19. Body talk
What are you allowed to say (and think) about how women look?
I wrote about Madonna. Some people were appalled at me — the words “sad”, “devastated” and “how could a woman write this?” featured in replies on Twitter. My crime: to have mentioned the fact that there has been some discussion about the fact that Madonna has plainly had extensive plastic surgery and fillers, and to wonder whether making TikToks about snacking on “big dicks” at the age of 64 is the Madonna I really want to see.
Some of the criticism charged me with double standards: “You wouldn’t say that about a man.” But Madonna’s extreme surgery and pornified self-presentation would be as notable in a man as in a woman. More notable in a man than a woman, really, because men are not under the same pressure to stay young and do sexy. If Iggy Pop had alien face and was telling everyone how much he loved to eat big pussies, believe me, I’d be mentioning that too.
Or perhaps I wouldn’t, because I’m not sure that I’d be commissioned to write about Iggy Pop in the same way. Bluntly: he doesn’t matter like Madonna matters. Madonna — her art, her image — is an index of the collective unconscious. There’s a reason dreams of Madonna are reported so commonly that they were once the subject of a book. For forty years, she’s been a pioneer of femininity, self-fashioning her way over the boundaries imposed on female lives. A two-way mirror in which we see ourselves.
When I was a teenager and Madonna turned forty, her Ray of Light era was a revelation to me, because it showed that midlife could mean reinvention for women rather than retirement. This sounds trite, but at the time, the understanding was very much that a women’s relevance dwindled with her egg supply: women in the public eye skipped directly from “nubile” to “nana”. That hasn’t exactly gone away (see Victoria Smith’s upcoming book Hags), but it’s no longer true that a female pop star has a hard upper age limit on her career.
No hard upper age limit, but still a hard lower fuckability limit. That’s what I think is most interesting (most unhappy) about 2020s Madonna. She’s refused to move into the “elder stateswoman” role. She’s remained on the cutting edge of pop, and pop in the 2020s is deeply imbued with the aesthetics of porn. Cyndi Lauper’s last album had a collab with Willie Nelson; Madonna is working with twenty-something rapper slash “sexual content creator” Tokischa. (And guess who gets more plays out of Lauper and Madonna.)
What Madonna is doing is pretty much untried: no pop star has ever attempted to negotiate growing old by simply denying it’s happening. This is audacious. Part of me admires this, because it’s impossible not to admire someone attempting an impossible thing. And a larger part of me is saddened, because ageing often informs great music. Johnny Cash’s Hurt and David Bowie’s Blackstar looked death hard in the eye and translated terror into beauty. Madonna is making music about shaking her ass — a subject I am very partial to, but not everything there is in this mortal world.
One of the things I love about being a Taylor Swift fan is that she’s made growing up part of her art, down to having multiple songs that use an age as a title (“Fifteen”, “Twenty Two”, “Seven”). As she gets older, more stuff happens to her, and she gets more interesting (in 2021, I wrote about my shameful excitement at the prospect of her becoming a mother and the music she might make about it). With Madonna, the opposite has become true. She can never acknowledge her maturity, because that might be interpreted as the decay of sexiness. The pretense of forever youth is a denial of female experience, a denial of female knowledge.
Let’s say I wrote the same piece about Madonna but I didn’t mention the obvious change in her appearance, the rumoured surgeries, the extensive commentary around it. That seems to me to be unconscionably dishonest: if the piece is supposed to fill in Sunday Times readers (not a population known for heavy TikTok use) on where Madonna is currently at, it is going to have to address her appearance, because it’s too remarkable to ignore. At the very least, the pictures require some explanation. The same wouldn’t be the case if I was writing about Debbie Harry, say, because Debbie Harry looks pretty much like you’d expect her to at 77.
But what if no one said anything about how any woman looks? In that case, there’d be no rationale for me mentioning it. There would be, perhaps, no rationale for Madonna to have altered her appearance at all. This sounds appealing — but it isn’t the world we currently live in. Beauty matters. Hot people have more status. And the collective definition of hotness runs through celebrities, whose image is part of their art, part of their presence. When a celebrity has clearly done something drastic to their appearance, the public is entitled to have feelings about that.
Here’s what John Jeremiah Sullivan wrote about Michael Jackson’s face shortly after his death:
On the Internet, you can see a picture of him near the end of his life, juxtaposed with a digital projection of what he would have looked like at the same age without the surgeries and makeup and wigs. A smiling middle-aged black guy, handsome in an everyday way. We are meant, of course, to feel a connection with this lost neverbeing, and pity for the strange, self-mutilated creature beside him. I can't be alone, however, in feeling just the opposite, that there's something metaphysically revolting about the mock-up. It's an abomination. Michael chose his true face. What is, is natural.
His physical body is arguably, even inarguably, the single greatest piece of postmodern American sculpture. It must be carefully preserved.
Later in the article, Sullivan reaches this conclusion: “We can’t pity him. That he embraced his destiny, knowing how fame would warp him, is what frees us to revere him. […] We bawl that Michael changed his face out of self-loathing. He may have loved what he became.” I don’t quite agree with this verdict, but I agree that Michael Jackson’s face means something — something about America and race, or something about Michael Jackson and fame, but either way that it’s an object made by purposeful choice, and so deserving of appreciation. Truly, the double standard here would be to say that a female artist’s body can’t be understood the same way.
Gimme, gimme more…
I’ve got a feature on a related theme coming up for the Sunday Times, so I especially appreciated Kat Rosenthal on the important question: “Is it racist to like big butts?”
I enjoyed season two of White Lotus intensely, and my favourite part of the commentary was the Portia’s outfits discourse. Terrible misfire from an out-of-touch production team or perfect alliance of fashion and character? I’m team costume designer on this one.
I’m doing edits now so it would be just great if the McMahon family could ease off the Succession shit and let me hit send on my wrestling chapter.