Ask the same question ten years later, and the answer would have been radically different. By then, the world had discovered another Madonna: a defiant provocateur from Michigan in a corset, a woman who said what she wanted, did what she pleased and inspired others to do the same.
This Madonna was a dancer. She was an artist who did not ask permission. And she was certainly not a virgin in the sense that centuries of religious and cultural imagination had attached to her name.
This week, Madonna turns 65. Across four decades in the public eye, she has been loved and hated with equal intensity. It is hard to name another artist of comparable fame who has provoked debates so passionate, so personal and so enduring.
At the center of those debates lies a basic misunderstanding of who she is. Madonna is often described as a dazzling star in the vast galaxy of celebrity. But that is too small a frame. She did what few artists, and even fewer female performers, have done: she changed the world.
Since 1984, when she nearly derailed her young career by revealing her underwear during “Like a Virgin” at the first MTV Video Music Awards, the press has repeatedly tried to reduce her to appearance, romance, sex and scandal.
Those words followed her for decades. They became easy headlines and cheap shorthand for people who did not want to look more closely. Yes, her life has contained both sex and provocation. But neither explains the source of her power.
Одягнена в Жан-Поля Готьє під час її туру «MDNA» 2012 року — Кевін Мазур/WireImage, через Getty Images
Madonna has never really been about sex. She has been about authority. Not shock for its own sake, but courage. Not provocation as decoration, but a woman’s right to define her body, her voice, her age, her faith, her career and the limits of what is allowed.
Madonna is a cultural disruptor. She dared to be many things at once: performer, songwriter, producer, actor, director, children’s author, muse and architect of her own image at a time when women were encouraged to stay in one lane.
She crossed social boundaries using words, music, the body and the stage as instruments of confrontation. She challenged the music industry, Hollywood, the Taliban, Vladimir Putin’s regime, the Vatican and other centers of power over sexism, misogyny, racism, homophobia and hypocrisy.
Because she is a woman and a pop star, critics have often dismissed her political gestures as opportunism or theatrical rebellion. But young people looking toward a future that seemed closed to them heard something else in her: possibility.
The writer Soniah Kamal first encountered Madonna’s music as a child living in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. For her, Madonna represented “pure, unadulterated, unprocessed sexual liberation” — and hope.
Hope that sexual girls did not have to meet bad endings. Hope that they could live long enough to tell their own stories. Hope that sexual girls could rule the world. And that, in fact, they already did.
Madonna’s fans know her story almost like a fairy tale. A middle-class girl from Middle America, with no professional connections in New York, arrives in the city and works — hard, relentlessly, without guarantees — to become the person she had imagined.
She did it without betraying herself as a woman or as an artist. When her first single, “Everybody,” was released in 1982, she was as astonished as anyone to hear her own voice coming from the radio.
The timing of her arrival was crucial. It was the beginning of Ronald Reagan’s presidency, backed by the first Republican-controlled Senate since 1954. The political and religious right believed it finally had the power to roll back the liberal gains of the previous two decades.
Women’s rights, civil rights, gay rights and the broader freedoms that had seemed increasingly secure were suddenly under pressure again. Against that background, Madonna’s world looked almost like an alternative republic.
Her world was made in New York nightclubs such as Danceteria, the Roxy and Paradise Garage. These were spaces where discrimination did not set the rules. Gender, racial and sexual diversity were not merely tolerated; they were celebrated.
Possibility was the key word. Humor was the password. Collaboration was the method. In that world, Madonna learned not only how to dance and perform, but how to see culture as a space where the rules of behavior, desire and power could be rewritten.
Матеріальна дівчина на зйомках фільму «Відчайдушно шукаю Сьюзан» — Бульвар Сансет/Корбіс, через Getty Images
Her early work, especially her starring role in Susan Seidelman’s 1985 film “Desperately Seeking Susan,” introduced fans to a place free from convention and restraint. There, a woman could be remarkable on her own terms, rather than becoming what society expected her to be.
That same year, Madonna opened her Virgin Tour with a message: “Don’t be afraid. It’s gonna be all right.” People believed her. A new generation of feminists was born — women who would later become third-wavers, postfeminists, rebels and the girl-power tribe of the 1990s.
But women and girls were not the only ones who heard her call to live without fear. By 1985, HIV/AIDS was killing gay men by the thousands. As the rhetoric of “God’s wrath” grew louder from powerful national radio preachers, men who had long been treated as outsiders were now avoided, shamed and abandoned.
Several older celebrities — Elizabeth Taylor, Joan Rivers, Burt Lancaster — spoke publicly and passionately on behalf of people living with AIDS. But in the lust-driven world of MTV-era pop and rock, defending people with an infection publicly associated with sex was not considered a smart career move.
Madonna’s world was full of gay men she loved. Some of them she would lose to AIDS. Gay men were among her first and most important supporters. She could not turn her back on them when so much of society was doing exactly that.
She chose to fight the AIDS crisis on two fronts. As an advocate for people with HIV/AIDS, she spread information about safe sex and raised money for organizations working on treatment, awareness and support.
As an artist, she used her work to celebrate gay life at a time when the dominant narrative was death. This was not an act of charity from above. It was an act of solidarity from within a community to which she owed a profound debt.
Madonna created unforgettable statements featuring beautiful, gifted gay and bisexual men, some of them HIV-positive. Among them were the videos for “Cherish” and “Vogue,” the Blond Ambition tour and her revolutionary 1990 MTV awards performance.
That night, Madonna and her dancers, dressed as Marie Antoinette and her court, stormed the Bastille of macho heterosexuality with a full, radiant, camp version of “Vogue.” It was not simply a performance. It was a cultural coup broadcast live.
At that decisive moment, she forced mainstream society around the world to look at gay men as she did: with admiration, not contempt. Madonna also helped gay men see themselves differently — with pride, style and a right to beauty.
Як Марія-Антуанетта на церемонії вручення нагород MTV Video Music Awards 1990 року — Френк Міцелотта/ImageDirect, через Getty Images
In the years since, her loyalty to the queer community has not faded. As Anderson Cooper said in 2019, “No ally has been a better friend or had a greater impact on acceptance for the LGBTQ community than Madonna. That is simple.”
Already in the 1980s, when Madonna was barely in her twenties, the press began asking when she might retire. Women in pop music were assumed to have an expiration date, and hers was supposedly approaching fast.
With each decade, the question returned with varying degrees of cruelty. In a 2017 interview with the writer Roxane Gay, Madonna called it sexist. “Has anyone asked Steven Spielberg why he’s still making movies? Hasn’t he had enough success?” she said.
Then she added: “Did somebody go to Pablo Picasso and say, ‘OK, you’re 80 years old. Haven’t you painted enough paintings?’ No.” It was not a complaint so much as a diagnosis of a culture that permits men to age into greatness while trying to retire women into silence.
Madonna is not finished. The battle against bigotry that she has fought throughout her career is far from over, and she still has something to say about it. Her art has never been only about dance, sex, fashion or fame. It has been about the freedom to live outside someone else’s script.
If her past proves anything, it is this: Madonna will continue to shock, inspire, challenge and entertain. But she will also continue doing what she has done from the beginning — expanding the space of possibility for everyone who does not fit the role assigned to them.
So today she deserves more than polite applause. She deserves recognition. Madonna did not merely survive the eras that tried to tame her. She became an era herself. And if someone still hears only sacred silence in her name, they have missed the point entirely: this Madonna did not come to be quiet. She came to reign.
