This past week, I, like you, like everyone else on this rolling rock that has access to an internet connected device, and no doubt some who don’t, awoke to the naked image of Kim Kardashian thrust upon my weary consciousness for time eternal. As I am wont to do when rudely awoken by naked gleaming vaginas, I posted a snarky something-or-other on Facebook. An hour later, clamping the bench seat of my red cabin, many metres above East London in a cable car^, I wondered how many of my Facebook friends might agree.
Some did. Some no doubt ignored me for being old, out of touch with what the kids are up to, a fuddy-duddy pearl-clutcher or worse still, a feminist.
Most interestingly, by way of riposte to my snarky remark, my brother, father of a pre-teen daughter, replied in the comments with a picture of a near-naked Madonna. It was his way of putting my overly vocal opinions and me back in a tacit box (all puns intended). His way of reminding me that Madonna, my girlhood idol, did much the same as Kim, exposing herself for fame, for money and for notoriety. But Madonna, unlike Kornea Kancer, possesses more than a modicum of talent.
Dedicated to my dear brother, known in these pages as The Smartarse, I’ve moved up the scale of progesterone fuelled rage from snarky asides to full blown bra-burning filibuster. Hold onto your Earl Grey, she’s about to go postal.
In no way shape or form do I object to full frontal, or partial, or possible, nudity. I find the human form beauteous in all iterations of its myriad forms. That sentient cells covered in skin can be grown inside a sack of blood, hurtled at speed against a car bumper or penetrated by platinum pellets…and still ambulate, is nature’s (not God’s) most exceptional and exquisite achievement. I love necks, I love pecs and I love the fleeting flecks of brown I have dotted all over me, each little stain a memory of some day or other in the sun, swimming, my opalescent skin visibly excited by the cool touch of the sea.
Bums, large and small, male or female, seen wandering off into a bedroom door are like an invitation to open an envelope of lust and love and lusciousness and are best observed betwixt the pages of the French Rugby Team Calendar (NSFW). Bums…like boobs, perfect pairs of clutchable carnality.
I think boobs are at their very best when unctuously spilling over the hardened pearl encrusted line of a bodice, something about the hard and the soft, the juxtaposition of stiffened tissue and soft, creamy white flesh. Maybe its my unnatural obsession with Colin Firth in a cravat or a fatalistic obsession with Anne Boleyn or more likely its because the favourite photo I have of myself, taken through the excellent lens of the Art-sis-tologer, is a black and white of me, in a boned red corset, boobs front and centre like the prow of a pirate ship. I reckon I give good décolletage.
I think penises and vaginas need context to be beautiful. Context in the human form of Fassbender can make any appendage attractive c.f. Shame. Context in the painted form of Titian’s very famous Venus of Urbino is a pretty perfect depiction of the naked female form c.f. The Uffizi in Florence. But a portrait of a flaccid penis while interesting isn’t the most attractive thing I might imagine and a close up of a vagina à la Courbet is more biological than beautiful.
So I can categorically assure you that I was not offended, affronted or outraged by The Kountess of Krass and her Komical Kackle. My first actual thought was isn’t she shiny! My second was that her boobs were very much bigger than I had expected. In both cases, I expect, my questions should be addressed to the postproduction team rather than the slippery subject herself.
I wasn’t offended; I was bored. I was apathetic. I was genuinely uninterested in the breaking of the Internet by someone whose biggest claim to fame is her excellence at making very famous friends. And even that is most likely credited to her mother. #mommyknowsbest
Then my brother compared the grinning, slickened Kim to Madonna, mid-performance-live-on-stage-gyration and I was angry. Every one of my hackles rose, he had bated me with a thrown down gauntlet and I wished I were geographically close enough to throw something at his head. That had been an effective method of keeping him quiet when the three of us shared a bedroom. #wheresmycabbagepatchkid
It is 30 years this week since Madonna released the song that got her kicked off the stage in Rome by an outraged Pope. Like a Virgin was released when I was eight. I had the cassette tape; I had fingerless lace gloves and teased, frizzy hair. I wanted, more than a “Barbie and the Rocker”, a tutu/wedding dress, but had to make do with a frilled skirt and a singlet. Madonna, had there have been an Internet in 1984, would no doubt have broken it, but she didn’t, she couldn’t. Madonna had to work her very, very small, oft exposed arse off to get anywhere near the record companies and MTV executives that would be bought, sold and schmoozed into selling her songs or buying her highly risqué music videos.
Madonna is a trained dancer, she had been accepted into university to study contemporary dance but moved to New York to pursue her dream and take her first steps into what we now know to be world mad-domination. She has, over the past 3 decades, worked tirelessly to reinvent her image, she’s toured the world 9 times (except bloody Australia) and she’s directed a couple of atrocious films.
I agree, sometimes she gets it catastrophically wrong, especially the film bit. I can’t say I’m a committed fan of her lengthy political speeches about love and hashtag rebel hearts and how we can overthrow it all with naked raving. But you have to give it to her; the woman is phenomenally talented. She can bang out a damn fine pop song and put on a spectacle of a show. You don’t have to love her, but without her gyrating in a Venetian gondola 30 years ago, there’d be no Kylie, no Gaga and perhaps no Britney. #notsadaboutthatone
She also gave a big-eyed eight-year-old girl a reason to ask her mother what virgin meant. It was a conversation that would lead to a premature understanding of the sexual act but at least I wasn’t shagging Shane in the Grace Bros carpark.*
Ten years later, and arguably the precursor to KUWTK, Madonna’s Truth or Dare was her fly-on-the-wall documentary of the Blonde Ambition, “touching herself” tour. The now boring and largely uninteresting image of her fellating a wine bottle or being snubbed by a pre-Melanie Antonio Banderas is now so passé as to be childish. Sucking on a bottle isn’t half as shocking as seeing Kim do it for real in her pre-Kanye sextape. Madonna ogling Antonio isn’t half as schadenfreude-y (that really was the only word) as Paris Hilton’s incessant 140 character jibes at her former lady lieutenant.
Madonna did it first, she made a whole book of naked pictures, and she backed it up with actual skill. Gaga does it today and sings torch songs live with Tony Bennett. Fassbender goes full frontal but backs it up with a stellar performance in every fucking film (pun, yes, intended) he makes. I take my clothes off every day. If you don’t believe me, you can come over at 5am when I wake up to shower before another full day at work earning the living that supports me, some of my family and infuriatingly, still, after a year away, some of France. A living I earn based on the power of my mind, my body and my genuine desire to improve the lives of the people around me.
So yes brotherdearest, I was angry that you would compare the two. Without Madonna, Kim and her sisters wouldn’t exist. Madonna may have sung a song about a Material World, but Kim, her cheap handbag sponsorships, her wedding selfies and her Internet not-really-breaking-pictures actually made it real.
^This week my commute took me 90 metres above London. This Emirates Air line isn’t so much double-decker dirigible directed down under as cable car creek crossing
*A closet conservative, Motherbear was less concerned about us practising sex as she was us ever having it in ‘The Grace Bros carpark’
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