Madonna and Me (12 page)

When I first met John, I was a college junior and a recently self-proclaimed feminist. I was immersed in writing, literature, and women’s studies. I screamed along to riot grrrl mix tapes my friend Karen had made me as I tooled around Amherst, Massachusetts, in my little white Honda Civic.

I’d dabbled in pro-choice activism since I was twelve or thirteen, attending rallies and sending the occasional $25 membership check to NARAL (I loved their cool purple bumper stickers). But this—
this
was different. Those riot grrrl bands, like Bikini Kill and Bratmobile, reached my rawest places, offering a direct retort to all the shitty cultural messages I’d internalized: that I was nothing without a guy; that I could never be too pretty or too thin; that sex was a sinister, scary forest where every woman was forced to play either Virgin or Whore. Add those crappy cultural cues to the fact that I’d been clinically depressed since I was a teenager, and the message I got was that I had no agency over my own life. That I would never be happy, serene, or free from the bondage of my own mind. Riot grrrl rhetoric spoke to my angst, dismantled the negative messaging, and fed me empowering ideas in their place. Music gave me hope—suddenly I wanted to reclaim my sexuality, scream about systemic oppression from the nearest Berkshire mountaintop, make zines, and write letters to the editor.

If riot grrrl was the AP course, Madonna had been the 101. My obsession with her started young; I was age six when she first flounced onto MTV, and I latched onto her instantly. I was a burgeoning music junkie, into everything from Tears for Fears and Samantha Fox, to Lisa Lisa and Cult Jam, but there was something about this twenty-six-year-old new girl on the block that hooked me
in a different way. After hearing my very first Madonna song (“Borderline”), I became a bona fide wannabe. She was just so . . .
cool
. (And supposedly she had a genius IQ! Not only was she cool, she was smart as hell.) It was love.

I memorized every lyric to every song, and I used my friends’ birthday parties as an excuse to dress like her. (I still can’t believe my mom let me out of the house in some of those outfits: black lace headbands, fingerless gloves, mesh tank tops, neon socks; I was a full-fledged Madonna mini-me). My obsession faded a bit as I grew up and my musical tastes changed, but I continued to follow her career and her personal life. I kept her in my back pocket like a little guardian angel, and I turned to her for hits of strength and inspiration when I needed them. She always delivered. When I felt scared or anxious, I’d think,
What would Madonna do?
She seemed to handle life with such assurance, swagger, and self-respect. Of course there were insecurities in there somewhere (there must have been) but she never showed them; she maintained a perpetual air of invincibility, and I admired her for it. Whenever I felt weak or depressed, she radiated strength and self-reliance. Particularly in high school, when I was not only swamped by insecurity, but drawing little to no attention from quality guys. I constantly fought off feelings of inferiority because of my sheer lack of experience in the dude department. Like lots of teenage girls, I’d given the idea of romantic love too much weight, too much power (aren’t American girls taught, even encouraged, to think this way?). By the time I hit college—Madonna still in my back pocket—I understood intellectually that a woman didn’t require a romantic relationship to be happy, but I found it difficult to apply that notion to myself. I believed
other
women were fine on their own, that their single status indicated nothing lacking about them, but it was different when it came to me and my perpetual single status: I felt lost and unlovable.

And so it was that when I first saw John standing outside a bodega on St. Mark’s Place one muggy summer night in New York City, I was
ready. I’d waited a long fucking time to fall in love. It was his Smiths T-shirt that first sold me—I was a longtime lover of the Smiths and Morrissey, and I was attracted to fellow fans. They tended to be like me: a bit socially awkward, maybe, but also tender-hearted misanthropes who thought too much, analyzed everything, and wanted love but had absolutely no effing clue where to find it (or even how to flirt).

Something tugged me toward him. I liked him immediately—his lankiness, his pasty blondness and his blue eyes behind hip glasses. (I was pasty and blond and wore glasses, too.) I got his number and called him two days later. Within a few dates, I was falling for him; it was mutual and heady and beautiful. We looked like brother and sister, which felt somehow sick and sexy at the same time.

Speaking of sex, that aspect of our relationship was . . . interesting. John was a virgin, for all intents and purposes, and had a long-standing aversion to masturbation (yes, really). Hence, he knew very little about, well, anything when it came to pleasure—his own or other people’s. This made things a bit tricky (to say the least), but I also found his bedroom inexperience weirdly exciting. I liked the idea of being his first, and of helping guide him through the dark and delightful world of naughty exploration.

My memories of that summer are vivid but spotty snapshots. I remember making fun of the way he organized his CDs—they were all displayed face-out on his shelf, like he was showing them off. I remember the heavy, ornate bright-red door of his apartment building on St. Mark’s. I remember the swelter and humidity, drops of sweat rolling down my chest, down my stomach, as we walked the streets hand in hand. I remember sleeping over at his dark, cramped railroad apartment, how my fine hair would tangle up into crazy bed-headed knots overnight, and how in the morning I’d sit in front of him on the bed while he brushed the tangles from my hair, so gently I could have cried. I remember when we held each other one night and his face broke out in a sudden swath of giddy happiness, and he squeezed me and murmured “you’re mine.” I’d never felt truly wanted
or protected before; not like this. It felt innocent and perfect, like words I’d been waiting to hear all my life.

I didn’t need my pocket Madonna; she wasn’t even the
spark
of a flashpoint in the new-couple bubble we inhabited. Instead, we were full to bursting with inside jokes and stupid pet names. At the end of the summer, I returned to college in Massachusetts. He stayed in New York, where he was raised, and we continued our relationship long-distance.

