Madonna and Me (11 page)

I had let fear keep me dateless in high school; I couldn’t let it happen again. I knew what I needed to do. It was time to “express myself.”

Penning my number on a napkin, I gathered my bag, hugged my friends, and walked up behind Hank. Shoving my napkin in his back pocket, I held my breath as he turned and grabbed at his butt.

“My number,” I smiled as I started to move past him.

“Wait, where are you going?”

“I gotta be up early,” I lied. I just wanted to seize the moment and get the hell out of there. “Give me a call,” I said, with more confidence than I felt, and then I jetted without a backward glance.

Instead of going back to the dorm, I wandered the campus, hoping I hadn’t made a jerk of myself, hoping I’d read his signals right, and hoping he was as interested in me as I was him. Arriving at my dorm an hour later, I read a message from my roommate scrawled on our dry erase board.

“Hank called. Call him when you get home. Any time.” His number was written just beneath it.

It worked!
As I read and reread the message, a confidence I had never felt before shot through me. That’s when Madonna’s photographs all made sense; I didn’t have to live by anyone’s rules but my own. It was time to
be
whoever I wanted,
with
whoever I wanted. I didn’t need to be white
or
black. I just needed to be me.

Hank and I ended up dating for the rest of the semester, then I moved on to a Latin guy, then a Filipino guy, another black guy . . . my swirls were endless. Finally feeling free, I let my naturally curly hair go wild; no more straightening. No longer was I invisible or trying to blend in. Whoever wasn’t down with my swirl really wasn’t down at all.

Gloria Feldt

 

 

 

 

 

FESS UP, LADIES. Is there anyone among us who has
not
used the power of her sexuality to get something she’s wanted? From the time we discovered around age one that flashing an adorable smile got us that extra cookie, or when we learned at, oh, age three, that showing the neighbor boys how a girl peed got us our preferred sandbox toys, we were off and running.

My father used to call me a prima donna, but I’m so
pre
-Madonna it isn’t funny. As a girl from the so-called “ungeneration”—the small cohort born during World War II who grew up among all the Rosies who’d Riveted during the war and then returned to kitchen and kinder of their own volition—I experienced adolescence in the no-choice and low-aspirations (for women, that is) 1950s. There was little or no sex education—no one even said the word “sex” aloud in polite company, and polite company was a rather important concept at the time. It was pre–birth-control pill, too, and according to the British poet Phil Larkin, “Sexual intercourse began in 1963.”

But I have a secret: Sex and its power were around even then. I’m pretty sure that’s how I became pregnant at fifteen, married to my high school sweetheart, and genuinely thinking I’d be living happily ever after behind our neatly painted white picket fence.

In 1958, the year Madonna Louise Veronica Ciccone, the third of six children in her fairly traditional 1950s Catholic family, was born in Michigan, my eldest daughter, Tammy, was born a few thousand miles away in west Texas.

Madonna was just a kid during my early years of marriage and motherhood, but I think her essence was there as a nascent but gestating metaphor for the social ferment of the times, when women were just beginning to break out of our girdled, socially prescribed post-war roles.

I was not the first of the second-wave feminists, but I did become an early adopter in the 1960s. There were several triggers that pushed me in that direction. First were the practical ones: those “Help Wanted: Female” ads that kept me from applying for the higher-paying “men’s” jobs I wanted, and how I found that even after I was gainfully employed, I couldn’t get a credit card without a man’s cosignature. I was ticked off! Like many in the burgeoning feminist movement, my “click” moment came when the personal experience of injustice converged with popular culture, such as the new
Ms.
magazine and the television sitcom
That Girl
, which illustrated another way.

Initially, I experienced my indignation alone. Then other young wives timidly whispered similar thoughts. When I saw emerging feminist leaders like Gloria Steinem and Florynce Kennedy on the evening news protesting the status quo, I felt they were giving political voice to our inchoate personal desires to break free of the old molds. Women began shedding more than girdles in our quest to live less constricted lives. I searched out the five other at-large members of the new National Organization for Women who lived within a
one-hundred-mile radius of my Odessa, Texas, home. And I became fueled with a passion to make sure my daughters would have more options and more opportunities than my peers and I had.

Sex and sexual power played a central role in my newfound activism, too. First of all, the average age of marriage for women then was nineteen. Like me, most women married young, either so we could have sex “legitimately” or because we’d already had sex. We realized
en masse
—and a little late—that this wasn’t the healthiest way to start a lifelong relationship. The divorce rate shot up. Though my ex-husband and I made a brave eighteen-year try, we simply didn’t have the emotional maturity to sustain a marriage during those times of roiling social change; we split in 1976.

I was like many other women who joined the 1970s sexual revolution after a divorce. We were chafing against the long-held cultural archetypes—still in place today—that viewed women only along a sex-saturated continuum that incorporated:

Madonna challenged every one of those female archetypes, complete with shocking costumes. She did it by taking on elements of each character at 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 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.

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.