From Pop Icon to Sex Robot: The Rise and Fall of Madonna

The Sex Robot Look
Photo: Jeff Kravitz/MTV VMAs 2021

Joe's sister Janice and I love to torment him by bashing his idol, Madonna. It’s all in good sport, and it gets quite a rise out of him. 

Desperately afraid to act her age, coming across as a privileged, grill-wearing idiot on Jimmy Fallon, and striking pornographic poses on her Instagram feed, Madonna, at 64, is one hot mess. She also won’t keep quiet about her obsession with sex. What once was risqué is now just crass -- and pathetic.

 

In what seems a perfect assessment of the pop queen’s attention-seeking vulgarity, plastic surgeries, and severely Botoxed face, Janice once blurted out that the 2022 version of Madonna looked like a sex robot. The term stuck without us knowing what a sex robot was. 

 

All that was before the internet said she looked like “a boiled egg." Sex robot or boiled egg, Madonna has lost her mind.

The Boiled Egg Look

I haven’t always felt this way. Back in the ‘80s, I was a stan before the term existed. You could find me most nights camping out at the Royale Theater’s stage door, All About Eve-style, where Madonna was making her Broadway debut in David Mamet’s Speed-the-Plow. An incapable actress, her onstage performance was amateurish and embarrassing; but no one cared. 

 

Offstage, she knew how to manufacture controversy and make waves. Aligning herself with gay culture, she was a liberating beacon of self-expression. She stole every inspiration in sight to aid in self-reinvention and reigned over a cutthroat pop cultural landscape. She also put out music. 

 

But around the time she first locked lips with Britney Spears -- a move they recreated again this year – Madonna’s base attention grabs started turning me on her.

Even as Madonna became a mother and champion for children in Malawi, her public persona – which had gone through so many successful incarnations -- descended from cool to fool. Rather than becoming the voice of a generation that could help connect the dots between the bygone days of Keith Haring, Danceteria, and today’s youth, now she desperately wants to be one of today’s youth.

 

To be sure, I feel like a traitor to my old self speaking these harsh truths. But we all need to get with the times. Joe, ever a child of the ‘80s, can’t quit Madonna and wants you to know he never will. 

 

I’m glad one of us still gets some enjoyment out of her. But I doubt she will ever grow up -- or ditch the unseemly sex robot routine. The prospect of her carrying on this way in her seventies is horrendous. In the meantime, she has forfeited something even more precious than her youth: her relevancy.