My Dearest Darlings, I've written about Madonna before, click here to contextualise the below.... Once again the press have chosen to focus on Madonna though this time on the muscularity of her arms. The photograph above has featured on many of the tatty rags you purchase and is an unusual depiction of femininity, a femininity at odds with most of your own. Though to me what is interesting about this attention on the limbs of this undeniable Icon is what it reveals about the motivation of your sick and twisted culture.
For the male person in your culture strength is desired, preferred, celebrated, be it physical, mental or social. All versions of strength are it seems preserved for your menfolk. Indeed a man lacking in such qualities is apparently repugnant, a perversion of what masculinity should be. Homophobia is an obvious incarnation of this hatred, it is no coincidence that for any man to display what are considered to be feminine traits results in an endless stream of cultural hate and derision directed at the male daring enough to turn away from what maleness is intended to be.
It is no surprise then that when a woman of power chooses to embody such qualities of strength that your mostly male and occasionally female journalists are thrown into a version of hysteria. All around it is possible to hear that gasps at these daring images of Madonna who is apparently transgressing the natural personification of femininity, obediently you insist on expressing shock and even disgust at the audacity of a female display of physical strength.
The irony is that most of you teeter on the precipice of insecurity about how various parts of your body choose to move or not move. The desired physical condition appears to be a caricature of womanhood. The mythology perpetuated by your media is a simultaneously curvaceous voluptuousness woman who is immobile, hard and unwavering. A hardness that is impossible to achieve, most women gently quiver whilst they walk this is a normal female attribute, though in your contradictory notions of femaleness you battle the slightest bulge, the gentlest of undulation. All is a striving for perfectly solid impossible roundness attainable only on the immobile images of your magazines, which are airbrushed and tweaked beyond recognition.
This desire for hard unforgiving surface could be attributed to the objects your surround yourself with, your black mobile phones and silver laptops are contemporary objects of desire, they bring you closer to your loved ones through a filter of tough plastics and aluminium, a rigid cold relationship which enables you to momentarily cross distance and bridge gaps until you once again access the soft embrace of an actual human being made from glowing flesh, yellow fat and darkest marrow.
So as most of you embark on the futile pursuit of the impossible reality of perfect artificial hardness you chastise and mock Madonna who has achieved the goal and apparently taken it too far. She has left the acceptable and delicate domain of the female and entered the male universe of strength and power both physically and professionally she is a personification of control and empowerment something that you still are threatened by and fail to understand.
So My Darlings let the men be soft and the women be hard, be free to undulate and waver do not allow your complex and contradictory culture prevent you from being the version of the gender you wish to be.
With Love The Amazing Ms Coco LaVerne x