by Ben Shapiro
The crowd went wild, as the on-the-spot camera panned to the stunned face of former Britney boy toy Justin Timberlake. When Madonna turned to Aguilera and proceeded to swap spit with the “Dirrty” young star, it was almost anticlimactic.
The salacious kiss made front-page headlines across the United States—and across the world. It made the top page of USA Today. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution even apologized to its subscribers after it received a wave of complaints from angry readers stunned to see the saliva exchange on page one.
But the publicity ride wasn’t done yet for the three prostitutes. Madonna called the kisses “ironic because I was playing the groom and I had two brides, so we were operating at many levels. It was like a passing on of the baton, so to speak.”1 For Madonna, more than one level of meaning constitutes uncharted intellectual depths—combining the titillating and the political is quite a feat.
Here’s the real irony of the situation, however: while Madonna showed millions of little girls how to smooch other girls, she shielded her own daughter, Lourdes, from the actual kisses, explaining: “As soon as she got off stage she was whisked away in a car and went home. So she doesn’t know anything.”2
The MTV awards show was a monster hit, garnering 10.7 million viewers and the highest ratings from the twelve to thirty-four crowd of any cable show that year to date.3 Predictably, stories concerning lesbian experimentation among teenage girl and articles about “bisexual chic” began appearing in the mainstream media. A December 2003 article in the South Florida Sun-Sentinel described the growing demand for lesbian experimentation used by some as a turn-on to get guys, by others as a journey in self-discovery.4 Richard Luscombe of the UK Observer noted: “A wave of ‘bisexual chic’ is sweeping the United States. Emboldened by such images as Madonna kissing Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera on a TV awards show, girls are proudly declaring their alternative sexualities at a younger age than ever before.”5
As reported in January 2004 in the Washington Post, a Coolidge High School teacher “got so fed up with girls nuzzling each other in class and other public places that he threatened to send any he saw to the principal’s office.” One high-school girl interviewed, Chanda Harris, explained that she started going out with girls at age fourteen, following a breakup with her boyfriend; her mother, she says, “prefers me to be with girls than guys. She says I’m happier.” What kind of boys was young Chandra dating, the illegitimate children of Charles Manson? Better question: why is she dating at all?
The Post piece noted that “teenagers are starting at younger ages to have same-sex sexual experiences: thirteen for boys, fifteen for girls.” As the Post reporter triumphantly exclaimed, “Try this on, Mr. and Mrs. America: These girls say they don’t know what they are and don’t need to know. Adolescence and young adulthood is a time for exploration and they should feel free to love a same-sex partner without assuming that is how they’ll spend the rest of their lives.”6
Here’s the question: If one prominent lesbian snog-fest—particularly an event choreographed and planned as a publicity stunt—can set off so much bisexual activity among young girls, what effect does constant promotion of promiscuity have on them?
While the world expected Madonna to do her thing—and anything—on TV, many people were shocked at the behavior of the two younger icons. After all, both Aguilera and Spears had been all-American girls next door during their days with the Mickey Mouse Club. But that’s the new strategy in the pop music industry. The MTV Video Music Awards kiss merely exposed for the world what the porn generation already knew: The teen pop industry is geared and focused on sexualizing girls at the earliest possible age. Forget singing, songwriting, or even basic musical talent—sex is now the driving force in pop music. Hot young stars often begin as virgins to solidify their teen-girl base, then move on to semi-sexuality, emerge into flagrant sexuality or even promiscuity—and for that extra edgy hipness, add a tang of bisexuality. The pop tarts start with sugary descriptions of love and teen angst; then they turn dark, narcissistic, and hedonistic. And little girls go along for the ride.
The Material Girl
Madonna was really the first pop “artist” to openly advocate amorality and subjectivism to young girls. She is a heroine to the social Left and to feminists in particular—and that’s no exaggeration. As New York Daily News writer Jim Farber wrote in 1991: “Sometimes I wake up in the morning and just think about how lucky we all are to live in the same world as Madonna. I am not being at all ironic.”7 In August 1994, even with her musical career on the rocks, Norman Mailer called Madonna “our greatest living female artist.”8
Madonna was controversial because, in the words of Rolling Stone writer Mim Udovitch, “the singer was not only unapologetically sexual, but frankly horny. Where Donna Summer might talk about bad girls and loving to love you, Madonna made it clear that she was more than talk, beyond bad, and primarily interested in you loving her whether you liked it or not.”9 She has sex for her own pleasure, uses sex to her advantage, and challenges traditional morality. Instead of challenging sexist notions of morality by calling upon men to act like gentlemen, Madonna crawled into the muck with them and encouraged a generation of women to follow her, molding teenage girls into her image.
