Madonna and Me (28 page)

Which brings me nearly full circle to my purpose here, to Madonna.

Part of staying in shape, part of every boxer’s regimen, is road work. I force myself to run at least twice a week so when I do spar, I don’t collapse from exhaustion. Boxing is really about balance and
legwork, which is why Madonna would make a better prize fighter in real life than, say, a muscle-bound Stallone. I get bored of running the streets in my neighborhood, and when I have some extra time, I take the A train past Brooklyn into Manhattan, to Columbus Circle, where I can run Central Park’s loop. One relatively early morning, climbing Cat Hill on the park’s east side, I saw two runners approaching: a tall man and a small woman. The man wore shorts and a tank top. The woman wore sweats and sunglasses. Just before we passed each other, I recognized her face: Madonna, out for an incognito run with her bodyguard. I didn’t stop to gawk. I didn’t call out her name. I didn’t ask for an autograph. I’m a born-and-bred New Yorker, too cool to lose my cool over a star, usually uninterested in celebrities. What I did do was look in her eyes—what I could see of them behind her tinted lenses—and nod my head. She nodded back. Of course she didn’t know she was one of the catalysts for my Central Park run, but that moment of connection felt perfect.

Madonna striking a pose on a poster. Me striking a stance in a boxing gym.

I still have Madonna’s ring-post poster above my bed. My daughter, now eighteen, mocks my home-decorating technique of taping magazine pages to the walls (along with the picture of Madonna pretending to be a fighter, I’ve taped photographs of real female fighters sweating real sweat). Chava rolls her eyes in exaggerated embarrassment when I walk around in tight T-shirts that show off my bantamweight arms, or when she catches me shadowboxing in the living room, kicking the ass of whatever opponent is in my head that day. Sometimes I even throw punches to the tunes of early Madonna, when she was just a kid coming up.

Madonna Louise Ciccone. She was always more than a could-have-been contender. Like the best champions, she inspired millions. She helped shape me in my could-have-been years when I was young and felt I could take on the world. She helped motivate me in my
non-contender years when life as a single mom seemed a little too tough. And she got me to Gleason’s Gym. It seems Madonna has been in my corner all along—sometimes directly, usually tangentially, a song playing in the background, a line of lyrics in my head.

Maria Raha

 

 

 

 

 

I’VE ALWAYS LOVED badasses.

And before her strange adoption drama in Malawi; before her rather unwitting embrace of Kabbalah; and before those acts belied her supreme narcissism, Madonna was, in my eyes, a definitive badass.

Her first album,
Madonna
, invaded suburban radio stations in 1983, when I was eleven years old. I had grown up listening to Joan Jett, Pat Benatar, the Go-Go’s, and Blondie; I had always liked, respected, and dreamt of becoming like these women, whom I admired for their rough edges. In short, I liked women I was slightly scared of. And because of that, there was no good reason why I should have been so astounded by Madonna.

But I was.

That fascination had to do with the fact that most of the women prevalent in ’80s pop culture had bodies that didn’t look like my softening pubescent frame. The most admired women then were
perfectly sculpted and toned—they fit the standards of beauty that were slapped, crammed, and cramped into magazines, from
Cosmo
to
Playboy
. The women of
Charlie’s Angels,
plus Loni Anderson, Suzanne Somers, and Bo Derek—hell, even
The Dukes of Hazzard
’s Daisy Duke—were entirely too perfect for any preteen to model themselves after. Besides, they bored me. They preened. They posed. They wore completely uninteresting, mostly pastel clothing, and curled their gleaming, mermaid-like hair. Even ’80s rock stars, including Joan Jett, had angular, athletic bodies. But I was pale and freckled and sported insolent cowlicks; I had thick, short legs, wide feet, and broad shoulders—and I was always picked last for teams in gym class.

But Madonna seemed more like me than she did a celebrity. She had risen to infamy with a belly she wasn’t afraid of. Unlike the compulsive tummy tucking of Jane Fonda’s workout—and later, Suzanne Somers’ ThighMaster—Madonna was initially unapologetic about that extra layer of chub. Instead of pretending that she didn’t have it, she
showed it off
. She framed and bedazzled it with rhinestone belts and cropped T-shirts. She burst out of bustiers while my friends and I were busy trying to flatten our stomachs and hide our “flaws” from the world.

