ABSTRACT

Is Madonna a feminist? Gimme a break. Do pigs fly? There was a time that I didn’t know the difference between Madonna and Cyndi Lauper. (I have

these problems; it was a long time before I was absolutely sure which were flora and which were fauna.) Then, suddenly, I was reading and hearing about Madonna all over the place; and since I don’t live in a cave, I’d seen her videos. It interested me to see how someone who was decidedly not beautiful could nonetheless manage, for seconds at a time, to project beauty. I thought it was a neat trick. Certainly a marketable trick. I thought: She’s a sly one (I never for a moment thought: She’s quite a feminist); and that was that . . .