Fucking with Madonna
How long has it been since you cracked your copy of Sex (trashy spiral binding permitting)? It seems like history now, part of the cultural detritus that will help youngsters who were born the same year it was published define, spoof and honor the nineties when they turn eighteen, serving something like the purpose that Brady Bunch lunch boxes have today. As I write this, Madonna is busy redefining motherhood—a logical next step after colonizing sex, perhaps? Over a decade after “Papa Don’t Preach” pissed off feminists for what they read as romanticization of teen motherhood, Madonna has done an ironically feminist thing: had a child on her own terms. (It’s okay, you see, if a woman does that after she’s thirty.)
By now it should be clear, if it wasn’t before, that Madonna is grappling with the same large issues as many of her female contemporaries: sex, economic success, gender roles, motherhood. She’s just living her life on a much bigger screen than the rest of us, and—as I said four years ago—living as a big screen, too. It’s easy to predict that little Lourdes will get more media attention than any kids since Caroline and John-John and that Madonna herself will be the most notorious mother since Joan Crawford, no matter what kind of mother she turns out to be.
For, among other things, women are not supposed to be as big as Madonna—as rich, as famous, as successful. The intense and intensely judgmental attention focused on her sexuality during the Sex years (or rather, year) is only the most prurient aspect of the public’s scrutiny, which results, in part, from the fact that Madonna is a woman of her generation: living (and cannily working) the disruptions of gender-role expectation, the sexual intensity of the plague years, the dissonance our culture still feels about powerful women, especially women who go it alone. She is the poster child of a transitional generation, a success story for those of us who aren’t sure what success is.
You can tell from the way I write about her that I like Madonna. I’ve followed her career fairly closely; I buy magazines to look at pictures of her shoe collection and Tamara de Lempicka paintings, identify with her exhibitionism and love of gay men. I think she’s sexy. I am fascinated by the dynamics of her transition from undiscovered disco habitué to diva to mother. She is close to my age, and I watch her to see how she will make the transition into middle age. I wonder especially whether we will want to continue to obsess about her sexuality, and whether she will continue to make it the site of her primary relationship with the culture. I knew Madonna’s prominence (and importance) had to do with sexuality before Sex—didn’t everybody? And not just her sexual charisma, which is very considerable; look also to the queer tropes, the campy and reverent references to sexual icons, the AIDS and safe-sex activism. Madonna’s agenda has to do with sexual politics as well as sexual entertainment, and she has entertained a generation for whom sex was intensely, inescapably political.
Will she maintain her sexual edge now that she’s a parent? Is our generation—is Madonna—ready to jettison the culturally enforced split between mother and whore? Here Madonna could exercise a rare, needed kind of leadership, if she dares. The media seems ready to follow her cheerfully into Evita-worship, leaving those pesky corsets and skinhead dykes behind. Will she play along as they try to construct her a new mature image, or stay stubbornly bohemian?
She’s as rich as Midas, for christ’s sake. We watch her because she has a more lavishly lawned playing field than any other woman alive. What will she choose to play next?
I wonder if any other reviewers of Madonna’s Sex bothered to stop reading to masturbate.
If I’m the only one who did, no wonder so many reviews seemed to miss the point. Sex was both excoriated as pornography and ridiculed for not being erotic enough. Few of the reviewers and pundits set to the large task of steering the public through the experience of Sex, however, were accustomed to writing thoughtful analyses of pornography. Or erotica. Or whatever the almost-explicit, heavy handful of dreams ought to be called.
If others had found Sex appealing enough to make them set the book aside and turn the bell down on the phone, switch on the Magic Wand for a fast buzz or unzip the trousers for a quick wank, would it be widely considered appropriate in a book review or opinion piece to say so? Would this be considered a plus?
I began considering these questions as soon as I switched off my vibrator. Sex and art make powerful, evocative bedfellows, but they don’t usually make for very cogent art criticism, largely because sex has a language and logic with which some are unfamiliar, to which many are hostile, of which many are afraid. These impairments hog-tied commentators as surely as Allistair and Julie (the book’s balleyhooed “lesbian skinheads”) trussed Madonna to her chair. But even those reviewers who responded to the eroticism in Sex didn’t tell me what I wanted to know: At what point did you put the book aside? What got you hard? What made you wet? Where did you insert yourself into the action, or what did you watch with the greatest emotion?
