Madonna can’t go too long without saying some dumb shit, so she decided to run her mouth to OUT about how the gay community has it so much better than women do, which… oh man.
“Gay rights are way more advanced than women’s rights. People are a lot more open-minded to the gay community than they are to women, period.” For women, she feels, the situation has hardly improved since 1983. “It’s moved along for the gay community, for the African-American community, but women are still just trading on their ass. To me, the last great frontier is women.”
Coming from Madonna, the analysis seems significant. I ask her to elaborate. “Women are still the most marginalized group,” she says. “They’re still the group that people won’t let change.” To be a successful woman, she asserts, “you must fit into this box: You must behave this way, dress this way.” Immediately after our first interview, Madonna was snapped by a paparazzo upon exiting the building and endured criticism from The Daily Mail for wearing a “sheer corset, which left little to the imagination.” This seems to be Madonna’s point: Thirty-three years after she became, by her own reckoning, the first female pop star to make use of subcultures and to express herself “with an overt sexuality through her work” (“Before me, if it was anyone,” she says, “maybe Debbie Harry, but she was less overt”), Madonna’s costume changes are still attracting harassment from tabloid moralists.
She continues: “You’re still categorized — you’re still either a virgin or a whore. If you’re a certain age, you’re not allowed to express your sexuality, be single, or date younger men.” Now in her 50s, Madonna has become a cougar virtuoso, cycling through three male-model boyfriends under the age of 30 in less than four years. This is behavior, Madonna points out, for which “a man would never be questioned or criticized.” Madonna seems to be thinking primarily of straight men: Grand old queens with a taste for youth, like Liberace — or Stephen Fry — might empathize with Madonna’s predicament.
As a woman, I think I’m pretty qualified to speak on this. Yeah, we have a LONG way to go. Feminism is still REALLY important – particularly because of how badly people STILL react to that word. But to sit there and say that no group is more marginalized than women is absolutely fucking ridiculous, I’m sorry. Of course, Madonna’s straight, white and rich, so of course she can say something so ignorant without even thinking twice. I should be surprised, but I’m just not.
Time to retire, Madonna.
I think the whole article is pretty crazy, but I think Madonna is happily confused and not ready for retirement.
She should come down South gays aren’t accepted here one little bit. This is still the Bible Belt after all!
As if lesbians didn’t exist, or black lesbians didn’t exist. This is embarrassing.