The more I was inundated with her early image, the more I found myself wanting to be brasher and less apologetic—
Charlie’s Angels
be damned. And to hell with pastels. I wanted the same bows, hats, combat boots, rubber bracelets, and ragged skirts that Madonna wore. I wanted to stick out more than fit in. Suddenly, I wanted to take up
room
—a surprising thing for a girl at the height of an (extremely) awkward stage.

As Madonna’s image and career evolved, so did my sense of self. I felt increasingly uncomfortable as I endured twelve years of Catholic school and attended mass every Sunday. I started to feel suffocated by unnecessary guilt and the church’s unwillingness to progress. At the same time, Madonna’s
Like a Prayer
era relied heavily on appropriated Catholic imagery, appalling my teachers and church leaders.
And in the face of the AIDS crisis, the ongoing abortion debate, and the resurrection of censorship in the late 1980s, that album and her insolence reinforced my own developing view of the Catholic Church as oppressive, patriarchal, and censorship-happy.

These views stoked restlessness in me. Luckily, I lived about two blocks from the Long Island Railroad, which shuttled me to New York City in forty-five minutes for about seven dollars. When I was seventeen, I began spending as much time there as I could. And it was then, when I began meeting more political, artistic, marginal people, when I started to witness true rebellion and began growing more isolated from the suburbs in which I had grown up, that I realized exactly how Madonna had gotten so far.

I would have had to be comatose to have missed the gaping chasm that existed between New York City and the suburbs. Obviously, this was pre-Internet: There was no easy access to non-mainstream culture. For me, mix tapes, magazines, newspapers, word-of-mouth, and eventually, long days wandering around downtown New York, introduced me to abundant, thriving subcultures populated by punks, drug addicts, poets, painters, activists, drag queens, drunks, and hustlers. I tripped over a world of progressive and experimental style, music, art, and politics that operated on its own, with open contempt for the middle-class suburbs that shored up its borders. I fell head-over-heels in love with outsiders and was almost instantly seduced by a city full of them.

But the more at home I felt in New York City, the more I grew isolated on Long Island—and the more Madonna made me
livid
. I wore clothes my peers couldn’t understand. I saw films they had never heard of. My friends tolerated me enough to ask for advice on new albums or stores that were located downtown. But almost no one wanted to hear about the drag queens and junkies that decorated the streets. In true suburban spirit, they just wanted to be one tiny hair past the Joneses. And outside of urban America, my friends were exactly the type to whom Madonna appealed.

Madonna’s suburban fan base could be fascinated with something that was new to them, something slightly different, without having to risk social rejection or venture into urban environments themselves. They could ignore the gay-friendly artistic lifestyle she flaunted, but love her music, which never strayed far from their comfort zone. Not only did the music keep her fans within their comfort zone, it also kept Madonna in hers. Marketable music isn’t a bad thing on its own. But compared to the passionate struggle and sacrifices of other, more marginal artists like Keith Haring, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Kim Gordon, her “rebellion” suddenly seemed calculated and cold.

The aforementioned people from whom Madonna lifted her image struggled for a lot less reward. For example, Haring addressed the political and social issues that plagued New York at the time—crack and AIDS being the most urgent. He painted in public, and both the messages and beauty were free. Not only was he making public art, he ran the risk of being arrested (and he was) for doing so. Basquiat spent much of his early life making public art, too—and living on the streets. Though musicians such as Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore and Kim Gordon have become icons of a different kind since the 1980s, they did so by holding fast to their vision, playing mostly for small (and confused) audiences, and tolerating the years it took for culture to catch up with them.

Unlike Haring, Basquiat, Moore, and Gordon, Madonna didn’t take artistic risks. She released love songs and dance anthems that might set the inhibited free, but she never really reflected the times in sound, like the hip-hop that flooded the streets managed to do. Unlike the other artists with whom she mingled downtown, she never addressed her generation in her music. Madonna only dipped her toe in substance when she sang about an unexpected teen pregnancy in “Papa Don’t Preach”—and reinforced the status quo when she insisted on “keeping the baby.” It wasn’t a rebellion that challenged the conservative culture of the 1980s, but it was
just enough
rebellion to tiptoe between shock and marketability.

