Madonna: more important than the fact that she doesn’t have her figure is that she was never the kind to take society’s rules and wipe herself with them, let alone to do so publicly. She was never a rebel and she never tried to shock people into paying attention to her. She is not Madonna.
So why are we comparing M. to regular women?
Madonna, the rule-breaker
Ever since she broke on the scene, Madonna has been writing her own rules: as regards fashion, as regards music, as regards the standards women should meet in their private life.
We may agree or not with the things she does, but we can’t deny that no other female artist has been so consistent in her dedication to staying true to herself. That still holds even if we assume Madonna is a public persona that doesn’t reflect who Madonna Louise Ciccone is in real life, that her entire brand is a construct of a solid marketing team.
Madonna doesn’t care what the world thinks of her, she doesn’t care if people approve of her or not, because she knows her fans will support her no matter what. In many ways, she is fearless, a champion of many things.
She breaks the rules and then makes her own, and she doesn’t even look back to see if others will be following her. But they do nonetheless.
Madonna may be thirsty for attention, she may be try-hard and she may even be a less than decent singer (it all depends on whom you ask), but she is consistent and she is bold, and no one can take that away from her.
“Women, generally, when they reach a certain age, have accepted that they're not allowed to behave a certain way.”
Madonna, the fighter against ageism
In her latest cover story with Rolling Stone, the pop star talks about the outrage she caused when she mooned people on the red carpet at the Grammys 2015, which was only a tad louder than the kind of ruckus she causes whenever she posts revealing photos on Instagram.
That was only her trying to show the world that “this is how a 56-year-old [butt] looks like, mother[expletive]ers!,” she says. This was her trying to let the world know that she was back and, as usual, she would be making no compromises. For Madonna, the freedom to express herself is everything.
So here are her thoughts on all those comments that she’s too old to be doing just that:
“No one would dare to say a degrading remark about being black or dare to say a degrading remark on Instagram about someone being gay. But my age - anybody and everybody would say something degrading to me. And I always think to myself, why is that accepted? What's the difference between that and racism, or any discrimination? They're judging me by my age. I don't understand. I'm trying to get my head around it. Because women, generally, when they reach a certain age, have accepted that they're not allowed to behave a certain way.”
Madonna wants every woman out there, even those who don’t have her figure, confidence, money and guts, to know that they can be “sexual and look good and be relevant” at any age, whether that’s 50s or 60s “or whatever.” Again, she erects herself as champion.
Who’s to say she’s not?
Every time Madonna does something out of the ordinary, like the Grammy mooning or even the performance, loud voices yell at her to sit down, take off those skimpy clothes, stop writhing around young men and just “act her age.”
They tell her she has kids at home, they remind her she’s “old,” they tell her she’s coming across as desperate for trying to cling to a youthful image that clearly doesn’t belong to her anymore. They call her disgusting hag, or other names I won’t reproduce here.
I’m not saying she’s not off-putting in some of the things she does, or that I find it thrilling to see her dry hump masked male dancers; this is only a partial defense of her stage antics.
She could tone it down and still stay true to her image, she could be less crass, she could be a lot of different things.
But who are we to tell her how she should be like / act? She is an artist, an entertainer, and she has just as much right as we have to express herself whichever way she deems right for her. If we, on the other hand, find that distasteful or offensive, we can always look the other way or ignore her, not endorse her work by buying her music.
There’s no denying that Madonna is a mature woman who acts as if she’s 30 years younger, both on stage and in the way she conducts her personal life. She is provocative and vulgar, and occasionally downright insensitive and offensive.
But yes, she is also a champion for women of all ages, because she is the only one to have the guts to show them that they don’t have to fit age stereotypes.