Madonna is a victim of beauty standards she helped entrench in Hollywood
Tiana Lowe
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Over the weekend, Madonna took up the hobby de jour in Hollywood: proudly proclaiming herself a victim of [insert oppression here]. After making a nearly unrecognizable appearance at the Grammys, the pop icon took to Instagram to #ClapBack.
“Many people chose to only talk about Close-up photos of me Taken with a long lens camera By a press photographer that Would distort anyone’s face!!” Madonna wrote. “Once again I am caught in the glare of ageism and misogyny That permeates the world we live in.”
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Anyone can fall victim to an unflattering shadow in the split second the camera captures a shot. But the saying goes that the camera adds ten pounds, not ten syringes’ worth of facial fillers. Furthermore, any critics daring to question this near-billionaire weren’t doing so because she had the audacity to be a 64-year-old woman in public life. Rather, it was her refusal to be a 64-year-old woman — her apparent delusion that she has to have the cheeks (both on her face and below) of a 24-year-old — that elicited not ire but disturbance. And most glaring of all, the standards Madonna decried in her #ClapBack are the very ones she helped entrench in Hollywood’s beauty standards.
Nobody should expect or want Madonna or any other Social Security-eligible woman to revert to the dowdy, asexual reclusion of our grandmothers’ stifling generation, and a few injectibles to help freeze emerging wrinkles or refill the volume that was already there in youth certainly help a woman age gracefully into the best version of (to use Hollywood parlance) her authentic self.
But there are two operative terms here. The first is “age,” as in a process Madonna has never allowed herself to do, lending to her current circumstance. (Rather than dial down the constant sexualization of herself, as recently as the 2021 MTV VMAs, Madge debuted a naked derriere that looked a little more like the product of a Brazilian butt lift than a good month at the squat rack.)
But the second operative term is that which fits with the West Coast values of “self-care” and “your truth” — one’s authentic self.
Recall that before she was a bleached blonde Barbie-wannabee, Madonna was a brunette Italian American. Over the years, her nose mysteriously narrowed and shortened, her brows lightened (and nearly disappeared), and her lips inflated. And yet, Hollywood — keen to call everything from capitalism to climate change “racist” — refuses to acknowledge that there might be something a little bigoted about the notion that women require white skin, ski jump noses, and more traditionally Aryan bone structures in order to fit the industry’s definition of beauty.
Madonna is hardly the worst offender in this regard, considering that between faux-British accents and stints simulating a dominatrix, she doesn’t seem to have much of an authentic self except for one: whatever brand of sex Hollywood has wanted to sell at any given moment.
While old women and widows are thankfully no longer expected to cover up and run for the convent, perhaps there’s been an over-correction in the direction where an otherwise healthy, wealthy, and objectively successful senior citizen feels the need to repeatedly prove to the plebeians that she, defying gravity and biology, it is every bit as pert, down to her nasolabial folds, as a younger woman. Wouldn’t progress, away from the cloisters and averting the hellscape of Hollywood’s current reality, be embracing the audacity to exist in public, in defiance of public consumption?
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