Madonna's Hypersexual 90s

I saw about three seconds of the “Erotica” video and was convinced that it was actual footage of Hell. I was also quite sure that I’d go to Hell for having seen it at all. The Madonna I knew from Dick Tracy- the first movie I’d ever seen in a theater was a Madonna movie, a fact portentous of my future homosexuality- was there, but she’d transformed into a dark, threatening spectre with slicked-back hair, raccoon eye makeup, a black mask, a gold tooth, and a riding crop. For the majority of the video she was in a mysterious, dimly lit, curtained room. Her voice was smoky and guttural, a far cry from the Minnie Mouse squeal she’d become famous for years before. Through an assemblage of stylishly grainy footage evoking the Warhol-Morrissey collaborations of the sixties and early seventies, I saw her in a multitude of sexual scenarios, always nude, cavorting with men or women or both, tied up in bondage, mouth gagged, feet in stirrups, smoking the ubiquitous cigarette. At that age I didn’t even know what sex was and had an idea that babies were conceived by kissing, but I knew that nudity was bad, and that Madonna was bad, and that a nude Madonna was the worst thing of all.

My mother explicitly forbade me from looking at Madonna in any context aside from Dick Tracy, which was deemed acceptable since her presence was kept to PG-minimum. She had this bizarre idea that Madonna had a penchant for urinating on stage- an urban legend that I haven’t found corroborated in my exhaustive Google searches- and she frequently referred to her as nasty and not nice. Ironically she would defend Michael Jackson to the end, and regarded his crotch-grabbing as evidence of his idiosyncratic talent, not at all like Madonna’s vulgar exhibitionism. As a result of all this hype I only gained the courage to actually listen to Madonna when I was fourteen or fifteen, and by then my fear of holy repercussion had dissipated and been replaced by a new anxiety: that listening to Madonna was simply too gay. I was gay, but I wasn’t that gay, so I countered the occasional Madonna listen with a barrage of hyper-masculine rock music, in the hope that it’d keep me from becoming the queen I secretly knew I was. It was a slippery slope to Streisand and AIDS, and I didn’t want to go down it.

Though she had always been known for her vulgarity, Madonna had been on a one-woman sexual rampage since approximately 1990, when she released her breathy black-and-white soft-porn music video for “Justify My Love.” It had been promptly banned by MTV, which catapulted it to enormous success as the first widely released music video single. In it, she is a lingerie-clad Brigitte Bardot type in a French hotel, witnessing and occasionally participating in a pansexual orgy with sadomasochistic overtones. At one point she kisses a woman, which at the time was quite shocking as the trend for flashy female bisexuality would not come full force for nearly another decade. She dry humps her then-boyfriend, gay porn star and model Tony Ward, who sits in a chair in a pair of corona-revealing silk briefs, legs spread wide. The video was shown on Dateline, or Nightline, accompanied by an interview with an impassioned Madonna, speaking of herself as the champion of free speech and First Amendment rights.

A year later, the documentary film Truth or Dare was released. It featured backstage footage of her Blond Ambition tour, in which she spoke candidly about sex, rolled around in bed with her gay dancers, was generally a bitch to everyone, made incest jokes, fellated a soda bottle, and pantomimed masturbation onstage. It was an enormous hit and cemented her reputation of the sexual provocateur or the moment. Over the next several years the public was hit with a barrage of interviews with the hypersexual Madonna, who would talk about how she alone says what no else will say, always dropping some new and more explicit detail about her sexuality. She became the first bisexual poster girl, though in hindsight it seems this was just part of the act. The interviews were always accompanied by glossy magazine spreads featuring Madonna in some burlesque scenario, topless or tuxedoed and top-hatted in Dietrich style, surrounded by nude men and women. She was the biggest celebrity on Earth, possibly the biggest celebrity of all time, and had free reign to do whatever she damn well liked.

