Soldier of Madonna

For some, it is spirituality that leads their hands to do good. For others, academics maybe, their hands are guided mostly to the keyboard by the search for a provable truth. But there are other options to answering to a higher power. There is Madonna, who, by example, instructs the hand into the two-fingered self-salute and reminds me that being fabulous and self-satisfying creates sustenance of its own. It a lifestyle of over-emoting, over-accessorizing, over-thinking (comeon, remember the video for Bedtime Story?) and above all, over-crotch-action. That is why I consider myself a soldier of Madonna. 

I first saw Madonna when I was five; watching her coo in Venice and dance around with white gauze I knew that I had something to teach her about acting "like a virgin." For one, buck-toothed virgins hung out indoors and formed strong opinions about stars like Madonna combating Cyndi Lauper for the heavyweight MTV babe belt. I always went in for Cyndi; I had more in common with a wafflized haircut, rejection and dancing around with my friends then Madonna's bravado... But admittedly, I sensed that zany was utterly unsexy; there was an impossible part of myself that wanted to be more like Madonna.

But I was destined to still be in the V-club when I heard about another big "M" Madonna. I was 20 and attending art school when I learned about the “whore and the Madonna" theory- and this time, Madonna was cast as a mother and was very much like a virgin. The Madonna of my youth was off having limosex waaaay at the other end of the sinful spectrum. The premise of the theory was that women are often fallaciously cast in art and books as either being totally pure or total jizz-wranglers. While this binary is obviously laughable, it does play out in the real world. i.e. when pregnant folks get stripped of their sexuality because they are all of a sudden somebody's mother; or in the abject dehumanization of women who do sex work. As a solo-sex performer only I didn’t feel like I belonged anywhere on this scale either. I sensed that Madonna Louise Ciccone and I had again passed like femme-ships in the night. 

So now I'm in my 30's, doing what I love most: talking about sex and getting my masters in social work. I’ve learned how to walk in heels and bought myself crinolines, thereby reclaiming my sexy Lauper side. I've enjoyed my debased, sluttier side at night while teaching pre-schoolers by day thereby turning my back on any kind of purity gamut. And after feeling for years like I’ve been on a teeter-totter opposite from Madonna, I suddenly find that we seem to be on the same side (which ruins a teeter-totter experience, but who cares on such a sunny day?!). It is the complicated sexuality side, which declares that we can play many roles at once, at different times of our life, but ever-central is self-fulfillment

With that said, I bring my two-fingered salute up to the brow of my hat and offer all the Madonna’s in my head, heart and pants this flow-chart, just to keep it all straight.