The latest Rolling Stone has an offensive retrospective on Madonna.

Although Madonna’s iconic look is always the subject of dispute, lately, the media has treated her like a clown. The only explanation is that she’s over 50. Fifty year old women, they say, shouldn’t prance around on a stage and spread their legs. It’s unbecoming.

Rolling Stone frequently participates in this mistreatment even though they’ve helped turn Madonna into an icon.  Many of their pictures deliberately show her in an unflattering light. In this retrospective, they do put a handful of pictures of her in her 50s, but they fill the pages with the youthful, beautiful Madonna of the 1980s and early ’90s.

My first reaction to the “spread” (word choice, huh…) was to remember how beautifully photogenic she was. My second reaction was to note that she’s not aging well, at least in most of her close ups. She looks haggard. Is she doing botox and face lifts? Maybe, maybe not. My third… well, wtf does “aging well” mean? I flipped the magazine closed, and stared for a moment at the picture of the stunning twenty-year-old Madonna on the cover.

When I tossed the magazine yonder, it landed on the Rolling Stone with Johnny Depp and… wait for it… his inspiration, Keith Richards.  Now there’s haggard. HEY, WAIT A MINUTE! Isn’t it unseemly for a 65 year old man to prance around on the stage?

Why does Rolling Stone fill its pages with young, hot women, but old, scraggly men? Why isn’t the amazingly fit, dynamic, mature Madonna on the cover instead of the youthful one, while the bag-of-bones Keith Richards is standing right there for all to see?  DOUBLE STANDARD, ANYONE? Ok, this is not news, but it’s still disappointing.

Even still, Madonna was ..-is-..effing beautiful.

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