MADONNA’S 1992 X-rated book SEX cemented her reputation as queen of controversy.
Yesterday Madge, 64, celebrated the coffee table book’s 30th anniversary at the Miami Art Basel exhibition.
Dressed in a black-lace corset and clutching a leather riding crop, the singer is re-issuing 800 copies of the book to raise money for the Malawi charity.
But what did it mean for women – and men – at the time, and how does it look today?
Here, a former NME writer gives her opinion on the book that promised to teach us “how to f***”.
THERE is nothing to make a woman of my age — 63 — crave a nice sit-down and a Garibaldi biscuit more than fully comprehending that Madonna published her book SEX a whopping 30 years ago.
It was the day after her fifth album Erotica and a single CD Erotic (the one with the chorus that I initially misheard as “Bill Oddie, Bill Oddie, put your hands all over my body”) came with the book; watching the video decades on, with Madonna at her least attractive, crop-haired and gold-toothed and biting down on a cane with all the sexual electricity of someone doing something sensible at the dentist’s, I was reminded how much like hard work she always made sex look.
She’s the sort of broad who’d want to do it standing up, but only so she could burn more calories.
Though her publishers were initially nervous, SEX topped the best-seller charts for three weeks and went on to sell more than 1.5million copies, remaining the best and fastest-selling coffee table book ever.
Thus validated in her bid to show her primary and secondary sex organs to the entire world, she’s been flashing us ever since.
Thirty years ago she was getting her rack out for the paying public in a deluxe, aluminium-covered tome — now, at 63, she’s doing it for free on TikTok.
Most of us of Madonna’s generation have photos in a drawer to remind us that we were once young and hot; the only difference is that millions of people have seen hers, many of them through the medium of this book.
But like its protagonist, it hasn’t aged well. It all just looks like such a slog with all the threesomes and bondage and heavy lifting, like a cross between a macrame workshop and an outward bound course with a bit of target practice thrown in — “Down a bit . . . left a bit . . . no, not like that! Look, like this! Do I have to do everything myself?”
Before Madonna, women only stripped off before they were famous, but at the height of her fame she was still gagging to get ’em off — a prompt for all the knackered ex-pop starlets shaking their money-makers on OnlyFans.
Approximately 80,000 photographs were taken for the book; just a fraction were used, the most memorable to my mind being the naked hitch-hiking shot, an image which still looks genuinely startling and rather beautiful.
It happened one morning when Madonna was prancing naked around her house in Miami; someone jokingly suggested she go out on to the street and she did so, causing cars to screech to a halt and a cyclist to fall off his bike.
Thespian Lesbianism — these days so widespread that whereas once a man might have divorced his wife for having sex with another woman, now he might divorce her for refusing to — was relatively unusual 30 years ago, and it’s only slightly embarrassing to see Naomi Campbell and Isabella Rossellini pretend to fancy Madge.
There’s lots of leather and spanking and restraints, and quite a few shots with Madonna gagged, which may well appeal to those many men who have entered into a relationship with this most alpha of females.
There’s a bit of business with a friendly dog (Madonna wearing only a bunny tail, on top of him) which you wouldn’t see in It Shouldn’t Happen To A Vet — though it shouldn’t, of course.
A sober reminder that this was the age of rampant Aids, the book starts with a lecture about condoms, which one feels is at least as much about Madonna being a bossy cow as a concerned citizen.
“THIS BOOK DOES NOT CONDONE UNSAFE SEX” we are sternly warned, only to be confronted with some poor sap being thrashed to within an inch of their life.
Though the images seem somewhat tame in these days of naked transexuals playing pianos with penises on national television, it’s striking how shocking Madonna’s words still are.
There is something of the exhibitionist in all performers, but in the past young actresses would say something like “Nudity was essential to the performance” before disrobing.
Reading the narrative of the book, you’re aware that Madonna is really quite thrilled by revealing so many transgressive fantasies — sex with a barely legal boy, sex with strangers, sex with herself — and that being watched is much of the fun for her.
She seems to believe that anything worth doing is worth doing in public.
Thinking back to when SEX was published, I was in my early 30s, twice married and moving in quite unshockable circles.
I don’t recall being unsettled by anything in the photographs — except, for some reason, the amount of pubic hair Madonna had.
When I went back to visit my respectable, working-class home, my mother — who had been a fan of Madonna’s early power-pop hits — was rendered speechless by even the milder images she’d seen in the papers.
I laughed at her at the time, but perhaps she had something.
The idea that women are “empowered” by stripping off has been an inaccurate one, limiting females as it does to a source of making money which cuts out at an age when other careers are just getting started.
Middle-class women who will never be reduced to the level of physical objects have picked up the glib lingo and can use it insensitively around women who are not privileged.
“Do you find lap-dancing empowering?” I heard a reporter ask a dancer on the radio the other day, sounding sure she’d say yes.
“No. Lap-dancing’s not empowering,” the girl said with a laugh.
“You know what’s empowering? Having money.”
The idea that being ceaselessly sexual will somehow set women free can be credited to — and blamed on — Madonna.
Most women of my age will be in two minds about Madge.
One side of us wants to cheer her on for her defiance, the other side wants to throw a fire blanket over her and wrest her to the ground while yelling: “Nothing to see, move on!”
Many of us still feel young and find it hard to recognise the stranger in the mirror — how extreme must this feeling be for Madonna, for whom the world was once a giant aphrodisiacal oyster?
If performers in every branch of the entertainment industry could be summed up in one phrase, it would be “Look at me!”
No one wants to be shamed as an attention-seeker, which leads many of them to attempt to compete in the Victimhood Olympics by complaining that fame is like being a soldier in the trenches (Gwyneth Paltrow) or being raped (Charlize Theron and Kristin Stewart).
I do feel a grudging respect that here is one star who is honest about her unending desire for the attention — while tough enough to ignore the often attending unkind- ness — of strangers.
I wish her luck on the release of this book with an extravagant exhibition at the upscale Art Basel show this week.
Nevertheless, I do hope that in another 30 years she won’t still be getting it out and shaking it all about, whether on social media or printed page, for all of our sakes.
