Madonna and Me by Laura Barcella Jessica Valenti Page B
Authors: Laura Barcella Jessica Valenti
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new.”
It’s also not surprising, considering the era I grew up in, that my own inner life’s work has paralleled my professional career, and that although she is much younger than me, I learned a great deal from Madonna.
By the way, back as a child in my grandmother’s backyard, a girlfriend and I actually got the three-year-old boys to show us how they peed. And we didn’t have to give them anything in exchange, except promise that we wouldn’t tell their parents. Sometimes speaking sexual truth to power just takes a big bluster.
My Pocket Madonna
Laura Barcella
MY FIRST LOVE, John, was a Holocaust denier. Of course, I didn’t know this at the time we were together. If I had, I never would have dated him. What can I say, I was blinded by college naiveté, his Buddy Holly glasses, and his well-worn Smiths T-shirt. I only discovered his penchant for bigoted delusion many years after our breakup. Looking back, I should have known something was off. Why? Because he never liked Madonna.
Not that most straight men I know do like Madonna. They just don’t seem to “get” the Material Girl—her mercurial style changes, her outspoken nature and penchant for weird sexual power dynamics, and her enduring resonance with modern women. But John was much more vehement in his distaste; he seemed to downright resent her, calling her nasty names and making ludicrous proclamations about her “setting feminism back hundreds of years.”
Whenever we’d “talk” about Madonna, we’d inevitably end up in a fight. Of course, I was twenty and desperately in love for the first
time. Back then, love meant drama (underlined, italicized, with a capital D): roiling, over-the-top passion, fire, and . . . fighting. Lots and lots of drunken fighting, about the state of us, the world, other people—and Madonna.
When I first met John, I was a college junior and a recently self-proclaimed feminist. I was immersed in writing, literature, and women’s studies. I screamed along to riot grrrl mix tapes my friend Karen had made me as I tooled around Amherst, Massachusetts, in my little white Honda Civic.
I’d dabbled in pro-choice activism since I was twelve or thirteen, attending rallies and sending the occasional $25 membership check to NARAL (I loved their cool purple bumper stickers). But this— this was different. Those riot grrrl bands, like Bikini Kill and Bratmobile, reached my rawest places, offering a direct retort to all the shitty cultural messages I’d internalized: that I was nothing without a guy; that I could never be too pretty or too thin; that sex was a sinister, scary forest where every woman was forced to play either Virgin or Whore. Add those crappy cultural cues to the fact that I’d been clinically depressed since I was a teenager, and the message I got was that I had no agency over my own life. That I would never be happy, serene, or free from the bondage of my own mind. Riot grrrl rhetoric spoke to my angst, dismantled the negative messaging, and fed me empowering ideas in their place. Music gave me hope—suddenly I wanted to reclaim my sexuality, scream about systemic oppression from the nearest Berkshire mountaintop, make zines, and write letters to the editor.
If riot grrrl was the AP course, Madonna had been the 101. My obsession with her started young; I was age six when she first flounced onto MTV, and I latched onto her instantly. I was a burgeoning music junkie, into everything from Tears for Fears and Samantha Fox, to Lisa Lisa and Cult Jam, but there was something about this twenty-six-year-old new girl on the block that hooked me
in a different way. After hearing my very first Madonna song (“Borderline”), I became a bona fide wannabe. She was just so . . . cool . (And supposedly she had a genius IQ! Not only was she cool, she was smart as hell.) It was love.
I memorized every lyric to every song, and I used my friends’ birthday parties as an excuse to dress like her.
It’s also not surprising, considering the era I grew up in, that my own inner life’s work has paralleled my professional career, and that although she is much younger than me, I learned a great deal from Madonna.
By the way, back as a child in my grandmother’s backyard, a girlfriend and I actually got the three-year-old boys to show us how they peed. And we didn’t have to give them anything in exchange, except promise that we wouldn’t tell their parents. Sometimes speaking sexual truth to power just takes a big bluster.
My Pocket Madonna
Laura Barcella
MY FIRST LOVE, John, was a Holocaust denier. Of course, I didn’t know this at the time we were together. If I had, I never would have dated him. What can I say, I was blinded by college naiveté, his Buddy Holly glasses, and his well-worn Smiths T-shirt. I only discovered his penchant for bigoted delusion many years after our breakup. Looking back, I should have known something was off. Why? Because he never liked Madonna.
Not that most straight men I know do like Madonna. They just don’t seem to “get” the Material Girl—her mercurial style changes, her outspoken nature and penchant for weird sexual power dynamics, and her enduring resonance with modern women. But John was much more vehement in his distaste; he seemed to downright resent her, calling her nasty names and making ludicrous proclamations about her “setting feminism back hundreds of years.”
Whenever we’d “talk” about Madonna, we’d inevitably end up in a fight. Of course, I was twenty and desperately in love for the first
time. Back then, love meant drama (underlined, italicized, with a capital D): roiling, over-the-top passion, fire, and . . . fighting. Lots and lots of drunken fighting, about the state of us, the world, other people—and Madonna.
When I first met John, I was a college junior and a recently self-proclaimed feminist. I was immersed in writing, literature, and women’s studies. I screamed along to riot grrrl mix tapes my friend Karen had made me as I tooled around Amherst, Massachusetts, in my little white Honda Civic.
I’d dabbled in pro-choice activism since I was twelve or thirteen, attending rallies and sending the occasional $25 membership check to NARAL (I loved their cool purple bumper stickers). But this— this was different. Those riot grrrl bands, like Bikini Kill and Bratmobile, reached my rawest places, offering a direct retort to all the shitty cultural messages I’d internalized: that I was nothing without a guy; that I could never be too pretty or too thin; that sex was a sinister, scary forest where every woman was forced to play either Virgin or Whore. Add those crappy cultural cues to the fact that I’d been clinically depressed since I was a teenager, and the message I got was that I had no agency over my own life. That I would never be happy, serene, or free from the bondage of my own mind. Riot grrrl rhetoric spoke to my angst, dismantled the negative messaging, and fed me empowering ideas in their place. Music gave me hope—suddenly I wanted to reclaim my sexuality, scream about systemic oppression from the nearest Berkshire mountaintop, make zines, and write letters to the editor.
If riot grrrl was the AP course, Madonna had been the 101. My obsession with her started young; I was age six when she first flounced onto MTV, and I latched onto her instantly. I was a burgeoning music junkie, into everything from Tears for Fears and Samantha Fox, to Lisa Lisa and Cult Jam, but there was something about this twenty-six-year-old new girl on the block that hooked me
in a different way. After hearing my very first Madonna song (“Borderline”), I became a bona fide wannabe. She was just so . . . cool . (And supposedly she had a genius IQ! Not only was she cool, she was smart as hell.) It was love.
I memorized every lyric to every song, and I used my friends’ birthday parties as an excuse to dress like her.
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