hen Madonna called out ageist reactions to her 14th album this month, I felt a nasty lurch of guilt in my stomach. ReviewingMDMA in 2012, I was mean about her decision to invest so much “desperate” energy into maintaining the impression of eternal youth, leaving her looking and sounding “exhausted and unhappy and making me feel the same”.
I was 36 then and Madonna was 54. I’d just given birth to my second child and wanted to weep at the number of playgroup conversations in which the women around me discussed the diets, workouts and cosmetic surgery required to restore their figures to perky, pre-pregnancy form. The female celebrities they saw in magazines seemed time-proof and they dutifully added this responsibility to their To Do lists.
It seemed to me that if anybody had the power to flip a big, stadium-sized, multi-platinum V sign at this rubbish it was the hero of my early teens – Madonna. She had reinvented herself so many times, inspiring girls like me with possibilities of freedom and flexibility of identity.
