This may work for Madonna-the-delusionist. Indeed, the 45-year-old wife and mother may have moved on permanently to floral prints, matching pumps, and a kiddie book that is rooted, Madonna is quick to emphasize, in her seven-year study of Jewish mysticism. The rest of us, meanwhile, remain stuck among her true spawn -- little girls and big, Baby Britneys and Madonna-wannabes, who believe that exhibitionism is liberation, that the birds and the bees equal "hooking up," and, almost worst of all, that bra straps and navels are outerwear. Thus, has sexuality -- to borrow a phrase from the late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan -- been defined down, down, down. There's little mystery in it now, let alone mysticism.
No wonder Madonna hopes to protect her wee one. Which is precisely what many of us spend our own children's early years trying to do: We resist the extent to which sexuality, particularly female sexuality, has been snatched from its traditional time and place in human development -- as a rite of passage to adulthood, to marriage, to having children -- and grafted onto girlhood. The sexualization of childhood may not have started with Madonna, but under her pop influence, and under that of her pop descendants, it became pretty irreversible.
Madonna says she has no regrets. But neither does she appear to understand her own leading role in coarsening the culture against which she now guards her daughter. She does admit that what was cast as a crusade for sexual honesty in the 1980s and 1990s was really something of a scam. "Was I really trying to liberate people?" she asks rhetorically. "Or was I just being an exhibitionist and basking in the glory of being able to do what I wanted? I think that probably was mostly what it was."
So do I. But while she exhibited and basked and did what she wanted -- and grew wealthy beyond exaggeration -- she could always take shelter in an impervious cocoon of wealth and cultural influence. (The multitudes she influenced to bare all and do all, alas, had no such protection.) Now that she has moved on a little bit, wearing specs and writing children's books, maybe she is finally trying to hide her tracks. We know for sure she is trying to hide her daughter. Not that she can, of course. Which is too bad, because the real Madonna -- the notorious global persona -- isn't too savory an influence on anybody's growing girl.