Madonna herself seems unclear on why she made the Sex book. I recall seeing an interview with the newly reformed spiritual Madonna of the late-nineties in which she is asked why she did it. She stutters for a minute and then just admits, “I don’t know.” She also sometimes makes it seem like she could foresee the coming backlash, and alienated everyone on purpose, as an artistic statement. Regardless, she did it, and it is by far the most transgressive celebrity gesture of the twentieth century, and has yet to be topped by anyone else. At midnight on October 21, 1992, Madonna’s career seemed to be over.

Sex is a monolithic, expensive metal-bound coffee table book full of provocative pictures of Madonna shot by Steven Meisel. The “Erotica” music video which had so frightened me as a child was actually edited from video footage shot for the book. Again, Madonna is featured nude in sexual scenarios just this side of hardcore, running the gamut of taboo sex acts in the company of several other celebrities. She is seen hanging out with some topless butch lesbians with nipple piercings. She is depicted in a mock-rape, in a schoolgirl outfit on a basketball court, surrounded by menacing skinheads. She is seen sitting topless on an old man’s lap. In a corny jungle fever-themed spread, she is sandwiched between Big Daddy Kane and Naomi Campbell. She stares at her vagina in mirrors. Most shockingly to me, she is shown with her face buried in a man’s shapely ass, exposing Middle America to a sexual practice they probably had no idea even existed. The pictures are accompanied by stream-of-consciousness text by Madonna, in which she talks about her early sexual experiences, her preferences, or just says things to get a reaction, such as, “Sex with the young can be fun.”

The book sold out immediately, but as evidence of the prudent hypocrisy of the American public, caused a backlash so intense that Madonna’s career looked like it might be over for a few years. It was embraced by no one. It was condemned on the right for basically being mass-marketed pornography and it was condemned on the left for not going far enough. I’ve read a book of critical essays about it called Madonnarama, and no one, but no one, was about to risk their status in defending the Madonna book. They all claimed that it was derivative, and other more legitimate artists like Robert Mapplethorpe had produced for more provocative work, but in saying this they were missing the point entirely. Sex might not have gone as far as it could have, but it didn’t need to, because it was remarkable mainly for the fact that the biggest celebrity in the world put out something so scandalous, on purpose, simply as an act of fuck-off exhibitionism. Marilyn Manson did similarly shocking things in his heyday in the 1990s, but it was expected of him since he was a gothic shock rocker. Madonna was a universally appealing entertainment spectacle, and her initial fan base had been comprised of little girls. Furthermore, one had basically no choice but to look at Sex, it was forced into every mundane retail outlet, not confined to adult bookstores. Lavish displays were set up in mall bookstores. My mother told me she leafed through a display copy at Tower Records, which is probably what set off her decade of Madonna hatred. So, even though the book promptly sold 3 million copies at $49.95, no one would admit that they liked it. Instead, everyone turned against Madonna.

It took Madonna awhile to win back the public, and she went to great lengths to do it. In 1997 she returned in a spiritually-conscious, cleaned up maternal state with her Ray of Light album. I recall seeing her on the cover of Good Housekeeping or some similarly dowdy magazine, posing with her baby, wondering how this could be the same woman that had been famously photographed hitchhiking nude for the final page of Sex. My mom started to like her because of this and the musical Evita, and I cautiously downloaded the Ray of Light album and listened to it in secret. I eventually grew to embrace every aspect of Madonna’s career, and now find her more endlessly fascinating and layered a character than any other in pop culture. I sincerely respect her for throwing it all away with the Sex book, though. Madonna was instrumental in bringing about a more liberal sexual feeling after the 80’s, during which time AIDS had brought about not only a fear of homosexuals, but a fear of sex itself. Madonna was physical with gay men at a time when many still thought that you could contract HIV from touching and kissing. Though the world tired of her sexual escapades, she left an unimaginably large impact. Virtually every other music video seems like it is put out by Madonna’s spiritual children. They rehash the same black leather S&M scenario endlessly, and it still inexplicably ignites minor controversies. If Madonna was leading us on the road to Hell, then I’m glad to be going with her.

