Madonna played up her sex appeal at the Metropolitan Museum of Art Gala in May with an outfit featuring duct-taped nipples and strapped-up bare buttocks. The social critic and academic blames 1960s disruptions of gender roles (and not the entertainment industry) for Madonna's and J. Lo's difficulty letting go of their youth as she chastises them to "stop cannibalizing the young."
In December, at the Billboard Women in Music Awards in New York City, Madonna was given the trophy for Woman of the Year. In a rambling, tearful acceptance speech that ran more than 16 minutes, she claimed to be a victim of "blatant misogyny, sexism, constant bullying and relentless abuse."
It was a startling appropriation of stereotypical feminist rhetoric by a superstar whose major achievement in cultural history was to overthrow the puritanical old guard of second-wave feminism and to liberate the long-silenced pro-sex, pro-beauty wing of feminism, which (thanks to her) swept to victory in the 1990s. ADVERTISING
Madonna's opening line at the awards gala was edited out of the shortened official video: "I stand before you as a doormat — oh, I mean a female entertainer." Merciful Minerva! Can there be any woman on Earth less like a doormat than Madonna Louise Ciccone? Madonna sped on with shaky assertions ("There are no rules if you're a boy") and bafflingly portrayed the huge commercial success of her 1992 book, Sex, as a chapter of the Spanish Inquisition, in which she was persecuted as "a whore and a witch."
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I was singled out by name as having accused her of "objectifying" herself sexually (prudish feminist jargon that I always have rejected), when in fact I was Madonna's first major defender, celebrating her revival of pagan eroticism and prophesying in a highly controversial 1990 New York Times op-ed that she was "the future of feminism."
But I want to focus here on the charge of ageism that Madonna, now 58, leveled against the entertainment industry and that received heavy, sympathetic coverage in the mainstream media. Her grievances about the treatment of women performers climaxed with this: "And finally, do not age, because to age is a sin. You will be criticized, you will be vilified and you will definitely not be played on the radio."
First of all, lack of radio airplay may indeed hamper new or indie groups, but in this digital age, when songs go viral in a flash, rich and famous performers of Madonna's level fail to get airplay not because of their age, but because their current music no longer is attracting a broad audience. When was the last time Madonna released hit songs of the brilliant quality of her golden era of the 1980s and '90s? Lavish, lucrative touring rather than sustained creative work in the studio has been her priority for decades.
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