Not Your Grandma
We didn't get old. You just got boring.
Some people cannot stand to watch a woman refuse to disappear on schedule. Madonna is just the latest reminder.
Two weeks later, the hate is still coming because she showed up at Coachella in the same boots and corset she wore during Confessions on a Dance Floor twenty years ago. She joined Sabrina Carpenter for “Vogue” and “Like a Prayer,” and announced a new album in front of millions of people. She called it a full circle moment.
Predictably, the internet lost its mind in two directions at once. Half the world was on fire with joy while the other half was typing “grandma” into comment sections like it was an insult that meant something. She was dressed too young, they said. She should know better. Apparently, there’s a point at which a woman is supposed to surrender the corset, leave the stage to someone younger, and go away grateful to be someone’s version of alive, but out of the spotlight. In other words, age gracefully.
What a fucking disgrace.
The praise wasn't much better. People marveled that Madonna could get up from a kneeling position without help. That's the bar. That's what we're celebrating now. A woman on her knees getting back up and everyone acting like it's a miracle.
What pisses me off most about this Madonna backlash is that I spent years in the music business and I can tell you that nothing has changed. Aging was always a privilege reserved for men. It was perfectly fine for some decrepit male rock star to parade around with a teenager on his arm, tight pants showing every wilted, sagging inch of him.
And God forbid a woman put on a few pounds. It didn’t matter that Ann Wilson of Heart could sing as well as, if not better than, Robert Plant. During the MTV years, Ann’s weight gain became everyone’s obsession. The record label pressured her to lose weight but until she did, they came up with a solution. Hide her behind gigantic amplifiers. Amps stacked in front of a woman with one of the greatest voices in rock history because she wasn’t thin enough to deserve being front and center.
Mick Jagger, 82, is praised for his stamina and dance moves. But Madonna? Please.
Madonna didn't get to where she is by pretending the rules didn't exist. She got there by refusing to follow them. When she accepted Billboard's Woman of the Year award, in 2016, she explained exactly what those rules are:
There are no rules — if you’re a boy. If you’re a girl, you have to play the game. What is that game? You are allowed to be pretty and cute and sexy. But don’t act too smart. Don’t have an opinion. Don’t have an opinion that is out of line with the status quo, at least. You are allowed to be objectified by men and dress like a slut, but don’t own your sluttiness. And do not, I repeat, do not, share your own sexual fantasies with the world.
Here’s what I saw on the stage at Coachella at home dancing to “Vogue” in my lace underwear. I saw an icon who still has something to say, still has a killer body, and still shows up in the same boots she wore twenty years ago. Why? Because she can. It wasn’t for your nostalgia or your approval. She performed with someone less than half her age on her own terms, with a new album coming out and zero fucks available for anyone who has a problem with that. Imagine having that kind of confidence. The haters can’t because they’d rather hide behind a screen name, dragging down a woman who hasn’t thought about them once in her entire fabulous life.
And the “grandma” comments were never really about her age. They’re about the rage people feel when a woman refuses to put on the age appropriate costume they’ve picked out for her. You know, the gardening gloves, the sensible shoes, the granny panties. The “grandma” comment is jealousy dressed up as a dress code violation.
I know this because I’ve faced my own criticism. I dress the way I do because it’s who I am and who I’ve always been. A Betsey Johnson dress, the leather jacket, the band tee, the boots, that’s not me trying to be younger. I've just never been anyone else.
My college students get it. They compliment me on my fashion, want to know where I found something, and then move on with their lives. Young people are too busy being themselves to worry about how anyone else is showing up. The only criticism I’ve ever gotten about the way I dress has come from women my own age, wondering why I don’t just wear solid colors or something “more comfortable.” I am comfortable. I'm just not their version of it. It's women in my own generation that have suggested I trade in my Manolo’s for Birkenstocks and my band tees for solid colors.
When hell freezes over.
It's fascinating that the harshest dress code enforcement doesn't come from the young. It comes from people who are perfectly happy with their own choices but can't seem to leave anyone else alone with theirs.
And to be clear, if a woman wants to let her hair go gray and live in comfortable shoes and linen, I’m cheering for her. Go makeup-less. Wear whatever makes you feel like yourself. That’s entirely the point.
What I have a problem with is the woman who made that choice and then wants to make it for everyone else. Age discrimination cuts both ways. Telling a woman to dye her gray hair is just as ugly as telling her to trade in her leather jacket. Both are just different ways of saying women are supposed to age on someone else's terms.
Nobody embodies this better or gets punished for it more publicly than Cher. The woman has sold over 100 million records, won an Academy Award, a Grammy, an Emmy, three Golden Globes, and a Kennedy Center Honor, and is the only solo artist in history to have a number one single on the Billboard charts in seven consecutive decades. And what are we talking about? Her clothes and the man on her arm.
Cher is seventy-nine years old, dating a man forty years younger, living her life exactly the way she wants to, and people are absolutely losing their minds. The insiders are always "so concerned,” always so conveniently anonymous, rushing to tell anyone who will listen that she’s “an embarrassment” or that “she needs help.”
Nobody said anything when Warren Beatty was doing exactly this for forty years. Nobody staged a wellness intervention for Mick Jagger, who just had a baby with his 38-year-old girlfriend. And nobody wrung their hands over Hugh Hefner, who spent the last decades of his life in a bathrobe surrounded by women young enough to be his great-grandchildren and was somehow considered a legend for it. Cher picks a younger man and suddenly it becomes a referendum on her judgement.
The math isn’t complicated and the bias isn’t subtle. An older man with a young woman is a trophy situation but an older woman with a young man is a cry for help that requires immediate media coverage and a team of concerned anonymous sources.
To the people typing 'grandma' into comment sections, Madonna fills arenas while you sit behind a screen. Cher doesn't need a man to survive, and she certainly doesn't need anyone telling her what to do. As she once said, “Men are a luxury, not a necessity.” She also said, "If I wanna put my tits on my back, it's nobody's business but my own."
These are two different women who arrived at the same conclusion from two different directions. Madonna put it this way: "I have never apologized for any of the creative choices I've made, nor the way I look or dress, and I'm not going to start."
Same.
Yesterday, Madonna and Sabrina Carpenter dropped a collaborative single, “Bring Your Love.” Carpenter is 26 years old and seems to have no problem standing next to a legend. Funny how that works.
Nailed it. And yes, what a ridiculous construct we still create for women after 40. Ridiculous. In every way.