This column in praise of Madonna has been written, you will notice, by a man and there's a reason for that.
Most women, particularly middle-aged women, have a problem with Madonna. In particular, they have a problem with her because she tries to keep young. They are anti-Madonna because Madonna is anti-ageing. But ageing is grim. Ageing is awful. Ageing is defeat. Madonna fights it, and that is good.
In particular, Madonna – whose new album is out on Monday – has always shown her disdain for that evil, misogynistic little phrase "mutton dressed as lamb". For her recent performance at the Superbowl, she wore thigh-high boots, a skirt that brushed her glutes and she danced around with pom-poms. What she was doing, in effect, was the same thing she did when she first appeared on Top of the Pops singing Holiday in the 1980s: having fun.
Madonna explained it herself in the film, In Bed With Madonna, which followed her Blonde Ambition tour in 1990. She was in her dressing room adjusting her conical bra and her dad was all worried about the raunchy parts of her act. "Why do you do it?" he asked and Madonna said: "It's cathartic. That's what my show is about." And it still is really, 20 odd years later: catharsis of the sexual, religious but mostly musical kind.
Which makes it curious that more women don't see that, or see the fact that, starting with the days of Like a Virgin and the lace and the crucifixes through the days of Vogue and those cone bras through to Give Me All Your Luvin and the pom-poms, Madonna has fought for their rights. The right to control – your life, your career, your body. The right to provoke – men, women, everyone. But above all the right we would all like to have: the right to do whatever the hell you want.
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