The Bump

The bump is less than an eighth of an inch wide, and is situated immediately above the point where his pubic hair tapers off into his shaft. He spotted it minutes ago while lying in the bath tub, drinking Diet Coke and flipping through a magazine. He’d come across a magazine ad that had induced an erection; it depicted a topless woman in a basketball court circled by indifferent mostly-unclothed male models, in a sort of mock-depiction of gang rape, the sort of thing that feminists nonsensically hold up as evidence of the evils of patriarchal society. It had taken him a moment to figure out what was being advertised. Oh, handbags. There was a handbag off in the corner, next to a particularly effeminate-looking male model’s ankle.

He examines it again, and presses it with a finger. It turns white. It’s sensitive to the touch, and hurts a little when he presses it, so isn’t that good? If it’s a wart then it wouldn’t be sensitive. Surely it’s not a wart. If it is a wart, he will have to tell Alan, and Alan will dump him, and then he will have to find another boyfriend, and if he succeeds in enticing him to bed, he will have to notify him that he has the wart, or had a wart, since by that time he will have had the wart removed with a laser or that thing that freezes them, and he will have been prescribed the appropriate anti-wart medication. Then the guy will get uncomfortable and say he has to go home, and he’ll never see the guy again. He will only be able to obtain sex through lies and deceit and anonymity, if he wants it, and he knows he will want it. Oh, wait, Alan surely already has whatever caused the wart, so maybe Alan will stay with him out of a sense of shame and obligation.

He squeezes it to see if it’s a pimple. If it’s a pimple, that’s a strange place for a pimple, but if it’s a pimple then it’s not a wart. He’d gotten pimples in strange places before, and each time he assumed that they were not pimples and he was being punished directly for his promiscuity. The first time he’d noticed one he’d called a female friend crying, and had immediately set up a doctor’s appointment. The doctor was a tired-looking woman of about sixty, who lifted his flaccid penis with her hand and could not immediately identify the offending bump. “Where is it?”

“Right here. Sort of right underneath the circumcision scar. Do you see it?”

“I still don’t see it.”

“It’s right…oh now I can’t find it. Oh there it is.”

She glanced at it skeptically and said she didn’t think it was anything to worry about, then proceeded to jam a lubricated five inch long Q-tip into his urethra to swab for gonorrhea, or syphilis, or whatever it was.

He squeezes it a little harder, and it turns from white to red. His heart is pounding. The adrenaline rush in anticipation of a roller coaster ride is more or less identical. The only difference is the shame. Whenever he reads about sexually transmitted diseases, or examines his genitals so closely that the whole package begins to look malignant and threatening, his residual Christian guilt returns. His version of Christian guilt involves less fear of God and more fear of his mother, a fear that he will for some reason have to tell her about a bump, or a discharge, or a deadly asymptomatic virus, and she will be overcome with an uncontrollable bout of homophobic rhetoric, blaming the disease on his sexual preference. His mind is flooded with a montage of nightmarish fantasies of him somehow transferring the disease to her during his weekly visit, through a mistakenly shared toothbrush, or a mouthwash bottle, or a soda can. He sees her face blistered with warts, the direct result of her gay son’s unbridled promiscuity.

When he was in ninth grade, they corralled everyone into the library and showed them a PowerPoint presentation of STD pictures so they wouldn’t have sex. It was titillating because these were the only other school-sanctioned images of frontal nudity they were allowed aside from the concentration camp footage that had induced in him a shameful halfie in fifth grade. Everyone had oohed and ahhed over the corroded, mottled vaginas and penises, but the real star of the show was a picture of a hairy male ass, spread open to reveal a cauliflower of anal warts that completely concealed the asshole. No one present had ever imagined that such horrors existed. The speaker, after pausing the accommodate for the audience’s reactions for an interminable length of time, said curtly, “This is the result of men having sex with men,” and clicked over to the next slide, which featured a comparably underwhelming lip blemish.

He towels himself off, applies anti-perspirant, turns on some music, and lies on his bed before getting dressed. He pulls his laptop off of the nightstand and begins searching for images of VD bumps for comparison. None of them look like the bump. He scans over various medical self-help websites where panicked people submit anonymous rambling questions at three in the morning. “Dear Dr. Help, I have been dating my girlfriend for a month now and I noticed a small white bump on my lower lip that disappears sometimes. What is it?” He reads typo-riddled medical advice columns of questionable authorship. Frustrated, he begins to masturbate, recalling the model sprawled on the basketball court in the magazine.