The choice of Madonna’s “Hollywood” for the MTV lesbian tonguing couldn’t have been more appropriate. Here’s the song’s key lyric: “I’m bored with the concept of right and wrong.” That lyric seems to be Madonna’s credo. Her purposeful degradation of morality has led to monumental success for her—and created a monumentally bad influence for her teenage fans.
It was her appearance on the first MTV Video Music Awards, September 14, 1984, that made Madonna a household name. Dressed in a white bustier (identical to those worn by Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera twenty years later) and a belt reading “Boy Toy” (identical to that worn by her daughter, Lourdes, twenty years later), Madonna burst from a wedding cake to sing “Like a Virgin.” “Like a virgin/Touched for the very first time,” Madonna warbled as she writhed around the stage, simulating sex. The message, according to biographer Andrew Morton, was that the notion of a virgin/whore incongruity was old-fashioned, that “it was okay to show off your body as well as your brain... Here was a woman who dressed wantonly and behaved badly, yet who, far from being punished for this behavior, was instead richly rewarded.” Madonna’s Like a Virgin album was astonishingly successful—the singer had expected the resulting firestorm, and was prepared to take advantage of it.10
Madonna had opened up the first chapter in the virgin/whore pop tart encyclopedia. While Madonna never claimed to be virginal, she used the imagery of virginity to contrast with her open sexuality. That’s what her performance at the MTV awards was all about: exploiting the trappings of moral absolutism to promote the ends of moral relativism.
Madonna has always used the imagery of rectitude to promote degradation—simply note the Catholic (and later, faux Kabbalistic) imagery she constantly utilizes in her performances. Madonna’s universe is a chaotic, existential place—but there, she is the ultimate arbiter of morality. It is that type of “live and let live” universe—in which each man/woman is his/her own god—which Madonna promotes.
Millions of young girls picked up on it. As a hot young star in the 1980s, Madonna’s wardrobe—a mix-and-match garage sale outfit topped off with a large cross necklace—became her trademark. This juxtaposition of religious symbols with the attire of homelessness smacks of amorality and chaos. And it was fantastically popular. As CNN.com describes, “a fashion craze developed among teen-age Madonna fans who imitated their new idol by dressing in torn-up clothes and rubber bracelets and tying rags in their hair. The Madonna look sparked a trend of young ‘wannabe’ fans.”11 Madonna spawned a new generation of low-rent child prostitute poseurs, a la Jodie Foster.
In January 1985, Madonna filmed the music video for “Material Girl,” again glorifying her own sexual image.12 “Material Girl” clearly epitomizes Madon
na’s view of sex, as well—it’s simply a conduit to something more important: money. “Some boys kiss me, some boys hug me / I think they’re okay / If they don’t give me proper credit / I just walk away / . . . Cause the boy with the cold hard cash / Is always Mister Right, ‘cause we are / Living in a material world / And I am a material girl . . . ”
Before Madonna, material girls were known as prostitutes. Afterward, they were just known as teenagers.
