Free Madonna and Me by Laura Barcella Jessica Valenti

Houston, Prince, Tina Turner, and Marvin Gaye were other favorites.
    As a rule, I was not a fan of white-girl music. Cyndi Lauper was okay, but I needed an image of someone like me—someone with brown skin. I got lucky that Whitney did some Cyndi-like punky stuff with her hair and her voice in the video for “I Wanna Dance With Somebody.” If I weren’t made to sing her song “The Greatest Love of All” repeatedly throughout elementary school, which made me sort of sick of her, I might have put Whitney on the virtual pedestal Madonna took up. As it was, Whitney was the sweet girl next door. Skinny, brown like me, with a wild wig and a big voice, and a breath capacity that I could only dream of. She was having fun—the daughter of a gospel singer with a “safe” image for singing ballads about love and broken hearts. Madonna was bigger, riskier, and it seemed like she had less to lose as she wore corsets while singing about sex and seduction.
    In the absence of anyone else like her, Madonna became my standard for female sexuality, despite the fact that different rules apply to black women in the public sphere. Janet Jackson would come into her own later, but even her iconography was tamer. Her lewd expressions were more memorable for their suggestiveness (“That’s the Way Love Goes”) and for the unscripted Hottentot Venus-like performance (the Super Bowl flash) than for any purposeful expression of her sexuality. (See: “Let’s Wait Awhile,” “Velvet Rope,” and “Anytime, Anyplace.”) And Tina Turner was rugged and raw, tough and able, gritty and beautiful in her strength. But she was not saucy. She was not compelling. She was not scandalous.
    I loved Madonna because she spoke to the part of me that didn’t quite fit any of the sexual, racial, or religious scripts from which I was supposed to take my cues. It might have been the soul of feminism I
was gravitating toward, though I didn’t know any feminists in my Bronx hometown or in the shelters where we sometimes lived. There was a race- and class-neutral part of me that wanted to do whatever the fuck I wanted. I knew nice girls weren’t supposed to curse and that, at least in my house, they were supposed to go to Mass once a week and confess their sins. But the way Madonna sang, the way she had fun, and the fact that she kept on keeping on even as she was derided for it, has always inspired a different part of me.
    I can’t say for sure how big this part of me was, really, but it was significant enough that at age ten I pulled a Punky Brewster. For no reason at all, I cut three pairs of holes in the thighs of my jeans and laced fluorescent green shoelaces through them. To her credit, my mother did not tamp down these horrid attempts at defining my own style. Thankfully, she also didn’t take many pictures.
    With that one homemade attempt to change my physical image, I was trying to be free of definitions of womanhood that I wasn’t even fully aware of yet. Madonna circumvented those definitions. Despite the fact that she couldn’t sing that well and wasn’t that strong of a dancer, she seemed ultimately cool to me because she was disavowing herself of all the things I’d thought white women were supposed to do and be. She was outside all the pre-existing scripts—she hung out with hot Latino and black gay boys, mostly. She made “vogueing,” the popular practice in which predominantly African American and Latino gay men dressed in drag and froze in model-like poses, a worldwide sensation (even though it was made moderately famous by the documentary “Paris Is Burning” a year before her song came out). And she wore, well, hardly anything.
    Her skimpy outfits (or lack of them) stood out to me as I slowly, painfully grew out of being a tomboy. At that age, my awareness of my body and other women’s bodies became more like an obsession. I wanted breasts, but I was flat-chested. I had no curves to speak of. I could sing, but I couldn’t