The love that lives forever

"My darling Krystle, I've had this fragrance created especially for you. I think it's as beautiful as you are. Every time you wear it, remember: I love you forever."

Imagine my excitement when I found a new bottle of this at a local pharmacy that also had a full display of Max Factor makeup from the seventies. I inquired about it and the pharmacist said that it had been sitting there since 1986...a year before I was born. He thought I was crazy when I bought it, but how could I not? I'm a huge Dynasty fan, and already have the nightmarish Linda Evans Rejuvenique facial toning system displayed proudly on my bookshelf.

It's about what I expected, meaning 80's drugstore, meaning still better than most of what is released for higher prices today. It's similar to Vanderbilt in that it's a loud, powdery vanilla rose, but what I like is the extreme muskiness of it. The composition feels to be about 50% musk, and a slightly foetid musk that they might not use anymore- it's certainly not detergent-like or clean-smelling at all.
Yes, it's gauche and cheap, but this is in keeping with the woman it's named after. I love that, before Liz Taylor kicked off the celebrity perfume trend, this fragrance based on a FICTIONAL SOAP OPERA CHARACTER was released and garnered a faithful fan base. The commercial for it is a masterpiece of cheesecloth and syrupy sentiment. Now to seek out its male counterpart, Carrington- I bet it's grim! Anyone know about the Joan Collins one put out by Revlon, called Scoundrel?

Incidentally, Krystle has much better taste on the show; it is mentioned several times that she wears Bal a Versailles, and at one point Alexis lures Blake to Rome, "bathed in Bal a Versailles," as she says, to seduce him away from Krystle.

CELEBRATE THE LOVE THAT LIVES FOREVER.

The dull throb of Giorgio

The final task in my quest to have all the 80's powerhouses in regular rotation- I already had Poison, Opium, Obsession, and Kouros- was to conquer Giorgio. Giorgio appealed to me only because of its reputation as the loudest perfume ever; the ads didn't have a trace of the elegance, sophistication, irony, or immersive fantasy of Opium or Poison, and instead painted a lifestyle of forced, loud, brash good times at the beach or in the convertible, usually involving a woman suspended in mid-laugh, as though she had been cryogenically frozen in Virginia Slims land and carted over to Giorgio without prior knowledge, her magenta-painted mouth hanging open to expose her Hollywood-white fangs in a feral distortion of a smile. It was either this woman or simply a picture of the "Extraordinary Perfume Spray" bottle looming like the 2001 monolith over a black background. Could I be this girl? I'm a six foot four, 270 lb bearded man, so it would be a challenge.
Soon enough I saw the yellow and white prison bars, so familiar to me from repeat viewings of "Troop Beverly Hills", staring back at me in TJ Maxx. I paid the $20 admission price and entered the world of Giorgio. I went back to my car and sprayed on lavishly. "Not so bad!" I thought. Pineapple, tuberose, and pool chemicals; it had that-er-"well blended" quality that I often find in cheap perfumes like Tabu, wherein the perfume seems to contain no discernable individual notes, just one big distinctive stench, the source of which can only be a giant oil drum labeled "TABU": or "GIORGIO" in a grimy factory somewhere, not, you know, "night-blooming jasmine from the fields of Grasse," or whatever. After thirty seconds I couldn't smell much but could feel a dull throb that seemed to be circling my brain-a sinus headache, I assumed. My vision also seemed slightly impaired, everything was blurring. Passersby stared at me as though I were covered in blood. It was DELIGHTFUL.
For three weeks I denied that the headaches that Giorgio caused were caused by Giorgio. I funneled allergy pills and pain relievers into my gullet on an hourly basis. I also sprayed on more Giorgio. I purchased Giorgio Red. None of these things helped. I was in a perpetually crabby mood whenever I had the Giorgio on, too. I didn't ask anyone's opinion of it because I didn't want to know what they thought. At this point in my life, it was perfectly appropriate that I was wearing a perfume that kept people away in droves, made everyone everywhere I went aware of my horrible mood, made me physically ill, cost too much for what it was, and didn't feel right with any of my clothing except for the Madonna Blond Ambition Tour tee.
I haven't been able to track down any old Giorgio for comparison but I would imagine that it would have the same effect in any vintage. As a child of the nineties, it's titillating and horrifying to me to think that the whole world smelled like this in the eighties. Everyone was experiencing that dull throb in their head all the time, everywhere they went, for an entire decade and then some. ON PURPOSE! And FOR A GREATER PRICE! Though it is now practically only found in drug stores and discounters, Giorgio was once THE snob perfume, the one that no one else had but you, or the one you wanted but couldn't afford. It was originally only available in the Giorgio boutique and by mail order, so you had to be on the inside to get it. The point of it was to advertise your nouveau-riche status by beating the whole world over the head with a toxic, lingering cloud of Californian grotesquerie. By the late eighties it was available everywhere, the top-selling perfume for years, and was worn (used, I should say, Giorgio isn't worn but used, with intent) by cliquey high school girls to terrorize their social inferiors. Its veneer of cheerfulness- pineapple! flowers! beaches!- hides a vapid, hollow, black soul and no moral center, capable of doing anything. Giorgio was cruel, exciting, and nauseating, and its success seems unthinkable today. Then it felt glamorous, now it feels like the olfactory equivalent of that scene in David Lynch's "Inland Empire" where Laura Dern is stabbed unexpectedly with a screwdriver and runs around screaming and bleeding on the Hollywood walk of fame until she collapses next to some homeless people and dies. A true classic.

