Do cover up, Madonna youre Lady

Bracknell now
Camille Paglia
Published: 7 December 2014

Reaction to Madonna's languid nipple-baring photo shoot for Interview magazine has run the
gamut from gaga to gagging. Is her grimly seductive portfolio a triumph for all women and a
powerful feminist statement (The Daily Telegraph)? Or do her topless photographs scream
new levels of desperation (the Irish Independent)?
I'm afraid I must agree with the online commentator at Billboard magazine who tartly declared:
Those who find these ridiculous photos hot are necrophiliac. The muddy, slack-jawed cover
image makes Madonna look as paralytically congealed and mummified as a Celtic bog body.
What is shocking about these ugly photographs is not their tiny nudity but their mediocrity and
monotony. Why is Madonna, a titanic pioneer of popular culture, tediously repeating formulas
that she debuted a quarter-century ago and that have been exhausted by a host of imitators
worldwide? She seems trapped by a past self and incapable of new ideas.

Madonna will doubtless produce more stylish or at least less appetite-killing photographs, as she
has already done for the Versace spring/summer 2015 campaign (after a mysterious exile during
which Donatella cheekily replaced her with Lady Gaga). But it is preposterous that so many
people, including savvy female journalists, evidently believe that the Interview spread is boldly
showing us exactly what the 56-year-old Madonna looks like. What pretty planet of gossamer
naivety do they inhabit? Heavy Photoshopping of celebrity images is standard industry practice,
taken in some cases (as here) to an extreme of deception. The visual landscape of contemporary
media is shrouded in a blizzard of lies. In America, snapshots of stars at awards shows are
instantly scrubbed via Photoshop in a back room before they are released to the press. (One of
my students had that job.) This flattering reworking is even dished out to favored politicians: the
chronically haggard, puffy Hillary Clinton is regularly buffed to a wrinkle-free rosy glow in liberal
American newspapers.
The magazines apparent insistence on artificially shaving 30 years off Madonnas face and body
does no service to feminism. The ultimate issue here is the media-fuelled nuclear arms race being
waged between middle-aged women and the young women whose dewy nubility they
vampirically covet. This is a war that ageing women can never win: cruel time conquers all.
The 45-year-old Jennifer Lopez is also caught up in manic age-denial. Still able to execute
complex dance moves that Madonna has painfully lost, Lopez has become a whirling dervish of
diva aggression, as in her bravura performance at the recent American Music Awards. But JLo
has diminished herself by her late-to-the-game twerking, which Beyonc made mainstream long
ago and which the clumsy Miley Cyrus has turned into a joke.
In Booty, a video that was released this autumn, a greased-up Lopez writhes and bumps with 24year-old Iggy Azalea, who struggles for breathing space. Despite its molten porn eroticism, the
video is pointlessly repetitious and the songs stupid juvenility unworthy of a major star: "Big,
big booty/What you got a big booty/ Shake that big, big booty".
What appears to have been completely forgotten by Madonna and her pop progeny, including
Lopez, is the brilliance of the great Madonna videos of the 1980s and early 1990s. They were true
works of art, vast in cultural reference and beguilingly clever in how they embedded sexual
display in a wider context. Like a Virgin, Material Girl, Open Your Heart, Express Yourself,
Vogue: in video after video, Madonna fused European art film with Hollywood iconography and
ravishing fashion photography.
Why has Madonna not learnt how to age well from Marlene Dietrich, her great precursor?
Marlene knew how to husband her own grandeur, which was magnificently embodied in her
performance (recorded for television) at the New London Theatre in 1972, when she was 70 years
old. Although she was barely able to totter onstage, Marlene looked and acted like an empress in
her svelte nude gown and sumptuous, floor-length, white swans-down coat (both designed by
Jean Louis). With a minimum of exertion, Marlene hypnotized the crowd with her magnetic
virtuosity.
Since the 1960s, women have made enormous gains in sexual freedom and professional
advancement. But intractable new problems have cropped up. Youth cult, another bequest of the
1960s, has obliterated the border between life stages that all prior cultures had honored. Mature
women once had near-dictatorial power over young women, whose courtship, marriages and
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pregnancies they supervised. This ancient protocol was still evident among the generation of my
immigrant grandparents from the Italian countryside. Modern career women have won
economic power but lost the social power that was once wielded by the dowager or grande dame
(typified by Oscar Wilde's Lady Bracknell), who cowed the girlish ingnues.
With motherhood having been demoted by feminism to secondary status, there is now no
distinct role or persona for the ageing woman, who all too often keeps anxiously measuring
herself against an impossible youthful ideal. The continuing sexual competition has become
toxic, forcing young women to flash more and more of their skin, especially their toned midriffs
where the mature tend to go saggy. It's time for ageing stars to lead the way by finding their own
idiom. Let the young be young, with all the beauty and vitality conferred by nature.

Camille Paglia is a professor at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia,

Pennsylvania
CAMILLE PAGLIA
Do cover up, Madonna you're Lady Bracknell now, December 7, 2014, The Sunday Times,
p. 3.