Additionally, Madonna’s rebellion never veered far from the visual, and appearance is what American culture has always used to distinguish women from each other (and from the norm). She might have given an accusatory glare, but it could also be misread for seduction. Her reliance on assertive sexuality made conservatives uncomfortable while enabling her to remain sexually available, an ever-fuckable fantasy to a swooning—and paying—audience.

The downtown ’80s scene wasn’t the only wave she rode. The release of the single “Express Yourself” in 1989 kicked off a decade of extreme notoriety for Madonna. She looked part pinup, part bodybuilder, and ultimately this was less accessible to young girls than her earlier images. She was also plucking more pieces from other subcultures than she had done before. One case of this lifting was “Vogue.” While black queens were vogueing during drag competitions in Harlem, Madonna was making millions imitating them without the sociopolitical baggage that the lifestyle inevitably carried with it. Even her version of the dance was dumbed down: Harlem’s vogueing took definitive skill, flexibility, improvisation, and spontaneity. It used mimicry and humor; it had its own language and symbolism. Madonna’s version was humorless, rigid, simplified, static, and robotic. In some ways, her hijack of vogueing was a contemporary version of the white washed way the music industry promoted rock ‘n’ roll as “white” music, even though its roots were in black culture and blues.

But stripped-down choreography was her lesser offense. The Harlem male-to-female transgendered and transsexual community lived meagerly, fighting to “pass” as women when they could, partially for survival. They starved for their art and culture, and they risked their lives when they ventured to parts of the city that didn’t accept drag as readily as the subterranean scene they moved in. For example, many of the lead subjects in the 1990 documentary about Harlem’s drag circuit,
Paris is Burning
, either were murdered or died of AIDS since the film was made. Madonna, on the other hand,
moved safely about that world, sent listeners into a robotic vogueing frenzy, and barely gave a nod to the Harlem queens that not only inspired the song, but invented what she turned into a nightclub craze. Not to mention how she made more money from that one single than a drag queen from Harlem is likely to make in a lifetime.

For all the ways in which Madonna spoke to me when I had a more limited frame of reference for female rebellion, I could finally see past the veneer. She was a collage of b-boy, punk, bohemian, gay man, drag queen, old Hollywood screen star, and heretic, not the free-spirited, free-thinking badass I had wanted so badly to model myself after. Because Madonna only toyed with social exile without fully committing to it, she hadn’t truly taken
any
risk.

In the early 1990s, while Madonna blithely urged women to “express themselves” (to men, of course), a third wave of feminism bloomed—and so did a backlash. Along with other artists and activists, musicians such as Kathleen Hanna, Tobi Vail, and Ani DiFranco, plus bands such as Bratmobile and L7, faced scorn for their stands on abortion, reproductive rights, a more inclusive feminism that accounted for race and class, sexual harassment, and violence against women. The right wing deemed feminists fascists, hence the term “feminazi.” Evangelical preachers such as Pat Robertson accused feminists of being witches and baby-killers.

For feminists of the third wave, empowerment wasn’t as simple as finding a partner who would let them express themselves, as Madonna seemed to advise. Some of these women drew strength from challenging men perceived as allies for marginalizing women’s issues in punk and indie music. These women rebelled by using the stage to explore issues such as rage about rape and incest, and they withstood vitriol from both the mainstream media and the punk/indie scenes.

The most prominent face of this new DIY feminism, called riot grrrl, was Kathleen Hanna, lead singer of the 1990s punk band Bikini Kill. Hanna became a bull’s-eye for punks and indie rockers who revolted against the idea of feminist dialogue in punk rock.
Hanna, her bandmate Tobi Vail, and other women in their scene loudly encouraged feminist dialogues, inspiring hundreds of other young women. The media, of course, had a field day, boiling down feminism to simplified black-and-white terror tactics and quotes taken out of context.