For me, it was the beach scene and its effortless lesbian seduction while the sun beat down. I had to go do myself because, unexpectedly, “The sky was the color of pussy”; because she parted the strange girl’s legs, vulva and ass-cheeks; and because I wondered if anyone could see them; and because I could picture myself, in turn, in each of their places. And because she was drunk, and I wondered if she’d be flushed with shame, when she sobered up, at what she had done; and because I wondered if she and the stranger would go back to the hotel, feed each other scampi in the dining room and scandalize the old rich tourists, and spend the night together fucking.
Of course, I had already paged through half the book. Doubtless each image had worked its own subliminal erotic spell on me. Sex is a wonderful advertisement for masturbation—in fact, it’s practically a primer. If you didn’t get enough of Madonna with her hand in her pants during the Blond Ambition tour, you’ll note with satisfaction that she celebrates the solitary pleasure throughout Sex. Her relationship with her pussy merits outspoken devotion and inspires a soliloquy about her youthful discovery of autoeroticism, which in turn reminded me of mine. With the gift of that long-unfondled memory, I had to put the book down for a minute just to sit and remember what it was like to be fourteen and crazy with the profoundest new pleasure of my life.
And the “young-Madonna” photos that follow, especially the picture where she’s captured spread over a mirror, show a much different side to her self-pleasuring than we get to see on stage or in Truth or Dare, where she’s a grown-up piston high on exhibitionism. Didn’t other reviewers remember the time when they first dared to prop a mirror up to watch themselves do it? Pity if they’ve forgotten (and, I must say, if they’ve never tried). Even rolling around on a Miami lawn, humping her platform shoe, Madonna is a winning ambassador for masturbation.
It’s hardly surprising that I felt such permission from the book. It moves me when someone tries to speak to sex, which is so overworked and at the same time so ignored, so skirted; it moves me more when the sex spoken to is not what I’m able to see every day. Even when the attempt falls short, my conversations with sex are bolstered to know that others try. I take it for granted that the interchange will be complex, often difficult, for nearly everyone—even Madonna. The ones for whom it seems simple are the ones, I think, who try not to engage very deeply in it.
Scanning the array of responses to Sex in print since shortly before the book’s publication, I found precious few people who wanted to see—or talk about—that complexity. Virtually all of them were prepared to make a loud declaration about what’s erotic about the book (not much) and what’s objectionable; if they found nothing to hail as erotic in Sex, it seemed, the shrillness of the criticism rose, as if they hoped and expected that their secret hearts were going to be captured in Steven Meisel’s lens. They made no secret of their disappointment, but they blamed it on Madonna, as if there were only one sexuality (instead of myriad), one definition of eroticism, and she represented it all wrong.
So many people desperately want an erotica that speaks to them. Or want, just as fiercely, not to be moved by erotica at all. When either sort got hold of Sex and found it missed the mark of their yearnings—or that it honed in too close—their bitterness spilled into the already cloudy water of that strange draught called “cultural criticism.” I drank so much of this stuff that I began to feel a little bitter, too—but not about Madonna’s spendy Mylar candy bar. About the furor.
I reduced this—at first—to “what you jacked off to” for a reason. Alternatively, I wanted to know what the critics had hoped to see. Each of us had a pornographic imagination (if we had none, why the hell were we reviewing the book?): a stockpile of scenes and images—or at least the rudiments of a filing system—that we mentally riffle through when passion takes us. Each of us knew something we found erotic, even if it was so innocent or romantic that my naming it “pornographic” threatened to sully it. Madonna’s internal photo album may or may not closely resemble the one she (and Time-Warner) sold us, and our internal albums may or may not resemble hers. All unwittingly, most of the critics of Sex told me more about their own eroticism than about Madonna’s. If only they had spelled it out, not done it by default.
