Like A Surgeon, Letting Perfectionism Run Amok: On the Latest Backlash Against Madonna’s Face

Anyone who sees Madonna rather regularly (perhaps better phrased as “any Madonna fan”) is likely wondering why people are acting as though this is the first time they’ve noticed that she’s had very noticeable plastic surgery. But then again, every so often, when Madonna makes an especially public appearance, as she did at the 2023 Grammy Awards, this usual, collectively expressed outrage about her looking like, apparently, Jigsaw from Saw comes about. And so begins the requisite news cycle about the alterations to her face (which once constituted being the emblem of an entire cover story for a 2008 New York Magazine article entitled “The New New Face”).

This time around, though, something feels slightly different about the commentary. That is to say, more people (specifically, females) were inclined to come to her defense in the matter, with a slew of women commenting on how Madonna’s overwrought plastic surgery was a classic case of being damned if you do and damned if you don’t as a woman enduring the accursed aging process. This goes tenfold for women in entertainment, who are subject to unrelenting scrutiny that so often comes in the form of the public comparing images of their younger selves to their current selves (an entire TikTok trend, to boot). The commentary then becomes something to the effect of, “She used to be such a beautiful girl”—the implied follow-up to that statement being either, “She’s really let herself go” or, if she’s had the plastic surgery tacitly expected of her, “She doesn’t even look like herself anymore.”

This is where Madonna’s face presents an even more philosophical question: what really is “the self”? Is it the carapace we walk around in, or is it so much more than that? Of course, celebrity culture and the society it reflects would like us to believe: not so much. And Madonna, for all her exhortations to be yourself and come as you are, has also fallen prey to that trap. Those who have come to her rescue in print, however, might offer up the notion that if this is what she wants to look like, that’s her right and prerogative. Except, what no one seems to want to acknowledge is that Madonna is suffering from some very overt signs of body dysmorphia, unable to see herself objectively at this juncture…as made evident by her over-the-top, smoothed-into-oblivion face filtering on Instagram. These being the “renderings” of her appearance that she wants to see herself as, in contrast to the other image—the one she accused of being merely a case of “close-up photos of me taken with a long lens camera by a press photographer that would distort anyone’s face!!” This written in an Instagram caption that felt obliged to address all the controversy directed at her after making an introduction to Sam Smith and Kim Petras’ performance of “Unholy” at the Grammys.

Her intro speech for that duo was, alas, met with a leaden thud among the audience, whose lack of response evoked the crickets chirping effect when she asked in a half-hearted shouting voice, “Are you ready for a little controversyyyy?” The audience, it seemed, was not. Jaws ostensibly dropped to the floor in stunned silence as they watched a version of Madonna that was later compared to Miss Trunchbull from Matilda proceed to inform the masses, “If they call you shocking, scandalous, troublesome, problematic, provocative…or dangerous [this last word said as she lifted her skirt to the side to show off some leg], you are definitely onto something.” But none of that, least of all her leg showoff, seemed to resonate with audiences as much as her face. And to get back to that word, “problematic” (which is also what Kim Petras is despite many seeing her as a triumph for trans musicians everywhere), Madonna has become just that over the years not because she has had plastic surgery, but because she essentially refuses to have a truly candid conversation about it. Which would be far more in the spirit of the “rebel heart” she views herself as being (in addition to simply not kowtowing to the expectation that a woman should have any plastic surgery whatsoever).

The only flagrant allusion Madonna has ever made to having work done arrived in the 2003 video for “Hollywood,” during which, to be on-brand with lyrics simultaneously extolling and deriding the vanity of Hollywood, Madonna is shown getting a series of Botox injections under duress. Though, clearly, she has been only too willing to go under the needle and knife in the two decades since that song was released. Which is why the most interesting thing about this entire “debacle” was that, at no point did Madonna address her plastic surgery at all… nor has she ever (though this addiction to the surgeon’s knife is an obvious extension of her perfectionistic nature). Instead, she wielded her go-to offensives in the aforementioned Instagram missive by saying, “Once again I am caught in the glare of ageism and misogyny that permeates the world we live in. A world that refuses to celebrate women past the age of forty-five and feels the need to punish her if she continues to be strong willed, hard-working and adventurous.”