In May 1985, Madonna’s face appeared on the cover of Time magazine with the headline “MADONNA: Why She’s Hot.” The piece describes how “hundreds of thousands of young blossoms whose actual ages run from a low of about eight to a high of perhaps twenty-five, are saving up their baby-sitting money to buy cross-shaped earrings and fluorescent rubber bracelets like Madonna’s, white lace tights that they will cut off at the ankles, and black tube skirts, that, out of view of their parents, they will roll down several turns at the waist to expose their middles and the waistbands of the pantyhose.” The article concludes: “Then, the Wanna Be’s, to whom the war between men and women is still far less real than the eternal skirmishing between parents and children, file out of the hall, dreaming of the time when they will be able to do anything in the world they want. Like Madonna.”13
Madonna’s career has been repetition of the same theme ever since. She should have been arrested in the late 1980s and 1990s for peddling pornography to children. The music video for “Like a Prayer” was so openly offensive that Pepsi was forced to cancel its endorsement deal with Madonna in 1989.14 Her 1990 music video for “Justify My Love” was so over the top that the liberal MTV banned it.15 In her “Blonde Ambition” tour Madonna posed “as a modern-day Amazon, her erotic and exotic routines invariably ending with the woman on top.”16 The tour featured scantily clad men engaging in homoerotic behavior, Madonna miming masturbation, men in Viking-style pointed bras, and Madonna, the dominatrix, telling the crowd “You may not know the song, but you all know the pleasures of a good spanking.”17 She also published the photo album Sex, a porn book including shots of rape, homosexuality, and naked hitchhiking, as well as shots with her and other celebrities. The book currently adorns the coffee tables of hundreds of gay men and sperm banks.
Madonna is a fabulously successful musician, a failed actress, and a cultural icon. She is also a whore, selling her promiscuity for power and financial gain. Like her pop tart followers, Madonna’s promiscuity has always been for a purpose. As one fellow dancer stated, “You could say she was a tramp but that was missing the point. She was never some dig-y white chick who slept around with the guys, she was smarter than that. All the way through her career she has been very sexy but take a closer look and she is always in control.”18
She isn’t just any whore, either. She’s a whore with a microphone. And she’s always willing to use that microphone to forward her message of societal amorality.
Princesses of the virgin-to-whore kingdom
If Madonna is the queen of pop whoredom, the two reigning princesses are Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera, whose careers have taken remarkably similar paths. Both Spears and Aguilera joined the cast of the “Mickey Mouse Club.” Both cut hit albums, ditched their virginal, clean-cut images, and ended up exploiting their sexuality for publicity and monetary gain—and both took millions of young girls along for the ride, inducting them into a world of amorality and soft-core pornography.
Let’s start with Christina. When celebrity first touched Aguilera, she posed as a clean-cut girl with a lot of talent. In 1999, she told VIBE magazine, “It’s important to me to be a positive role model. Parading around in my bra and a pair of hot pants will not inspire confidence in other girls . . . I’m not just another bimbo. I’ve got a brain and a heart. And I’m not gonna let my body distract people from that fact.”19
This moral stance lasted a couple of days. When her eponymous album broke in 1999, with the hit single “Genie in a Bottle,” many (including Disney Radio) were concerned about the song’s overt sexuality. The lyrics to the song: “I feel like I’ve been locked up tight / For a century of lonely nights / Waiting for someone to release me / . . . If you wanna be with me / I can make your wish come true /You gotta make a big impression / I gotta like what you do / I’m a genie in a bottle baby / You gotta rub me the right way honey / I’m a genie in a bottle baby / Come, come, come on and let me out.”
The music video depicted a scantily clad Aguilera lying on a car hood, asking a male model to “let her out.”20 Aguilera defended the song, telling CNN Online, “[The song is] not about sex. It’s about self-respect. It’s about not giving in to temptation unless you are respected.”21 Right. And men read Playboy for the articles.
Christina learned her lesson well from Madonna, deriding opponents of the song as opponents of female rights: “It’s really about female empowerment. When a female speaks her mind and shows a little tummy like I do, people take it a certain way. I’m a huge fan of *NSYNC, but when they’re onstage doing pelvic thrusts and singing certain songs, nobody says anything negative about that.”22 Aguilera’s words are a perfect illustration of feminism’s flawed logic. She rightly points out that boy bands are held to lesser standards than are female pop stars, but refuses to take the high road and dives in the ditch along with them. Aguilera told an interviewer at the time: “All this do-not-touch nonsense is not me. I’m no virgin, I’m all for female sexuality and taking the sexual power away from the guys. They’ve had it for way too long.”23 Hey, if the boys can do it, why shouldn’t Christina?
