Madonna and the Commodification of Women

By Aurora Dube

Sex sells. We use it to inspire art and sell beer; we sell the act itself in seedy underground bars and we sell the illusion of it in sold-out arenas. More often than not, it is women and their bodies that are commodified. This isn’t a new phenomenon; we’ve in fact seen the commodification of women in a repeated cycle for centuries. The iconic Venus paintings in all their many forms were one of the Renaissance’s representations of this. These were paintings of women, most often nude, from the perspective of the artist, most often male. They had a voyeuristic quality to them, with the viewer experiencing these women as the painter did. As The Venus paintings were being created, so were those of the Madonna.

The Virgin Mary is often referred to as The Madonna, Queen of the Universe and is famous for her body. In Christian religions, the Madonna is the perfect woman. She is the ultimate representation of purity and innocence, and her value as a figurehead is intrinsically tied to that fact, making her portraits stark in contrast to those of The Venus. Her value as a woman is placed in the simple fact that her body was never touched. Her body is a different kind of commodity, sold to us for its lack of sex and portrayed as the ideal version of a woman. She is the subject of many artworks, most often portrayed in white and soft blues that are symbolic of purity and innocence respectively. These paintings come with a different brand of voyeurism, where we put the Madonna on a pedestal as the symbol of what femininity should look like.

Madonna Ciccone, publicly known by her stage name Madonna, is a pop icon known for her sex-positive discography. Her 1984 track, “Like A Virgin,” is an iconic piece of pop culture that capitalizes on the same commodification that The Madonna and The Venus represented before her. This is the idea that we can look, but it’ll all be ruined if we touch. However, Like a Virgin is so much more than that. It was Madonna’s second studio album, but the first one she took complete control of. She used virginity as a means of sexualization both in her lyrics and in the iconic music video for the title track. She’s dressed in white but singing lyrics about being touched for the first time, yet her smokey eye makeup and innuendos give the illusion of sex that ultimately sells. With the song, the music video, and the album, Madonna skyrocketed to fame and earned herself the title of The Queen of Pop.

Over the course of her career, she’s been made an icon and figurehead for the LGBTQ+ community. When Madonna published her book, Sex, she stirred controversy with her bold display of sexual liberation. In a time when the AIDS epidemic was rampant and sex was still very much taboo, Madonna used the intrigue surrounding sexuality as a means to highlight real issues that were affecting the LGBTQ+ community at that time. In this way, she used the commodification of her body to her own advantage, rather than someone else’s.

The irony in the parallels between these artistic figures is not lost. In fact, they sit at either end of the spectrum of society’s approved femininity—hypersexualization and extreme purity. They both represent the commodification of women, perpetuating the idea that a woman’s worth is synonymous with her body. They speak to the notion that a woman only has worth if she’s able to be looked at and sexualized. “Like a Virgin” is the artistic representation of both sides of the spectrum, and love it or hate it, it certainly sells.