Madonna and Me by Laura Barcella Jessica Valenti Page A
Authors: Laura Barcella Jessica Valenti
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various times and twisting the stereotypes into ironic pretzels. For example, her signature bullet bra seems to me a perfect caricature of those chastely sweatered pointy breasts that bedecked 1950s movie stars—the ones who were never filmed sleeping in the same bed with their on-screen husbands. And the fact that she broke out with such a blatantly aggressive sexual persona during conservative Ronald Reagan’s presidency in the 1980s, when the political right wing was beginning to mount its crusade for sex-negative abstinence-only education, made me love her all the more.
The song “Like a Virgin” exposed the hypocrisy of American attitudes toward sex, especially about women’s sexuality and sexual pleasure. “Sex is nasty and dirty; save it for the one you love,” we were told in messages both overt and subtle, much as today’s abstinence-only zealots still give to youth. Madonna seemed to retort, “Sex is beautiful and fun; love the one you’re with, and make damn sure you get your fair share of pleasure while you’re at it. Oh, and if he (or she) doesn’t give it to you, give it to yourself. Ha, so there!”
As “Jbnyc” on the blog Madonnatribe.com writes, “Madonna sings of sex making her stronger, bolder, as opposed to sex . . . making her a possession of the man in question . . . [She] has publicly said that she was interested in holding up a mirror to society to show them that a woman can be intelligent, powerful, and sexual.” You can’t get more feminist than that.
Sexual power has always been the universal engine that drives human activity, whether we have been able to acknowledge it or not. Madonna is universal and timeless in that same way, a throbbing life force that makes powerful men fear the loss of control over everything they’ve held sway over for centuries.
Like many other women, I feel a kinship with her, despite the gulf between our eras. While she was producing sexually boundary-breaking music that encouraged women to embrace their sexual power and pleasure, I was busy breaking boundaries—both sexually and socially—that had enslaved women for millennia. Separating sex from childbearing and biology from destiny—to free women and give them the power to be whomever they choose—became my life’s mission. That includes Madonna’s freedom to be her amazing, authentic self.
While Madonna worked through the medium of pop culture, my work took me from political campaigning to three decades of leading Planned Parenthood, which provides essential reproductive health services for women, from pap smears to birth control to abortion and prenatal care. For nine years I was its national president, during one
of its most politically challenging times. And that led me to study, write, and teach about women’s still-complicated relationship with power in this unfinished revolution, for few of us walk as comfortably in our own power as does Madonna.
The quest for power—for agency over our own bodies and, by extension, our lives—is essential to human development. We all use whatever gifts we’ve got. When women haven’t had formal power (which has been throughout most of the long arc of history), we’ve found other, informal ways to extract mastery, however small, over our lives. And if men are gifted with greater brute force than women and have, through most of recorded time, been in the ruler’s seat, women have used their sexual attractiveness to effect the results they desire.
Only when you already have some formal or political power can you challenge the entire system and expect to live to tell the tale. Madonna could speak sexual truth to power because of how far the women’s movement had already come. When “Like a Virgin” debuted in 1984, birth control had separated procreation from recreation. It was just a short step from there to women demanding the right to sexual pleasure, and to flaunting their sexual power to get what they wanted—“shiny and
The song “Like a Virgin” exposed the hypocrisy of American attitudes toward sex, especially about women’s sexuality and sexual pleasure. “Sex is nasty and dirty; save it for the one you love,” we were told in messages both overt and subtle, much as today’s abstinence-only zealots still give to youth. Madonna seemed to retort, “Sex is beautiful and fun; love the one you’re with, and make damn sure you get your fair share of pleasure while you’re at it. Oh, and if he (or she) doesn’t give it to you, give it to yourself. Ha, so there!”
As “Jbnyc” on the blog Madonnatribe.com writes, “Madonna sings of sex making her stronger, bolder, as opposed to sex . . . making her a possession of the man in question . . . [She] has publicly said that she was interested in holding up a mirror to society to show them that a woman can be intelligent, powerful, and sexual.” You can’t get more feminist than that.
Sexual power has always been the universal engine that drives human activity, whether we have been able to acknowledge it or not. Madonna is universal and timeless in that same way, a throbbing life force that makes powerful men fear the loss of control over everything they’ve held sway over for centuries.
Like many other women, I feel a kinship with her, despite the gulf between our eras. While she was producing sexually boundary-breaking music that encouraged women to embrace their sexual power and pleasure, I was busy breaking boundaries—both sexually and socially—that had enslaved women for millennia. Separating sex from childbearing and biology from destiny—to free women and give them the power to be whomever they choose—became my life’s mission. That includes Madonna’s freedom to be her amazing, authentic self.
While Madonna worked through the medium of pop culture, my work took me from political campaigning to three decades of leading Planned Parenthood, which provides essential reproductive health services for women, from pap smears to birth control to abortion and prenatal care. For nine years I was its national president, during one
of its most politically challenging times. And that led me to study, write, and teach about women’s still-complicated relationship with power in this unfinished revolution, for few of us walk as comfortably in our own power as does Madonna.
The quest for power—for agency over our own bodies and, by extension, our lives—is essential to human development. We all use whatever gifts we’ve got. When women haven’t had formal power (which has been throughout most of the long arc of history), we’ve found other, informal ways to extract mastery, however small, over our lives. And if men are gifted with greater brute force than women and have, through most of recorded time, been in the ruler’s seat, women have used their sexual attractiveness to effect the results they desire.
Only when you already have some formal or political power can you challenge the entire system and expect to live to tell the tale. Madonna could speak sexual truth to power because of how far the women’s movement had already come. When “Like a Virgin” debuted in 1984, birth control had separated procreation from recreation. It was just a short step from there to women demanding the right to sexual pleasure, and to flaunting their sexual power to get what they wanted—“shiny and
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