Why? Because trashing other people’s sexual vision is so fucking common. It’s the highbrows’ lowest road. It’s the fascism almost everyone is willing to embrace. We do it to each other, routinely, lightly, viciously, in and out of print. Too many of us do it to ourselves.
I don’t know whether my sexuality very closely resembles Madonna’s. Madonna-lovers as well as -haters routinely project all kinds of things onto her, and I’m quite sure I’m no exception. I do know how strongly I responded to Sex. I know how extraordinary it felt to finally see a book that I could have purchased in a chain store speak directly to my lived and my fantasy sexuality. Fetishistic, eroticizing powerplay, genderbent, onanistic and exhibitionistic, transcending oppositional categories of gay and straight, the book picks the brains of those whose complexly lived (or dreamed) eroticism has few, if any, mainstream artistic representatives. Or maybe Madonna is, quite simply, one of us.
My friend and colleague Lily Burana was prepared to find in Sex a watered-down, hyped-up packaging of the sexual scene we document in our writing. She worried that the book, like Madonna’s video Justify My Love, “would just look like our home movies on a good weekend.” And it does! Neither of us realized until we saw the book how it would feel to see our sex reflected in the lens of mainstream culture. If anything, women like us—bisexual dykes with a letch for gayboys, leatherwomen, exhibitionists, whose sexuality cooked for years in the crucible of gay men’s porn but who search in vain for our reflections in the gay bookstore—are not even supposed to exist.
The message critics of Sex sent to me as a sexually adventurous female was sticky with prurience and judgment. Madonna was repeatedly called an exhibitionist—as if that were a problem instead of an inspiration, a pathology rather than a source of pleasure. I’m not prepared to judge whether there’s a dysfunctional streak to Madonna’s stardom (and frankly, I think it’s pretty unseemly for folks whose status as cultural critics depend upon others’ stardom to dis them for the qualities that put them there). I was prepared to evaluate the exhibitionism of Sex as an exhibitionist, for I understand the pleasure of showing as intimately as the pleasure of watching. Perhaps the problem here was simply that Madonna’s exhibitionism was viewed as an economic strategy and a personality disorder, not a flavor of sex. Then again, I had the distinct impression that Madonna’s sexual exhibitionism was precisely what alienated the crowd.
As Sontag said almost thirty years ago, there is only taste. The critics broke down to those few who embraced Madonna as artist, as icon and/or as object, while all the rest complained about being forced to look at so many pictures of her. It’s a shame that these people got the review assignments; it’s hard to get properly enthused about what you haven’t sought out but rather are paid for—having Sex for money, so to speak. And for those who did not in the least enjoy looking at dozens of pictures of Madonna, who feel at best vague distaste about the ubiquity of what scholars were calling “The Madonna Phenomenon,” how could these reviewers speak sensibly, much less with depth, to a consumer who wanted an albumful of pictures of Madonna naked?
The papers were full of pronouncements: “The book is callous, callow, contrived.” “It’s joyless, hard, cold.” “It’s not art. (Now, that Mapplethorpe penis—what design! What balance!)” While in the sex community, where thoughtful and creative sex art has a small but hungry audience, people amused rather than aghast that Madonna has been slumming with piss-drinkers and punk lezzies with knives flipped the pages and said things like, “Hmmmm. Nice try.”
I don’t even know, frankly, why I got so exercised. I already knew that my and Madonna’s culture vilifies sexually free women, S/M and leathersex, cross-dressed women (even if they are Isabella Rosselini) and naked fags. Public response to Sex was not surprising; the surprise was the book itself, spading up the underground into the chain bookstores for all the confused, fascinated, horrified world to see. “Mapplethorpe already did it,” the critics groused. Yes, but Mapplethorpe wasn’t a woman, damn it. On the streets, in the clubs, in their scarf-festooned four-poster beds, sisters are scrutinizing the terra incognita of sex with an eye toward mapping it both for pleasure jaunts and as a site for deep exploration. Most of the critics didn’t seem to understand (though a few clearly did) that Sex came with a sort of intellectual pedigree, or at least a recommended reading list. Most of them probably haven’t read Caught Looking or Pleasure and Danger. Would it come as such a surprise to find out that Madonna had?
