Madonna’s Hands
When I’m dead, they’ll finally kiss my ass. Isn’t that how it works? (Madonna, 1995)
I’ve got a lot of problems with Madonna right now, but her hands aren’t one of them. Despite that, they are the subject of this nauseatingly long think piece.
I’m not going to talk about her laissez-faire approach to her recent musical output, her terrible lead single, or her dubious forays into gym franchises. I’m going to talk about her hands.
Why the hands? Why not the exposed nipple, the cheek implants and the 20-something boyfriend? Or whether she’s too old to dress like a majorette? Or that mash-up?
I’m going to talk about her hands because they are a microcosm of all that and more. Madonna’s hands sum up all our fucked-up issues with the aging process in one fell swoop. Yuk! Granny hands! Madonna’s losing it! What an old hag! She’s so past it now, why doesn’t she just give up and leave it to Gaga and RiRi and Katy??!
How about this:
I mean, it’s pretty pathetic how she is soooo blatantly trying to cover up her ugly old lady hands with those nasty leather gloves right? And fingerless gloves?? On a 53 year old?? It’s so juvenile and unbecoming. She needs to get a grip and stop trying to dress like a teenager! Leave the rock-chick look to Lola!!
And there’s the rub – as a woman aging in the public eye you are damned if you do and damned if you don’t. Not even Madonna can stop time and we can’t have it all ways at once. It’s not fair to bitch about her surgery and the signs of aging at the same time. It’s not fair to blame her for the gloves when we recoil in horror at the sight of what lies below.
Some people would rather she continues down the surgery route and fights her age as much as she can. They are usually the same people who enjoy the idea that her faking a vacuous nubility that she never really inhabited the first time around (baton twirling! pom poms!) is liberating for women who want to ‘stay young’. They are the glove people. Some people feel she should act her age, be more responsible in front of her children, stop flashing her boobs in public. Age ‘gracefully’. They are the hands people, right?
You would think so, but from what I can tell no-one seems to be the hands people. The age-gracefully people still have a utopian notion that she will somehow do this without a wrinkle on her brow. Only she’ll be doing it in a twin-set. Kind of like Evita, but without Jimmy Nail.
When we see wrinkles and veins and liver spots appear on someone like Madonna it scares the shit out of us because we are staring straight into the face of our own mortality. If even our immortal icons are mortal, what hope do we have? Asked in an interview in 1998 what she thought people saw when they look at her she said simply “they see themselves”. And we do. Not because she is ‘one of us’ or ‘the girl next door’ but because she has always been, and always will be, a mirror to our collective social mores.
A little vanity can be a healthy thing and while I, personally, disagree with the people who are all-out, knowingly and enthusiastically for the surgical approach but it doesn’t bother me as much as thinking that she/we can do both at once forever. With the right bank balance you can get away with it for a while – a little Botox here, a slight alteration there. And maybe over time the procedures will get better, more sophisticated – but the inevitable end-point will still be waiting for us all.
Those candid, pre-photoshop pictures of her in her underwear that get used as the full stop on any reference to Madonna’s current sex appeal will never bother me as much as the puffy cheek photos and the way her face barely moves any more when she talks. One is a fit, fifty-something woman photographed off guard, the other is someone fighting their age desperately and unsuccessfully. One is the hands and the other is the gloves.
If you can’t see the connection between how we, as a society, react to the hands and why Madonna, of all people, has ended up in the gloves then let me put it this way: congratulations world, we broke her. Enjoy it while you can though, because you will be wearing those gloves yourself sometime soon no doubt.
This piece isn’t really about Madonna of course (which is precisely why I don’t want to talk about the underwhelming album or the religious connotations of her show, or whatever) but she is an unparalleled cultural barometer when it comes to how we view our own vanity, sexuality and self esteem.
Lets, please, learn to love Madonna’s hands?
All words by Susan Sloan.