Goddess: Inside Madonna (15 page)

Life in Madonna’s world guarantees pleasure without pain. Life on the street, however, is quite different.

Onstage or off, dressed in seductive costumes, Madonna is protected by bodyguards, burglar alarms, high walls, and a staff that isolates and protects her. “There is simply too much negativity in the world today,” Madonna has said, “to waste time on superficial appearances. All I’m trying to do is give the average or ordinary person some relief from that viewpoint or that reality.” Unlike her teenage fans, Madonna can dress and behave as she pleases without risk of being raped, hassled, or humiliated. Unlike her adult fans, as a public figure worth approximately $500 million, she has unlimited choices when it comes to love, motherhood, marriage, and divorce. While Madonna can act as she pleases in a protected and controlled environment, the average girl or woman who imitates her has many more risks.

Madonna’s video “Papa Don’t Preach” is another performance that is steeped in controversy as well as in double meaning. Costarring Danny Aiello as the irate father, the story is about his daughter, played by Madonna, who wants his blessing when she announces that she is pregnant and intends to have her baby. The most obvious controversy is that Madonna advocated single motherhood, teenage sex, and promiscuity; others saw the message as a stand against abortion. Anita Harris, a visiting professor at the City University of New York, on leave from the University of Auckland in New Zealand, whose field is the sexuality of adolescent girls, believes that the video was dangerously unrealistic for the average teenage girl. “Madonna never bothered to caution all the unmarried teenage girls that the character she played in ‘Papa Don’t Preach’ was not exactly realistic,” Harris explains. “After all, most young girls can’t come to their fathers to ask for their blessing or to ensure that they will have security and some semblance of a normal life if they choose to keep their baby. Nor did Madonna point out that in most cases unmarried teenage girls can’t rely on their boyfriends to stick around and presumably offer marriage.” Harris goes on to say that the problem she often has with Madonna is that she sends out the message that dressing and acting in a provocative way is part of women’s liberation. “If Madonna does that and gets away with it,” Harris maintains, “it doesn’t necessarily mean that other girls can do the same thing and be accepted and acceptable. If you’re a fourteen-year-old and you walk down the street in your town dressed like Madonna, you put yourself at risk. If you aren’t raped or assaulted, you would certainly get a reputation. The point is that you don’t have the same kind of freedom as a Madonna, who can do those things within the safe confines of her life. The girls I talk to would like to be able to walk down the street and wear what they want without being the object of sexual predators. They also want the right to have sex or not and not be hassled by men, but unfortunately that isn’t the case.”

Madonna has always had a much different view of reality when it comes to female sexuality and pornography. “Generally, I don’t think pornography degrades women,” she has said, “since the women doing it want to do it. No one is holding a gun to their heads.”

Madonna often forgets that material deprivation and drug addiction are other kinds of guns held to a woman’s head.

In many of Madonna’s other erotic videos, rather than watching a man toiling away at intercourse while women function as props or vessels for male pleasure, she has omitted the sole male partner and in his place used a succession of men or women, whom she, the protagonist, ultimately discards. By simulating masturbation, she also offers her female audience a new take on an old feminist message: a woman needs a man the way a fish needs a bicycle.

However, Michelle Fine, the CUNY professor, believes that young women are often unaware of female sexual pleasure. The message that Madonna sends is often lost on them. “I sit in on a lot of sex-education classes,” Fine explains, “and it strikes me that male desire is automatically woven in since all you have to do is talk about reproduction and you have his orgasm and his ejaculation. Her desire is never considered, which makes the discourse about female sexuality all about victimization, danger, or morality, but never about pleasure.”

