If someone wanted the question answered of how old a man had to be for relentless ageist rhetoric about his abilities to kick in, Joe Biden provided it this year: eighty-one. And it’s the kind of ageist rhetoric that, since Madonna was in her early thirties, has been lobbed against her. It’s never been a secret that the double standard between men and women applies, more than anything, to their age. While male musicians and, yes, politicians, are allowed to continue literally all the way into their eighties with little fanfare (until Biden), women are always expected to, as Madonna herself said circa 1992, “put themselves out to pasture” in their forties. Even still.
It was in response to the indefatigable media commentary about her age for what has now been the majority of her career that Madonna addressed the subject in her 2016 Billboard Woman of the Year speech: “I stand before you as a doormat. Oh, I mean, as a female entertainer. Thank you for acknowledging my ability to continue my career for thirty-four years in the face of blatant sexism and misogyny and constant bullying and relentless abuse.” That abuse evermore pivoted toward the media and masses pointing out what an “old bag” she is. Though, in fact, her age has never really stopped her from performing at the scale that she’s wanted to. Even after a near-death experience in 2023, Madonna waited only a few months to go ahead with kicking off her international tour as planned. And The Celebration Tour was, as expected, another extravaganza befitting all her previous stage shows. Contrarily, it was frequently made clear that Biden’s age did seem to be affecting his abilities to effectively govern “the greatest” nation in the world. A nation that incessantly tells people, in ways both overt and subtle, to ignore reality and “go for the gold” all the time. That with just a little bit of elbow grease and endurance, you can achieve anything you want. The fine print never seemed to mention anything about age…at least not so blatantly until now.
And while there was a small camp that kept pointing out how Donald “Orange One” Trump is only three years younger at seventy-eight, it didn’t matter. The Orange One was able to “present” as assertive and confident. Never mind that said “assertiveness” and “confidence” entailed being a bullhorn of misinformation and hate. What’s more, there are those who have said that once you do “transition” into your eighties, that’s when things make a major shift, “all downhill”-wise. So perhaps once Trump hits that decade, he, too, will face the same “cognitive decline” (though few objective people would argue that he doesn’t already display ample signs of that, and has for some time).
Throughout the rash of discourse surrounding Biden’s age as it related to his “fitness” for the presidency, Madonna, notoriously outspoken about political matters, kept surprisingly mum. In fact, one could posit that she’s usually more political than any politician, Democrat or Republican. And there was something about her silence that was slightly unexpected, in that, of all people, she might empathize with being told to essentially go crawl into a hole and die because of her age rather than continuing in the profession she’s still passionate about. By the same token, Madonna is also known for being contemptuous of the fact that old white men have long ruled over everything (see: the “God Control” video, wherein a sign on her bedroom wall reads, “Straight White Men Rule Everything Around Me”).
Thus, it’s safe to say she wasn’t “over the moon” about a Biden presidency, and that, like most other white liberals, she simply wanted him to be there as a “placeholder” in lieu of Trump and his far-right, fascistic agenda. With the torch being passed (theoretically) to Kamala Harris, it would seem likelier that Madonna might come out in far more vocal support of this candidate (as she did for Hillary) than Biden. A woman and a woman of color? It’s right up the “liberal” alley of someone like Madonna, who crafted one of her biggest hits on the backs of Black and Brown folks. Indeed, one of the Black men she’s close to these days, Jeremy O. Harris, was among the first to react to Biden dropping out of the race with the tweet, “In a Catholic Church in Italy texting with @Madonna when I found out that Biden dropped out. Let me light a candle this feels like Catholic Jesus might be real.”
So it was that Harris (both Jeremy and Kamala) echoed the sense of joy felt by “liberal” people who no longer saw Biden as a worthy opponent of Trump, thinking of him the same way as the latter when he called the president an “old broken down pile of crap” in a video leaked earlier this summer. Of course, it takes one to know one. Even “olds” themselves, like Fran Lebowitz, had delighted in mocking Biden by quipping on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon that she wasn’t “old enough” to run for president (side note: she’s seventy-three).
With the entire narrative around the election shifting to highlight Biden’s frailness and Trump’s “vigor,” it seemed like, for the first time in history, a man was being subjected to the same level of ageism that women endure far earlier in their lifespan (hell, even Mitch McConnell hasn’t drawn as much ire for his age as Biden). And while, of course, no one wants to feel insecure about the mental competency of a major world leader, the extent to which Biden was harangued solely about his age (as opposed to, say, his policy stances and pro-Israel, pro-genocide actions) more than bordered on cruel. He was effectively beaten into submission. For when you’re told something about yourself frequently enough, you can’t help but believe it. Or, as Vivian Ward (Julia Roberts) in Pretty Woman said, “People put you down enough, you start to believe it.” To be sure, it does become very difficult to cancel out such noise, no matter how oblivious one might be in their ivory tower (not everyone has the strength of will to go by something else Madonna said in that Billboard speech: “In life there is no real safety except for self-belief”).
Enough doubt was cast in Biden’s mind for him to “step aside” and let someone younger take the reins. But younger doesn’t automatically mean “defter.” As we’re soon (hopefully) likely to find out. Yet that hasn’t stopped the press from continuing to goad Biden in the headlines about his age, calling him things like a “lame duck,” despite the fact that he’s forfeited the game—so why the need to keep kicking while he’s down and literally out?
For those who were still willing to rally around Biden before he dropped out, it speaks to something larger about how there are many who do want to believe you can achieve anything at any age. In short, that age doesn’t have to stop you or slow you down from doing what you want. Even being the President of the United Fucking States. Or going on a massive world tour in your mid-sixties (granted, there’s more at stake with the former role). While Madonna was able to prove the latter despite the jibes about how she had to wear a knee brace throughout (which is actually nothing new, considering she was wearing one all the way back in 2004, during the Re-Invention Tour), Biden, in contrast, was not able to prove that “age ain’t nothin’ but a number” within his own professional arena. And that admission was historic for many reasons. Not least of which is that it is painful to so publicly acknowledge limitations as one gets older, especially since, again, Americans in particular live in a country that constantly drills the idea into your head that you can do and be anything no matter what. For the first time, though, age was written into the fine print of that American “can-do” spirit.
Biden and Madonna each represent something about a divide in how people think about age. On the one hand, there are those who want to tear down and totally decimate the idea that you can live as you always have in your “later years,” calling it both naive and embarrassing, and, on the other, there are those who want to fortify this idea as a means to tell themselves there’s always more time to achieve, to push yourself. That you never have to be limited because of the year you were born.
Bette Davis famously said that getting old wasn’t for “sissies.” But she left out the part about how a lot of that related to being endlessly flogged for even daring to be seen in public after a certain age, let alone continuing to take on a major job. And yes, the presidency is, arguably, one of the biggest jobs there is (though some say it’s merely a matter of letting yourself be puppeteered). Maybe that’s why, for “just one day out of life,” Madonna was actually able to experience less ageism than a white man.
