Armed and fabulous

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 15/05/2010 (5620 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Last week one of the tabloids ran an old photo of Madonna in a sleeveless shirt, once again igniting a discussion about the Queen of Pop’s right to bare arms.

It seems to be a matter of spirited public debate. Just try Googling "Madonna scary arms" and see what you get.

The New York Daily News offers a 17-image retrospective of Madonna’s biceps, from the Desperately Seeking Susan days to 2009. Liz Lemon on 30 Rock chides Madge for desperately trying to hold onto youth with her "Gollum arms."

Madonna’s been accused of looking like a velociraptor. Or a 16th-century anatomical drawing of flayed muscles.

But, realistically, what are her alternatives? If she stopped working out and started eating cupcakes, the gossip sites that are currently slagging her for being "too toned" would be the first to mock her for being too flabby.

Our cultural attitudes toward women, age, fat, sex and power are such a welter of confusion that the 51-year-old Madonna is doomed whatever she does. In fact, she’s damned for even trying.

There’s a depressing double standard here, of course. A sinewy Iggy Pop body and haggard Keith Richards countenance are considered chic, even compulsory, for veteran male rock stars. But there seems to be no female equivalent. Even Madonna, the mistress of the shifting persona, is having a hard time navigating the uncharted territory of the pre-menopausal pop icon.

Eternal beauty Catherine Deneuve once said that after a certain age a woman must choose between her face and her ass. In young women, the bonny balance between slenderness and fullness is just right. But after 45 or so, a thin figure often means a sunken face, while a rounded visage usually means a correspondingly rounded body.

(The "which cheek do you choose" conundrum, understood intuitively by French women, has since been confirmed by researchers at Case Western Reserve School of Medicine, who studied the Body Mass Index of identical female twins over 40. Women with a higher BMI looked up to four years younger, according to the researchers, while too much thinness often left the face looking "depleted." What a word.)

For wealthy celebrities, the face vs. fanny problem has been ameliorated by miraculous makeup and skincare products and trendy new interventions — cheekbone implants and various injection procedures — that emphasize volume, volume, volume.

But the limbs don’t lie. (Demi Moore’s knees are another tabloid hotspot.) This is where taut can tip over into terrifying. The arms have become the last battleground for women taking a defiant stand against time and age.

So, no, Madonna isn’t aging naturally. But when has Madonna ever been natural? The whole point about Madonna is that she’s a cone-bra-wearing cultural construct, an ongoing one-woman spectacle. Her recent vein-and-tendon Rambo look is just another reinvention.

Madonna reportedly works out two hours a day and shuns fat, sugar, spices, carbs, dairy, alcohol, caffeine… well, basically, she shuns food. Speaking as someone whose own arm improvement regimen involves putting on a cardigan, I still think there’s something magnificent about Madonna’s crazy, steel-cabled guns.

When you’re young, beauty is heedless, easy. When you hit 40, beauty becomes much more interesting. For most of us, it’s a balancing act, a strategic retreat, a carefully calibrated matter of taste and judgement. In Madonna’s case, it’s a triumph of pure Nietzschean will.

alison.gillmor@freepress.mb.ca