“Like a Virgin” is an example of how Madonna plays with words and double meanings. In the video, she never actually says that she is a virgin in the most obvious meaning of the word, but rather alludes to being a virgin in the emotional and romantic sense. The boy she is singing about has managed to reach that secret place in her head and heart that she has never surrendered to anyone else. “Burning Up,” another video that purports to address female sexual independence, shows Madonna pleading with her boyfriend to treat her as an equal. But when he decides to let her drive his car, he suddenly disappears and Madonna ends up in the driver’s seat. In “Borderline,” yet another example of a video that supposedly empowers women, Madonna is discovered by a fashion photographer while she is break-dancing with her Latin boyfriend. When she embarks on a new career, the boyfriend is resentful and jealous of her newfound independence. There is a double message, however, when the character Madonna portrays suddenly realizes how superficial her life is as a superstar model and how much more meaningful true love and a good relationship can be. She drops the photographer and her career and runs back to her lover, who has apparently also realized where he has failed her. They are reunited in a pool hall where we see him patiently teaching Madonna how to play pool, giving her the respect and attention she deserves. In fact, throughout her show at Radio City Music Hall in 1985, where she performed these songs along with others, she seemed to be talking to the girls in the audience more than the boys. As Madonna touched herself and moved seductively around the stage, the message she sent was that a woman doesn’t need a man to enjoy her own body.

Madonna is not the only
female icon of the middle-class woman nor is she the first. Back in time, Mae West was everything that any good girl or average woman was taught
not
to be. She was brazen, sexually aggressive, independent, and original. “Every man I meet,” West once said, “wants to protect me. I can’t figure out what from . . .” Her rebellion found its way into the hearts of her fans as she represented the antithesis of the Hollywood star. Her power was in her strength, and her strength was in her sexuality. She broke rules and never had to pay a price, at least on-screen. She demanded pleasure and yet never made excuses for her needs. Like Madonna, Mae West walked a fine line between what was allowed and what was forbidden, forcing people to think about those so-called moral restrictions that society places on women.

Today, there are Roseanne Barr and Martha Stewart, two women who have also liberated the middle-class woman, although each addresses very different aspects of middle-class life. Madonna, unlike Barr or Stewart, does not talk about the daily realities of a woman, wife, or mother. Rather, she reaches the same audience by offering the possibility that women, unlike the sitcom wives and mothers of the 1950s, have an erotic potential.

While Roseanne is seen as a survivor, an example of hope for those women who have been diminished or abused by their parents or humiliated and abandoned by their men, Martha turned the drudgery of housewifery into an art form. Roseanne gets under the beds and behind the furniture, addressing the unspeakable such as family violence and bad sex, an example of the latter being when she said about her soon-to-be ex-husband, Tom Arnold, “What he lacks in size, he makes up for in speed.” Martha is the high priestess of the produce department, proving once and for all that Truman Capote was wrong when he said that the only difference between the rich and the poor is that the rich have better vegetables.

Roseanne commiserates with women on their sad lot in life while sending out the message that because women are superior to men, they should rebel. Realistic enough to know that she is the exception rather than the rule, Roseanne captures her public by acknowledging that even if they never reach the stardom and success that she has, they nonetheless share a big secret—that men are laughable. One of Roseanne’s most biting lines was to a group of militant lesbians who had criticized her for not addressing that segment of the women’s movement. “I don’t know why lesbians hate men so much,” Roseanne said. “They don’t have to sleep with them.”

Martha, on the other hand, arrived on the scene when housekeeping was fraught with both resentment and longing. Her audience started with the women who relied on television commercials to tell them which product cleaned the best, and along the way, she picked up that generation of women who were too embarrassed to admit that they also wanted impeccable homes as well as the ability to prepare gourmet meals. Martha showed those women that they could have it all, including the professional success, as well as a pride in homemaking that had been denied them for two generations. If Roseanne is a self-proclaimed “domestic goddess,” coining the phrase as a more palatable description of “housewife,” and Martha is the high priestess of produce, Madonna is purely and simply a goddess. She is the modern version of Diana or Artemis with the torch in her right hand, the protector of virgins as well as the goddess of the heart and the hunt at the same time that she is Aphrodite, the goddess of love, the more passive and traditionally feminine deity.