We Need to Talk About White Linen

Last week I enjoyed an unusual flirtation with clean scents. I spritzed on some of the original clean fragrance, Estee Lauder's White Linen. At the time of its release it was considered a light perfume (!) meant to project a sort of detergent, white, tight-skinned Tippi Hedren blond ice queen image but by today's standards it's so heavy that it just...couldn't possibly be thought of as smelling clean. Predictably, my favorite thing about it is the sourness of the beginning, so I kept spraying on more to get that effect. By spray six I was surrounded by a blinding white force-field of aldehydes 40 feet across and must surely have smelled strange to passersby. See, this is one of the reasons I enjoy perfume so much- subverting the intentions of the perfumer in various ways and playing jokes with it- in this case over-spraying a perfume meant to broadcast cleanliness to the point of whoreish vulgarity. Of course I'm the only one that gets these jokes and to others I must just smell unpleasantly loud and outdated, but that's their fault for not making themselves aware of the history of White Linen! What else to say about White Linen...I can honestly say that I love EVERY Estee Lauder perfume, that they're so inexpensive they practically GIVE them away, yet they're all beautiful, sophisticated, complex compositions that could command much higher prices. They have staying power on skin far beyond anything else so accessible or cheap, probably because most of them were created for a different era when women weren't as afraid of smelling "overpowering" as they are now. They don't discontinue any of their perfumes, which is brave and commendable because they probably lose money for it; they know that each of those scents has a devoted following of women that have been wearing them for decades. I mean, just IMAGINE what the typical idiot girl browsing the Macy's counter looking for a tutti-frutti syrupy floral would think of Azuree or Spellbound or Alliage if they sniffed the testers: "EWW this smells so OLD and it's so STRONG I don't wanna smell OLD or STRONG and oh my god it smells MUSTY is that PATCHOULI this smells MASCULINE, GROSS! TOTALLY OLD LADY IN AN ELEVATOR! EWW WHO WOULD BUY THIS?" Imagining it just delights me to no end. That all of these gorgeous compositions completely not in keeping with the current tastes of the masses are still faithfully produced and displayed and sold at absurdly low prices with virtually no reformulations over the years is just incredible. I love you, Estee Lauder! And look, here's loathsome Gwyneth, looking smugger than ever, shilling the flanker Pure White Linen to Japanese people! I kind of like the well-bred, WASP-y mood of this commercial- it's all those D&G Light Blue ads minus the white speedo-ed Guido and sleaze factor.