gender blender

It's interesting to read in today's NY Times the following two stories. In the first, from which I've extracted a paragraph, Gina Bellafante rather grudgingly describes Madonna's current body shape—and kicks in a little bitchery as well. Madonna is described as being a “denier”, her sculptured body the product of a “number of hours...each day” in hard and demanding physical exercise.

(H)er perfect musculature produces a kind of dissonance. Madonna doesn’t have an altruist’s body, she has a denier’s. What you’re tallying in your head when you watch her dance with the strength and agility of a 19-year old, are the number of hours she is spending each day practicing ashtanga, running hills, bench-pressing the weight of a Regency table. You are counting all the calories Madonna is not eating.
read Gina Bellafante's story here

Mick Jagger, in Guy Trebay's telling, is as “lithe as a boy”, a “gorgeous superannuated Pan.” No hard work for the Mickster, no hours spent huffing and puffing (at 63?). Hmm—not even a hint of the scalpel making him look so boyish. You can bet there's been more fat vacuumed off his ass than off Anna Nicole Smith's. Madonna's too.

As lithe as a boy, Mr. Jagger seems to defy age. At least he does below the waist. Grooved and sunken, his weather-beaten face betrays every second of his 63 years and this makes it all the more startling when he prances and postures like some curious and gorgeous superannuated Pan.
Guy Trebay's story here


I don't have much sympathy for either of them (though Exile on Main Street still rocks my player).....but it is curious that Jagger is seen as just a naturally lithe, miraculously youthful old codger, while there seems to be something desperate imputed to Madonna's equally unlikely hand-crafted body.

Now, the two stories had different themes and weren't connected in terms of editorial placement, but the fact remains that they represent two very different views of essentially the same subject. I guess we're talking gender politics here, though the stereotypical views of men/women and their bodies are turned on their heads. It used to be that women were granted the benefit of the charitable doubt and were described as "eternally youthful" and so forth, and men derided for their desperate attempts to chase their youthful selves and remain attractive for the dewy-eyed innocents on whom they preyed.