Single sex and the girl: meet Madonna, scourge of the Pharisees, defender of artistic integrity, exposer of Christian uncharity

National Review, August 12, 1991 by Joseph Sobran

SINGLE SEX AND THE GIRL

IN ONE SCENE in Truth or Dare - a documentary, of sorts, of her "Blond Ambition" concert tour - Madonna phones her father to ask if he's coming to see her perform. He says he understands her act is pretty "racy" and inquires as to whether she'll "tone it down" for him and the family. No, she answers; she won't "compromise my artistic integrity."

A few minutes later, we see that uncompromised artistic integrity as she lies on a bed onstage. The stage is dark, except for the bed. Standing beside her are two black male dancers wearing weird conical brassieres. As she sings "Like a Virgin," she vigorously massages her crotch, moaning and arching her back spasmodically. There's more, but you get the basic idea. The huge crowd goes wild.

Madonna is a genius at getting attention. Everything she does gets attention - her records, her videos, her movies, her marriage, her divorce, her amours (including a joke that she'd had a lesbian relationship with the comedienne Sandra Bernhard). When she showed up at the Cannes Film Festival with her hair dyed a new color, her face appeared on the front page of the New York Daily News. She has been on the cover of every magazine except National Geographic.

How does she do it? As she admits, she's not a great singer, a great dancer, or even - at least in repose - a great looker. She can't act. Yet she has the most flamboyantly theatrical personality since . . . well, who was the last one? Bette Davis? Joan Crawford? Tallulah Bankhead? Some people have what I can only call contagious vanity. You may even dislike them, but you can't take your eyes off them. Madonna is like that. In a country where people want to be liked (maybe even more ardently than they want to be loved), she dares you to hate her.

"Madonna is the true feminist," writes Camille Paglia, herself a sort of anti-feminist feminist. "She exposes the puritanism and suffocating ideology of American feminism . . . Madonna has taught young women to be fully female and sexual while still exercising total control over their lives. She shows girls how to be attractive, sensual, energetic, ambitious, aggressive, and funny - all at the same time."

Kink and Danger

SHE'S undeniably magnetic, but it's a calculating magnetism, a carefully constructed aura of kink and danger. If she seems to be shattering conventions, she's also there to pick up the pieces. One of her steamier videos, "Like a Prayer," shows her in a Catholic church adoring a statue of a black saint, who comes to life and kisses her passionately. She receives the stigmata, and there are burning crosses and things, and . . . well, again, you get the idea: a deliberate fusion of such themes as sex, race, and religion. These elements are combined in surreal montage, and the effect is eerie, shocking, Weimar decadent.

An even more explicit video, "Justify My Love," did succeed in outraging people, and even easy-going MTV refused to play it. "The video is pornographic," Miss Paglia writes. "It's decadent. And it's fabulous. MTV was right to ban it." But she chides Madonna for copping out on Nightline by pleading "her love of children, her social activism, and her condom endorsements." If you want to shock people, go ahead and shock 'em. But don't blame them for being shocked.

The trouble is that Madonna wants to have it both ways. (One problem in writing about her is that everything tends to sound like a double-entendre.) She clearly knows what she's doing, but wants to pretend she doesn't. Her calculation is shown in one sequence in Truth or Dare when her tour arrives in Toronto and she is told that the police are prepared to arrest her if she does the masturbation bit. She asks what the penalty is. She learns she'll probably just be booked, fined, and released. This, to her, is a cheap price to pay for the international front-page publicity she stands to get, so she goes ahead with it. The cops back down and do nothing. Never has the structure of incentives been so favorable to artistic martyrdom.

A similar event occurs in Italy, where she finds on her arrival that the Vatican has denounced her in advance. She holds a press conference, and says that as an Italian-American she resents this prejudicial treatment. Hers is no "conventional" rock act, but "a total theatrical experience." The note of pique sounds sincere enough, but she also knows that in her terms the Vatican has done her a favor. Madonna has a keen sense of whom it's profitable to offend and whom it isn't. She surrounds herself with blacks and homosexuals. She is heavy into AIDS education: "Next to Hitler, AIDS is the worst thing to happen in the twentieth century," she told Vanity Fair recently - a good, conventional, and convenient view to hold in her line of work. And when the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles attacked her for including the phrase "synagogue of Satan" (from the book of Revelation) in one of her songs, she apologized.

In the film, one of her dancers worries that his scene of simulated sex with her will hurt his career. "In this country it works the other way around," she answers. "The more notorious you are, the more you are going to work! Don't you guys understand that?" Indeed. Nothing is more conventional than the daring. In Truth or Dare, she talks nonstop raunch, bares her breasts, gets into bed with a naked dancer and whoops about the size of his organ (it's all right, he's gay), and much, much more.