But things changed, as they tend to. The fighting started. It would usually happen when we were drinking together (which happened frequently during our monthly visits). I’d watched one too many artsy foreign films, and I thought real love brought constant pain and turmoil. So I picked fights. About
everything
. I was young and dramatic, craving—no, demanding—more reassurance than one person could ever be reasonably expected to give me. But in those fights, I learned some things. Things about John, things about me, things that weren’t always pretty.

I began to glean that beneath his goofy Morrissey-loving shell there lurked a darker John—insensitive, intolerant, possibly even bigoted. I learned this when he began to mock the riot grrrl music I loved as “bratty chatter.” When he said that every nail-salon owner was an aging Korean woman who couldn’t speak English. (Yes, we once fought about nail salons.) When he described, during our eventual breakup phone-call, “not knowing how to tell his girlfriend”—um,
me
—“that her butt was getting big.” (Those times he read my diary, went through my computer files, and hid my makeup from me didn’t help, either.)

But oddly, I learned about our differences most glaringly from John’s outright, unabashed loathing for Madonna. We probably fought about her more than anything else—more than about our own relationship, even. I’m not sure why, but there was something about the venom he reserved for her, his cruelty in dissecting what he perceived as her “slut factor.” In saying she set feminism back
hundreds of years (which he enjoyed saying often), he was dismissing everything I loved and admired most about her: not just her sexual agency, but her ballsiness, her self-possession, her boundary-pushing, and her never, ever giving a crap what anyone thought of her. She was the golden rebel-girl icon of my childhood, a shining example of everything I wasn’t (yet), but wanted to be. Seeing her do all the things she did (strike a pose, lash a whip, wear corsets and collars and bustiers—oh my!—change her hair color, publish books, have babies, find God) showed me that if I wanted to, I could do those things. Watching her live without shame allowed me to believe that I, too, could live without shame.

John’s rejection of Madonna felt much deeper than just some petty distaste for a pop star. OK, I might have been a smidge biased—she
had
been my idol. But his perspective on Madonna felt like nothing short of derision—for her, for me, for women as a whole. His inability to accept Madge for all the complicated intricacies of who she was indicated that when it came down to it, he couldn’t accept me, either (hello, big-butt comment). And it did us in, just shy of a year together.

Now it’s been thirteen years, and I can’t lie—I still feel a twinge when I think of him. It’s probably just rose-tinted memories of our early days, getting sweetened by time; that impossible nostalgia many of us inadvertently hold onto for the intensity of our first loves (which may have been all wrong, but felt so Big, so Irreplaceable). I don’t think John and I should have ended up together, and I don’t envy the woman he’s married to now. In fact, it was just last year that I realized the full extent of his issues (I found, buried in my Gmail archives, a paper he’d written that asserted his strident belief that the Holocaust never happened). But the early days of our relationship were some of the happiest times of my life. For an anti-Semitic Madonna-hater, he sure had a hold on me.

I’m still single. I’m still a feminist. And I still crave a romantic relationship (I’m human!), while knowing, deep down, that it won’t cure my struggles with depression and self-doubt. Love won’t magically
“fix” me. It won’t make me serene or content or self-confident. Only I can do that. I realize now, more clearly than ever, that I owe it to myself to practice patience. I owe it to myself to wait for someone who accepts me wholeheartedly, variable butt size and all; someone who looks at women’s self-expression as what it is: self-expression, not “bratty chatter.” Someone who respects women with swagger, drive, and adamant sexuality.

And if I feel lonely during the wait, I can still turn to the Madonna in my pocket to remind me to keep my head up and keep moving. She grins defiantly and reminds me—my childhood idol, my shining beacon—“absolutely no regrets.”

Stacey May Fowles

 

 

 

 

 

I WAS PROBABLY about six years old when I first displayed an interest in domination and submission.

Of course, at the time it wasn’t about sex. I didn’t know anything about sex or how it worked, other than what the tomboy down the street had sloppily taught me about kissing boys on our brown corduroy couch. A lonely only child with an overactive imagination, I was the puppet master of bizarre and complex Barbie-land scenarios in our suburban rec-room. While my stay-at-home mother was busy with household chores, Ken would kidnap an unwitting Barbie and tie her plastic wrists and ankles with ponytail elastics. Blindfolded and gagged, Barbie would be driven aimlessly around in her pink Corvette for Ken’s (and my) amusement and pleasure.

When I was old enough to have bath time by myself behind a closed door, I was again mentally enacting an elaborate kidnapping fantasy. In the midst of my bathing, pirates would sail though the soapy water and savagely abduct me from the tub. They would then
force me to choose—what part of my body would I conceal with the square foot of terry washcloth available to me? I never questioned my need to be their imaginary captive.

When playtime was over—in and out of the bath—the pirates would sail off, Barbie’s clothes would go back on, and I’d have a bowl of chicken noodle soup and clean my room, just like any other kid. You could blame this sort of imaginative storytelling on the seeds of a writing life, but an interest in “surrender” that roots early is impossible to remove entirely. These memories are now a comfort to me in a world (both progressive and traditional) that occasionally looks upon my desires with disdain and judgment.

My childhood was healthy, normal, and supportive, and yet still, I turned out “wrong.”

Those first juvenile inklings of submission were completely harmless, but writing them still fills me with a twinge of embarrassment and a compulsion to explain. It would never have occurred to me to think they were anything but innocuous fun until the world of adulthood rushed in with judgment, disappointment, and the notion that “nice girls
don’t.”
With age comes a desperate need to define desires, catalogue them, compartmentalize them, and sometimes even forbid them. With age comes shame. We learn that our sexuality is only acceptable when it’s in a quiet, culturally sanctioned form. Certainly never when desire asks our lover to hurt us.