Once again, Madonna is the subject, and women are the haters.
I watched her performance in awe. And like Lisa Rinna and the rest of the crowd, I got up and danced. Rinna, 63, told reporters she came to the VMAs for one reason and one reason only: Madonna. She even went platinum blonde for the occasion.
I assigned the MTV Video Music Awards, which aired on Sunday, to my Entertainment Public Relations class. They were to watch the show, review the PR narratives and highlights, and weigh in on whether or not it succeeded in reaching its younger target audience. These are college students, mostly juniors, seniors, and grads in their early 20s. When we discussed it in class, none of them trashed Madonna’s age or her clothes, and none of them insulted her. They just talked about how much they liked her performance. A couple of them said they loved seeing the cross-generational moment of younger artists on stage with an icon.
But women my age? What the fuck is wrong with these people?
I guess Madonna committed a crime, but I still haven’t figured out what the crime is. She came back to the VMAs stage for the first time in 23 years and performed a killer show. Then the comments started, most of them from women around her age. They accused her of wearing a diaper, of being on drugs, of being too old for everything from dancing to singing, to just being. It didn’t matter that she won seven awards, including Artist of the Year, Best Album for Confessions II, Best Collaboration for “Bring Your Love” with Sabrina Carpenter, and Best Dance, Best Long Form Video, Best Choreography and Best Cinematography for Confessions II: The Film.
And now MTV is being accused online of rigging the awards. People are asking how she could beat Taylor Swift and Sabrina Carpenter, and how she beat Olivia Rodrigo for Best Album. The theory is that young people don’t vote for Madonna, so MTV must have fixed it to get her on the show or to pump up the ratings. I guess a 68-year-old woman couldn’t have won all that on her own.
I wrote a similar story a while back when Madonna performed at Coachella with Sabrina Carpenter. The same shitty comments came pouring in like a busted sewer pipe, mostly from women. They went after her lavender corset, her vintage boots, her dance moves, and acted like she was a disgrace. So here we are again, and why am I surprised? I just expect better from women in my age bracket. Maybe I was hoping as I watched her win all those awards for an incredible album that it might finally prove she’s a force to be reckoned with at any age. I was wrong. It’s just another hateful shit show aimed at one of the greatest performers in pop history.
But the thing I’m so perplexed by is why any woman would care enough to leave the nastiest comments on every site that mentions Madonna.
And don’t get me started on Megyn Kelly, who did an entire segment on her show called “Madonna Is Aging Like a Deranged Person.” She went after the performance, the outfit, the dancing, and what she claims is work Madonna has had done to her face. She said she feels sorry for her, and that Madonna should take a page from Pamela Anderson so men would still think she’s cool. Kelly is 55, and her advice to another woman is to make sure men approve. Apparently one takedown wasn’t enough, so she went on Piers Morgan’s show the same day to do it again. She told Madonna to “stop trying to look 38 when you’re 68, because it only translates to sad.” She told Madonna to find a more empowering narrative for 68.
Let’s compare résumés.
Madonna is the best-selling female recording artist of all time, with decades of hits, tours, and reinventions. She just walked away from the VMAs with seven awards. Megyn Kelly got her big network shot at NBC that ended in 2018 with the cancellation of her morning show after she defended blackface Halloween costumes. Now she makes her living on SiriusXM and YouTube, where she can say “fuck” on air but Madonna can’t wear a corset and dance.
One of them built an empire on breaking the rules. The other built a career on punishing women who break them.
At least the women on The View got it right and went after the haters on air. Alyssa Farah Griffin pointed out that Madonna was being ripped apart for trying to look too young, at the same time actress Jasmine Guy was being slammed for letting herself age naturally. “You can’t win no matter which direction you take,” she said. Sara Haines said the people rage-posting aren’t exactly in a good mental state. Ana Navarro, 54, summed it up in three words: “Leave women alone.”
Go gray, you’ve let yourself go. Stay sexy, you’re desperate. Get work done, you’re fake. Don’t get work done, you look old. There is no version of an older woman these people will accept, other than one who stays home and keeps her mouth shut.
At first I thought it must be jealousy, and I was tempted to write “Jealous much?” on every vile comment, or what I was really feeling, “Go fuck yourself.” But I don’t really think these women want to be up on a stage dancing in front of millions of people. I think it’s more that they can’t stand that she’s allowed to, or that she can. I know plenty of women who stopped wearing what they liked and stopped dancing in public because somebody told them that’s what you do when you get older. You tone it down and age gracefully, whatever that’s supposed to mean. As far as I can tell from reading these comments, it means disappearing.
And the diaper comments, I mean, really. Women who age know exactly what they’re doing when they say something like that.
Maybe these women see Madonna as a threat because she stands for everything so many of them have decided to be against. They punish women for being young and for being old. The only exception is the woman who fits their idea of what a woman should be. I would guess that these haters probably are anti-trans, anti-LGBTQ, anti-anything that doesn’t fit the boxes they’ve checked as acceptable. Madonna has spent 40 years staying outside the box. She put gay culture front and center when nobody else would, and she stood up for people with AIDS when most of the country wanted to pretend they didn’t exist. Maybe the women tearing her down don’t have any of that in them anymore. Maybe they’ve lost their motivation, and they feel like everything should stop with them.
The strangest part is that the young women in the business don’t seem to care at all. Sabrina Carpenter did a song with her and accepted the award with her, and Charli xcx performed with her. They see her for exactly who she is. If you don’t believe me, watch the show and look at the young people in the audience dancing to her music. Nobody in that crowd was checking her birth certificate.
And then there’s Taylor Swift, the biggest pop star on the planet. She walked out of that same show as the most awarded artist in VMA history and went looking for Madonna in the theater so they could talk and take a picture together. These two go way back. In 2015, Madonna praised Taylor’s songwriting, and that same year Taylor played guitar while Madonna sang “Ghosttown” at the iHeartRadio Music Awards. Eleven years later, Taylor is 36, at the top of her game, and she still treats Madonna like the queen she is.
Meanwhile, the women in those comment sections chose the opposite, and I’ll admit I was tempted to do the same to them. I could take apart their profile photos, and believe me, I thought about it as I held my fingers in a tight fist. I could comment on their wrinkled faces, or their caked-on foundation, or their blue eyeshadow stuck in 1987, but what’s the point? I’d be guilty of the same thing they’re doing to Madonna.
Do people even understand who Madonna is? At the very first VMAs in 1984, she came out of a giant wedding cake in a wedding dress, lost a shoe, rolled around on the stage, and flashed her underwear on live TV. In her acceptance speech on Sunday, she said her manager told her afterward that her career was over. It wasn't over then, and it isn't over now. Forty-two years later, she's still getting shit for showing skin, and people have been telling her to cover up and go away the entire time.
I wish women understood what it means to put other women down, and that every time they do, they're agreeing to the same rules that are going to be used on them.
So get off the computer and go hang out with some young people, the loud ones, the queer ones, the ones with tattoos, the ones you’d judge before they ever opened their mouths. Or hang out with some of us who refuse to age by anyone else’s standards. Spend a some time with a few badass women your own age, and you might remember what it feels like to stop caring what people think. And the next time Madonna gets up on a stage, try getting up and dancing instead.
so interesting that Tina Turner never got the same bullshit
Yes! Let's hang out with badass women of all ages and celebrate each other! The only way to age well is together.