No one embodies this hideous transformation more than Madonna. She blasted onto the scene when I was a girl of 7 or 8. Before that, I had seen something of the original punk culture — my dad liked to hang out in a bar called Grassroots Tavern on St Mark’s Place in the East Village, and he took me along with him sometimes. One of my earliest memories is of that dark, smelly bar and the scary-looking punks with their spiky hair and pins in their faces. I couldn’t have been more than 5 years old, and I did not like it.
So Madonna’s much more aesthetically pleasing and softer version of punk removed all the ugliness and danger, and kept the the newness, the edge, the sense that you were seeing something a little bit transgressive, but firmly bounded within beauty norms. Fun, not frightening. Watch her 1983 video Borderline and tell me you aren’t charmed. Madonna had a mesmerising, Old-World beauty and a very American, urban, modern aesthetic. The combination was pretty intoxicating. And most of all, she was young. Her sexy insouciance fit the season of life she was in, and gave me — two decades her junior — a sense of thrilling anticipation of the power that awaited me, when it would be my turn to be a young, sexy woman out in the world. I still have enormous affection for that sweet season of my girlhood and the role Madonna’s songs and videos played in it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rSaC-YbSDpoToday, Madonna looks like a beast from the pits of hell. And I am a middle aged woman who can’t help but see the horror that has come from our wholesale abandonment of traditional female life stages, from maiden to crone, and a total debasement of natural female beauty.