Female and feminist sexual adventuring has produced its own body of erotic literature as well as theory. The media, which seems too invested in portraying feminists in general as anti-porn, even anti-sex, largely ignores it. These efforts to generalize and gloss a complex and fascinating debate inevitably stumble into the same pit Sex photographer Meisel did with his ridiculous claim that no one would ever have to produce another photo-essay on eroticism. No one person—or faction of feminism—has a full vantage on sexuality; there can be no last word to the conversation. Anyone who claims otherwise betrays arrogance, or how little they know, or both.
Sontag’s essay “Notes on Camp” should have been on the required reading list for Sex critics, and in fact perhaps an advisory label would have been in order: “Warning: Camp sensibility at play. Analyze accordingly.” Madonna’s whole career, up to and including Sex, traded heavily on campy imagery and camp understandings of gender and sex. “The essence of Camp,” says Sontag, “is its love of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration.” Many straight and feminist commentators foundered on this language barrier. But “Camp is esoteric—something of a private code,” Sontag continues, and those who think they have nothing to gain from sending up gender roles or hoary notions of “normal” sex will never crack it.
Further, “homosexuals, by and large, constitute the vanguard—and the most articulate audience—of Camp.” Without a grasp of queer aesthetics (sexual and not, campy and not), reviewers could not uncover either what was sexy about Sex or what Madonnaphiles were likely to love. It is a familiar affront that art produced through a nonheterosexual lens is viewed as a freak show. Only the hetero-hegemony of this culture, which expects even homosexual artists to conform to heterosexual themes, could produce a Vanity Fair cover story in which writer Maureen Orth, white-knuckled, informed us that “mainline heterosexual images are in short supply” in Sex. This amused the Village Voice’s Mim Udovich as much as it did me: To complain about the lack of heterosexual images, she said, “is accurate only if you don’t believe male-female S/M, sex with an older man, sex with a Botticellian younger man, biting a man’s ass, shaving his pubic hair, sucking on his toe, or sex with a man wearing makeup to be heterosexual.” (Of course, “heterosexual” can be such a difficult concept to grasp.)
Madonna’s queer community ties are not superficial, but neither are they simple. Rather, they represent a complicated web of reference, affiliation and appropriation. A gay community who would like to claim her puts more stock in the Sandra Bernhard factor than in her heterosexual relationships, then reads her gay male erotic references as rip-off: She steals from us! Another segment of the gay community simply responds viscerally to the images she mongers: She celebrates us! These communities would prefer to claim her only on their own terms; in the realm of identity politics, her identity is much too fluid for the gay community to view her as entirely trustworthy.
No, Madonna is a horse of another color, but only a culture of enforced poverty of sexual imagination would try to call her straight. In fact, the lesbian and gay communities’ issues, insights and agendas have spilled out of those communities’ never-very-effectively-enforced boundaries and are now largely out of their control, and the spin Madonna puts on sexual liberation is a little too broad for the National Lesbian and Gay Task Force. Enter the queer community, which has surely influenced Madonna’s thinking about sexual possibilities. Arguably, too, Madonna’s prominence over the last decade has contributed to the cultural conditions that shaped the rise of the “new queerdom” itself. Here it’s acceptable for girls to be boys and boys to be girls; here “lesbian” and “gay” are not the only alternatives to “straight.”
Madonna, in fact, articulates the phenomenon of the queer het, the ostensibly straight person whose heterosexual persona covers a much more complicated sexual psyche. This is hardly a new sexual profile, but historically closet cases and swingers have taken no inspiration from the queer community. (Do I need to spell out that bisexual, though the label resists cachet, is the most self-evident word we might use to describe many of these non-gay non-hets?) Everybody has a sexuality—in fact, some people seem to have more than one—and the gay community’s message has at last begun to gain relevance for other segments of the populace who think, “If gays can fight to be respected and self-actualized around their sex, so can we.”