In a more contemporary version of feminism, Madonna is Dietrich or Harlow as easily as she is Marilyn or Carole Lombard. In fact, in the 1970s, Madonna would have been the ideal Marabel Morgan woman who wraps herself in Saran Wrap, a chilled martini in her hand, when she greets her husband at the door. In the 1990s, when Madonna’s book,
Sex
, appeared, the public was introduced to Dita, the fantasy woman who crossed gender barriers while assuring her public that a little sadomasochistic play was harmless fun. Whether Madonna is holding a martini or a whip, the impression she gives is that she is playing a role less for her partner’s pleasure than for her own. And yet, because she changes images as readily as she changes her own opinion, she also provokes contradictory reactions. In some segments of society, some believe she is a good example for priests to take vows of celibacy and withdraw into their monkish intellectual world to escape the temptations of the flesh and the devil.
Rolling Stone
honored Madonna six times on their cover less for her artistic accomplishments than for her unparalleled capacity to liberate her fans’ most erotic fantasies. Patrick Leonard, an old friend and constant collaborator, claims that what sets Madonna apart from other performers is that she has “shown that she can reflect her own life and sexuality in her art by making sure that her music isn’t something that is held at arm’s length.”

Like any heroine in an ongoing soap opera, Madonna sends her fans the comforting message that she has the same desires, fears, insecurities, and conflicts as they do. More than just drawing parallels between herself and her public, Madonna encourages them the way her mother nurtured her. She offers herself as an example that anything is possible and that any ordinary girl who works hard can get lucky and become a star. As the opening credits roll in her video “Like a Virgin,” Madonna’s singsong voice, imitating a heavy New York accent, explains away her fame by saying, “I went to Noo Yawk, I din know anybody, I wanted to dance, I wanted to sing, I wanted to make people happy, I wanted to be famous. I wanted everybody to love me, I wanted to be a star, I worked very hard and my dreams came true.” That message is one of the most important components of her success, because she transcends the usually distant fan/star relationship, replacing it with one that assures them,
I am you, you are me, if I can do it, so can you
.

Several events that occurred during
Madonna’s early childhood continue to have a profound effect on her. When Madonna was five, her mother took a photograph of her wearing her wedding dress. The picture of the little girl enveloped in the folds of white taffeta would become a harbinger of her inner turmoil and determination to replace her mother in her father’s eyes. After her mother’s death, Madonna kept the photo next to her bed. For years, it traveled everywhere with her and would haunt her as a symbol of loss, not only of her mother but of her father as well.

When she was four years old, Madonna had trouble sleeping and got into the habit of wandering into her parents’ bedroom and crawling into their bed between them. “My father was always against my coming into their bed,” Madonna recalls, “but my mother was always for it.” One of the strongest physical sensations that remained from those nocturnal visits was of cuddling up against her mother’s red silk nightgown. For Madonna, the softness of the fabric and the vague smell of her mother’s perfume would become a synthesis of the ideal woman.

Shortly after her mother died, when she was barely six, Madonna remembers having a “sexual awakening.” She had a sense that she had an absolute authority over her own body. “As a child I was always flirtatious,” Madonna has said. “I was one of those little girls who crawled on everybody’s lap. I flirted with everyone, my uncles, my grandfather, my father, everybody. I was aware of my female charm. I knew I had something powerful, although I didn’t know what to do with it. I was just very aware of it.” From then on, Madonna considered herself the primary woman in her father’s life, and for months after her mother’s death she would continue to wander into his room at night and try to crawl into his bed.

During one sequence in the
Truth or Dare
documentary, while Madonna is engaged in risqué “girl talk” with the comedian Sandra Bernhard, she tells her how she couldn’t sleep at night when she was little. “I used to climb into my father’s bed,” Madonna joked, “and after he fucked me, I went right to sleep.”

Melanie Klein writes in
The Psycho-Analysis of Children
that the “cause of her [the young girl’s] attachment to her father [is] being fundamentally affected by her attachment to her mother. Freud also points out that the one is built upon the other and that many women repeat their relation to their mother in their relation to men.” Klein also states that “how far she [the young girl] will be able to maintain her feminine position and in that position evolve a wish for a kindly father-image, also depends very greatly upon her sense of guilt towards her mother and father. Furthermore, certain events, such as the illness or death of one of her parents . . . can assist in strengthening in her either the one sexual position or the other, according to the way in which they affect her sense of guilt.”