But ultimately, that’s not really what Madonna was being punished for in this instance. What she got punished for, as a few called out, was having the gall to “show her work” (a.k.a. “You’re Not Offended That Madonna’s Had Plastic Surgery, You’re Offended That You Can Tell”), which is how Monica Hesse for The Washington Post phrased it. This being a reference to a passage Hesse recalled from Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, during which “the Bennet sisters are taking turns playing piano at a social gathering. Middle sister Mary ‘worked hard for knowledge and accomplishments’ and was the best player of the group, but Elizabeth, ‘easy and unaffected, had been listened to with much more pleasure, though not playing half so well.’” Hesse’s point being that Madonna pulled a Mary (namesake-wise, that’s pretty appropriate) by quite literally showing her work. But again, that’s what she’s been doing for some time now, so it’s almost a source of confusion as to why this public appearance in particular was so jarring for people. Maybe the hairstyle she sported over-accentuated “the work.” Maybe the ensemble—intended to be a nod to her Erotica-born Dita persona—was causing a heightened awareness of her face somehow. Who knows? But even for all of Hesse’s well-meaning intentions to defend Madonna, there was still some insulting rhetoric at play when she said, “There was nothing subtle or easy about what had happened to Madonna’s face. There was nothing that could be politely ignored. The woman showed up as if she’d tucked two plump potatoes in her cheeks, not so much a return to her youth as a departure from any coherent age.”

So much for solidarity in sisterhood. Which Jennifer Weiner also attempted backhandedly with an op-ed of her own for The New York Times in which she speculated that perhaps this is just Madonna’s latest “brilliant provocation.” Another calculated bid for stoking controversy and a “conversation,” if you will, therefore attention. And attention, in Madonna’s mind, has always gone hand in hand with relevance. For, like Oscar Wilde said, “There is only one thing in life worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.” Madonna has adhered to that aphorism repeatedly throughout her storied forty years in the music industry. This time around, however, there seemed to be no calculation on her part behind being talked about, but rather, it was a “happy” accident (via unhappy circumstances) that she could convert into yet another dialogue about ageism against women in particular and the patriarchal double standards about how a woman of “a certain age” should or should not look.

But her attempt at that conversation fell as flat as her rapport with the Grammy audience when, in the same post condemning ageism, she not only didn’t acknowledge having surgery at all (which is what people were shocked by), but also opted to, once more, filter the shit out of her face as she announced, “I have never apologized for any of the creative choices I have made nor the way that I look or dress and I’m not going to start.” Again, the heavy use of filters sort of negates that assertion about not apologizing for how she looks. She continued, “I look forward to many more years of subversive behavior—pushing boundaries, standing up to the patriarchy and most of all enjoying my life. Bow down bitches!” That last Beyoncé-grafted quote is not only cringe-y because it further confirms Madonna feels she needs to rely on others more “relevant” than herself for legitimacy, but also reminds one of bell hooks’ essay, “Madonna: Plantation Mistress or Soul Sister?” A merciless criticism of Madonna’s careful manipulation of the queer and BIPOC communities to further her own narrative that brings us to another question about using the critique of her face as a sign of misogyny. For if she feels the reaction to her visage is rooted in misogyny, then one must also ask: is getting massive amounts of plastic surgery really standing up to the patriarchy or simply continuing to work within it (and actually fortify it)? Something that Madonna has done for her entire career. A reality hooks touched on when she wrote, “Madonna [has] clearly revealed that she can only think of exerting power along very traditional, white supremacist, capitalistic, patriarchal lines.”

Before Madonna would go so hard at the surgeon’s office, hooks was also apt in pointing out, “Madonna often recalls that she was a working-class white girl who saw herself as ugly, as outside the mainstream beauty standard. And indeed what some of us like about her is the way she deconstructs the myth of ‘natural’ white girl beauty by exposing the extent to which it can be and is usually artificially constructed and maintained.” If that was true in 1995, when hooks’ essay was published, it’s true on an entirely new, more sinister level now.