Madonna carries her gay-bar inspiration into other sexual arenas, but like queers, leatherfolk and others, she’s determined to live to tell. (Even when Madonna’s songs themselves are anything but queer manifestoes, when we’re on the dance floor we pick out phrases that speak to us in the secret parallel language queers have always heeded: “Hope I live to tell the secrets I have seen,” “Papa, don’t preach,” “You keep on pushin’ my love over the borderline.”)
Straight men aren’t the audience Madonna aims to address; no wonder so many of them don’t like her. They’d be glad to fork over money if they felt she was looking at them, maybe even that she was styling herself with their particular gaze in mind. Ironically, though, the woman whose supposed pandering to men outraged so many feminists is really dressing up and performing for a mirror, and here again her queer and camp sensibilities get in the way of her being a traditional male’s traditional object of traditional desire. Look at the Brassaï-inspired photo spread she did for Rolling Stone, hardly a queer journal, where she was in your face with Weimar-era homosex and genderbend. No wonder the usual comment I hear from the straight-man-on-the-street is, “She doesn’t do anything for me.” If she does, he’s probably dreaming of kissing her shoes, like the lucky hunk in Sex.
Taking all this into account, perhaps it’s not so surprising that the other critics didn’t join me in sticking their hands in their pants. Who knows how rare and rarified this kink-soaked Madonnasex is, anyway? And thanks to our culture’s tendency to marginalize sexual difference, how likely is it the critics really want to help us find out?
Why am I an authority on Madonna? Because a ten-year-old girl compared me to her, that’s why. More than one Sex commentator made much of the increasingly bad example Madonna shows the little girls who idolize her; if we can’t convince each other that sexy pictures are bad for adults, surely we can agree that they’re bad for kids.
But I’ve got news for them. I think kids like Madonna precisely for her sexuality, presented in strokes so bold that it’s recognizable even to a child who hasn’t yet been schooled in subtlety. When I was little, my favorite grown-up was a friend of my mom’s who differed from her in every conceivable way, and when I was an adult and viewed old photos of her, I realized she was an absolute classic fifties’ sexpot. When I responded to her, and when my ten-year-old friend responds to me—or to Madonna—we’re picking up on a vibe that resonates where hormones meet self-image. Who responds to eroticism more viscerally—and unconsciously—than a pubescent kid? When I asked my young friend and her pals what they liked about Madonna, they chorused, “She’s pretty!” Will they grow up to be Isabella Rosselinis in tweed coats?
I guess most grown-ups would rather they didn’t. But better that than Allistair, tattooed and knife-wielding, eh? How dare Madonna suggest there are alternative ways of being women? And how many little girls are clamoring for that news!
And if the little boys are paying attention, they will surely see on display some very alternative ways of being men. This is all bound to drive the Christian Family folks insane, but I am here to tell you that when queer kids stumble upon Sex, it may well save some lives.
I’m recognizing in myself what I saw absent in most of the critics: a willingness to let Madonna take me there. It helped that, for me, the territory was familiar: Sex is a language that I know and work with all the time. Dream, fantasy and image are staples for me as a sex writer and sex worker—throw in that Madonna pushes open communication (reread the lyric sheet to “Justify My Love” if you doubt it) and you have the basics of sex therapy, a parallel a few critics noticed—though, absurdly, they named Dr. Ruth by way of comparison.
And of course, though I found Sex a bold and evocative piece of work, I had criticisms of my own.
I wish Madonna had pushed herself all the way to the wall for the written segments in Sex, and with few exceptions, I don’t think she did. I want what she knows (which seems evident, at least in collaborative images) to be said in words as boldly as it was said in pictures. (For me, her words matched the pictures’ power only once: when her persona Dita said to her shrink, “Any time anyone reviews anything I do I’m mistaken for a prostitute.” Camp meets sex-radical feminist theory, and I couldn’t find a single reviewer who so much as noticed.)
