It was a women’s liberation anthem perhaps not heard since the 1970s. The same year as the tour, 1990, Madonna’s “Justify My Love” video was banned from MTV for being too sexually explicit. Author and commentator Camille Paglia came to her defense in the pages of The New York Times.
“Madonna is the true feminist,” Paglia wrote. “She exposes the puritanism and suffocating ideology of American feminism, which is stuck in an adolescent whining mode. Madonna has taught young women to be fully female and sexual while still exercising total control over their lives. She shows girls how to be attractive, sensual, energetic, ambitious, aggressive and funny – all at the same time. Through her enormous impact on young women around the world, Madonna is the future of feminism.”
But Madonna may have finally pushed public tolerance to its limits when she published her “SEX” book around when she released Erotica. By then, she was developing an antagonistic relationship with the press and took hits that most male pop stars would not have had to endure.
Madonna’s response to critics who tried to put her in a box?
A very unapologetic track on her next album, “Human Nature,” often cited as her best example of a woman in charge and holding a mirror up to society. The video was also sexually explicit.
Critics and the press seem ready to pounce anytime Madonna creates a new project, book, album or film. “Why can the press just not wait to hate Madonna at these moments?” wondered one blogger at ohnotheydidnt.com, when Madonna was being attacked—sometimes viciously—for directing a film titled “W.E.” in 2012.
“Because she must be punished, for the same reason that every woman who steps out of line must be punished,” the blogger opined. “Madonna is infuriating to the mainstream commentariat when she dares to extend her range because she is acting in the same way a serious, important male artist acts. (And seizing the director’s chair, that icon of phallic assertiveness, is provocative as hell.)”
At the turn of the last decade, the pop chameleon borrowed from the most masculine of American icons, the cowboy, and released “Music,” on the cover of which she donned a cowboy hat and western shirt. But it was the last track on the album that carried the strongest feminist message, “What It Feels Like for a Girl.” Here she appropriated lines from Ian McEwan’s novel (and resulting 1993 film) “The Cement Garden.”
“Girls can wear jeans and cut their hair short and wear shirts and boots because it’s okay to be a boy; for girls it’s like promotion. But for a boy to look like a girl is degrading, according to you, because secretly you believe that being a girl is degrading.”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jQeOpTWPBfQ
The wannabes are older now, in their 40s and 50s, but if you’ve ever been to a Madonna concert, you’ll seem them. They are women who still look up to their idol as a symbol of strength. Whether she’s singing “Jump” with lyrics about self-empowerment and sufficiency while prospecting a new relationship, or “Some Girls,” another empowerment anthem from her last album.
Producer and collaborator William Orbit said of the song “Some Girls”:
‘Here I am. I am awesome,’ That’s what it communicates to anyone, I am sure. She is just like queen bitch… We love her for that and she knows how to rule.
She certainly knows how to get [to] her subjects [and get] the most devotion out of them. I love to see that relationship between fans and Madonna. It’s a rare thing, so proactive and that song really sums it up. It’s got great lyrics.
