NEW YORK — Madonna, this is a bit late because I was caught up writing a piece protesting the absence of Saudi women from the Olympics. I thought you’d understand.
I actually first “met” you in Saudi Arabia. It was 1984 in Jeddah, on the west coast of Saudi Arabia. Your first single “Holiday” came on a school bus radio as my high school friends and I were heading to a shopping mall to pick out clothes for our graduation. Our private school for the children of Muslim and Arab expatriates in Jeddah ended at 10th grade.
It was an impossibly cheery song for desperately miserable me. My family, originally from Egypt, moved to Saudi Arabia in 1982 after almost eight years in the UK. Can you imagine being a 15-year old girl moving from the UK to Saudi Arabia?
But up you popped tantalizing me with a combination of provocation and fun at a sad and lonely time.
In those early years, it seemed the only thing we had in common was your determination to strip and my determination to hide under layers of clothing. I started wearing hijab, or a headscarf, at 16 — shortly before my “Holiday” moment on the bus. I stopped wearing hijab nine years later, but at 16, I wasn’t one of the millions of girls perfecting your stringed-tank-top-and-mini-skirt look complete with the plastic bangles in the colors of the rainbow, circa “Lucky Star.”
You’d be surprised at how “modest” your album covers looked once the censor got his ink working to black out your bare mid-riff, arms and legs — just as he did with pictures of women in the foreign magazines and newspapers that made it into the Kingdom.
I became a feminist in Saudi Arabia, Mads, and our exceedingly at odds wardrobes united us in that feminism because I learned that you and I — back then at least — were two sides of one coin. You chose to reveal what you wanted in the name of feminism and I concealed what I wanted in that same name. And who would dare to say one was more feminist than the other?
I had some doubts about just how empowering your increasingly sexualized look was but it made me understand how difficult my wardrobe — which back then covered all my body except for my face and hands — could be for those from a western background to understand as something I felt empowered me.
We might’ve been two sides of one coin but we parted ways on “Like a Virgin”, my least favorite of your songs. When you sang that a relationship was so good it felt like being “touched for the very first time,” it was subversive for where you came from because you most certainly weren’t a virgin.
But I wasn’t “like a virgin” back then. I was a virgin as was expected of and taught to all girls my age. And so the song just reinforced, not toppled, mainstream ideology. And I’d much rather associate you challenging not reinforcing that mainstream.
I appreciated you even more, Madonna, when I became a journalist soon after I returned to my country of birth, Egypt, at the age of 21. Journalism is still a male-dominated field and watching you torpedo your way through the testosterone-heavy worlds of music and business was and remains inspiring — especially since I switched from the objectivity of news (and the relative safety of reporting the views of others) to opinion writing and expressing my own views.
Most would probably think of “Express Yourself” as the anthem to opinion writing but it’s “Human Nature” that best encapsulates the dangers of expressing your opinion, especially as a woman.
You might’ve written it about sexual fantasies but these lines resonate nonetheless:
You wouldn’t let me say the words I longed to say/
You didn’t want to see life through my eyes/
You tried to shove me back inside your narrow room/
And silence me with bitterness and lies.
I’m not the only Muslim Girl sending you birthday wishes by the way. My Saudi friend Muna, 35, a beautiful television presenter and icon in her own right, wanted to say a few words too when she heard I was getting ready to write to you.
“Madonna represented so many things. A woman who seemed to take control of her life, to get what she wanted, to play the game like a guy, to enjoy every part — except perhaps for her marriage to Sean Penn — who I hold in high esteem,” she told me in an email.
How apropos that you turned 50 on the day that 41-year old U.S. swimmer Dara Torres won a silver medal in the 50m freestyle in Beijing. I’m Dara’s age and when I look around at today’s one-named starlets — the Rihannas and the Fergies — I know how she must’ve felt in that pool: a 25-year old on my right and a 16-year old to my left. Go Dara! Your silver is golden to me.
I told Muna that your fabulous body inspires me at the gym, Madonna, but that your arms scare me just a bit.
“To have that butt at that age, you gotta have those arms,” Muna sagely explained. “Just the way it works.”
Talking of scary body parts — have you seen Dara’s abs?
Happy Birthday, Madonna!
Mona Eltahawy is an award-winning New York-based journalist and commentator, and an international lecturer on Arab and Muslim issues.
Copyright ©2008 Mona Eltahawy – distributed by Agence Global
monaeltahawy@gmail.com