Aguilera initially attempted to downplay the sexuality creeping into her music, in order to maintain her virginal image. But in 2001, Aguilera teamed up with Pink, Lil’ Kim and Mya to remix the Patti LaBelle song “Lady Marmalade” for the ridiculously stupid motion picture Moulin Rouge; the music video depicts all four gallivanting around dressed like prostitutes. It won an award at the MTV Video Music Awards in 2001, where the four singers reenacted the music video, which has nothing going for it besides skin and lacy under things.24 In 2002, Aguilera took her sexuality a step further with her new album, Stripped, posing on the cover of the album naked from the waist up. So much for the anti-bra-and-hot-pants routine. Aguilera’s comment? “I have stripped down to my inner self. I guess I’ve grown up in a lot of ways.”25
Christina also dubbed herself X-tina in honor of her newfound sexuality. 26 The song “Dirrty,” from the Stripped album, had a music video so dirrrrrrty it was banned in Thailand for promoting immodesty among young girls. The lyrics to “Dirrty” are both incomprehensible and raunchy. A sampling: “Let’s get dirrty (that’s my jam) . . . Ah, heat is up / So ladies, fellas / Drop your cups / Body’s hot / Front to back / Now move your ass / I like that / Tight hip huggers (low for sure) / Shake a little somethin’ (on the floor) / I need that, uh, to get me off / Sweat until my clothes come off.” As Greg Overzat of the Ft. Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel observed, “Looks like Xtina should change her name to XXXtina.”27
Aguilera’s development from clean-cut teen cutie to young “empowered” woman also reflects her personal and artistic descent into the world of Madonna-esque subjectivism. Aguilera promotes a world of unbridled hedonism and narcissism. She was willing to ditch traditional morality for the promise of easy money. But there’s a price for this decision: Underneath all the talk about doing what she wants to do, Aguilera betrays a deep depression in her words and music. In a 2002 interview with Rolling Stone, Aguilera decided that she no longer wanted to be thought of as “pretty,” remarking “I don’t like pretty. F—the pretty,” and adding that she was “showing her true colors now.”28 Aguilera also got into self-mutilation through body-piercing, explaining “There’s a comfort to me in pain.”29 There’s a real sickness in those words. When the world and life mean so little that only pain can prompt feeling, it’s time to reexamine your philosophy of amoral freedom and “empowerment.”
Like Aguilera, Spears quickly transitioned from a popular virgin into an even more popular M
adonna imitator. Her first hit single, “ . . . Baby One More Time,” moved her squarely into the realm of sexuality. The single was released in 1998, and immediately jumped to the top of the charts. The lyrics are suggestive enough: “Oh baby, baby / The reason I breathe is you / Boy you got me blinded / Oh pretty baby / There’s nothing that I wouldn’t do . . . When I’m not with you I lose my mind / Give me a sign / Hit me baby one more time.”
The video became especially popular and controversial. It depicts Spears dressed in a Catholic-school uniform with shirt knotted to reveal belly and typically short skirt. The Lolita-style video, which Britney thought up herself, prompted her to defend the semi-pedophilic content: “All I did was tie up my shirt! . . . I’m wearing a sports bra under it. Sure, I’m wearing thigh-highs, but kids wear those—it’s the style. Have you seen MTV? All those girls in thongs?”30 No word on whether Spears has heard of “kiddie porn.”
By the end of 1999, over ten million copies of . . . Baby One More Time had been sold31—and Britney had posed in her nighties for Rolling Stone at the tender age of seventeen.32 Still clinging to her younger audience, Britney maintained that she was happy as a role model, and implied that she was pure as the driven snow. “You want to be a good example for kids out there and not do something stupid,” Spears told Rolling Stone. “Kids have low self-esteem, and then peer pressures come and they go into a wrong crowd. That’s when all the bad stuff starts happening.”33 Just a few months later, she reiterated to Rolling Stone that she had “really strong morals, and just because I look sexy on the cover of Rolling Stone doesn’t mean I’m a naughty girl.”34 Her virginity was intact as well, and she stated unequivocally that she wanted to wait until marriage to have sex: “If I did anything else, it would be a mistake, one I would regret forever.” According to associates, Spears made the comment to provide support for girls feeling pressured to give sex to boyfriends.35 While simulating sex on stage with dancers and posing for kiddie-porn for Rolling Stone, Spears insisted that she wasn’t a sex seller: “That’s the edgiest I’ve ever been. But it was Rolling Stone and it has an adult audience. The photographer explained to me what he wanted to do and I was cool about it. But it’s sooo not me at all. I was playing a part, acting, and I don’t regret doing it at all.”36