Just as I wish the Vogue video had at least been made by Jennie Livingston, if not a videographer with roots in the drag balls (is that a naïve desire, or what?), I do sometimes object to Madonna’s tendency to gloss, to appropriate. I’m not the first to say this—Dave Ford in San Francisco’s lesbian/gay/bi The Bay Times, while agreeing that Madonna “consciously and vocally [has] worked an intense gay agenda,” opined that her “symbiotic exchange” with the gay community “feels worn out now.” Cindy Patton’s analysis in The Madonna Connection (“Embodying Subaltern Memory: Kinesthesia and the Problematics of Gender and Race”) addresses this as well, though she notes that Madonna’s appropriations also present alternative, useful images to other subsets of the culture. Indeed, I think this is what has made Madonna a phenomenon (for study, for cultural criticism) rather than just a wildly successful pop superstar—and, of course, she is that, too.
Madonna goes too far occasionally; Gratuitous comments about fat people might slip in an interview, but are offensively, weirdly situated in a work like Sex; likewise her homophobic attack in the Johnny letters might be understood as a hedge against really going too far. She rarely goes too deep; Sex’s “S/M and abuse” and “women and porn” glosses address weighty questions, and it was not surprising that most commentators viewed Madonna’s light touch as rather insulting. As reviewer after reviewer went ballistic, I thought, “I think I know what you were trying to get at, Madonna, but it’d probably have been better to just keep it to yourself.”
Mostly, though, I think she doesn’t go far enough. What do I want, the moon? In fact, I do. I’m willing to stay in close enough communication with my culture’s reality, though, to know it won’t be given to me by a star—and certainly not in a format I can buy over the counter in a chain bookstore. Madonna isn’t un-radical, but she’s also a pop artist. If she went “far enough” we’d never have been fed her work complete with media blitz and conglomerate-driven purchasing push.
I’d also have picked a much sexier dog.
If in the end Madonna’s Sex proves to be no more than the illustrated catalog to My Secret Garden (on second thought, make that Women on Top), it still accomplished something we see too little of: It made women’s sexual imagination front page news. It got some very queer images into the mainstream. It made us talk about sex.
The book’s cultural importance did not lie chiefly in its artistic dialogue with eroticism; its success (or failure) at portraying eroticism was not the point, nor were the flavors of eroticism it portrayed. The reviews of Sex illustrated at least one thing: Casting a critical (and, in most cases, untrained) eye on somebody else’s sexual vision is an endeavor doomed to fail. In the case of Sex, it failed so dismally that I suspect most commentators didn’t even recognize what a deep cultural sinkhole trapped them. “It’s not erotic” is a pronouncement so closely related to “It’s not normal” that I was as embarrassed as I was angry to see it repeated so often in print: The results of this Rorschach were all too clear. Americans—at least the book reviewers—weren’t ready to embrace this much pluralism.
Evidently, though, Americans were willing to go to the mall and plunk down money for a front row seat at the dialogue, which is where Sex’s true importance lies. Madonna, at the height of her cultural visibility, used her stardom and her own skin to dare us to look squarely at sex. Sure, she got richer in the process, but anyone who maintains that’s all she was trying to do has given the erotic content of Sex only a cursory glance, or none at all. Sex sells for myriad reasons: Our unfulfilled hunger and our curiosity feed into our desire to be moved. Madonna invented none of this; her sexual imagination clearly fires her work, and the public’s response to her is fired by the complex interplay between her personae, her willingness to explore sex publicly, and her fans’ and viewers’ own sexual yearnings and antipathies.
Madonna intervened, very splashily and perhaps a little gracelessly, in a cultural climate in which dialogue about sex is still expected to be hushed, prurient, clinical or—at its most outspoken—relegated to “alternative” venues. The importance of Sex lies in its mainstream accessibility, its superstar creatrix, its presence on the front page. Cresting a turbulent wave generated by our need to talk about sex at least long enough to coax a condom onto a penis, Madonna—who has been a high-profile safe-sex ambassador for years—had the nerve to talk about pleasure and variety, not sex partners and germs.
Hers is not the only voice in the dialogue, perhaps not even the loudest, certainly not the most sophisticated. But for a moment she had everyone’s ear, and what she talked about was pleasure. Fantasy. Exploration. Polymorphous identities. Fetish.
Add these to the vocabulary we use to talk about Sex.
