Madonna and The Whore

The Material Girl was never going to age into a woman who chose tasteful tweakments. She emerged voguing from the Coachella 2026 stage to a glimmering sea of recording cellphones. According to the infallible internet, the mother of pop is somewhere between two to three deeplane facelifts deep, and fillered, botoxed, and peptided into an indeterminable age. Madonna opens her latest dance anthem I Feel So Free letting us know she can “Create a new persona, a different identity” anytime she wants. She samples Lil Louis’s 1989 house classic French Kiss, “Oh by the way, it all started like this.” Madonna never left the club. She is tethered there by an umbilical cord. 

There was a time every trend was marked by her arrival. What was moving and slithering in the underground became ready-packaged to sell to the masses. The Wellness Wives are years behind a taut Ashtanga-era Madonna with her leg behind her head in Eka Pada Sirsasana. You’re unlikely to see her in a matching Alo set holding an iced matcha. That’s a poor xerox of a trend she’s already moved on from. Her fingers have always been firmly on the pulse, even when others couldn’t see it until a few seasons later. But aren’t those fingers on hands that give the age away? Is that why Kris Jenner won’t be photographed without gloves?

God, why can’t women just age the right way? 

You don’t look younger. We can all tell. 

Why not age like Pamela Anderson?

Another material girl, Pamela, has been pushed on and off the beauty standard pedestal for most of her career. A fresh-faced beauty pulled from the crowd at a football game in Vancouver, she is the ideal of how a woman should look in a swimsuit, in a sextape, and, now, as an aging woman. Going make-up free, fresh faced, glowing, and most importantly, natural. 

God, she’s really let herself go.

What happened to her?

The coin doesn’t flip fairly for either woman. For every comment lauding them as iconic, every woman knows both are still judged through the eternal question: Do men still want to fuck them? And isn’t that a little boring? In 1994, Madonna sang on Human Nature, “I'm not your bitch don't hang your shit on me.” Thirty years later, women who don’t play by the rules are still equally alarming, formidable, and even hideous. Thirty years later, little girls are now selling anti-aging products to each other.

One week after Madonna took the stage with Sabrina Carpenter, The Guardian published an in-depth analysis on young girls posting their skincare routines to social media. It proved that brands are marketing retinoids, categorized as strong anti-aging products, to 13-year-old girls. It showcased 2-year-old toddlers rubbing serums on their cherub cheeks. In a world dealing with fuel shortages, there is no shortage of adorable little girls in face masks online. Brands are using children to sell eternal youth to each other. A future where they need never have laugh lines, look feeble, or become undesirable. And those brands are making bank. In 2025, the anti-aging market was estimated to be worth between $55-$85 billion USD. Now that every demographic of females aging is being marketed to, men are becoming a larger part of the golden financial pot. Braden Peters, 20, also known as Clavicular, is the new poster child for young men achieving a beauty standard that, at its extreme, involves bone smashing, meth, and adding “xxing” to the end of any word you choose. The snake is eating its own tail.

But we’re not at an endpoint. The surgeries and injections will keep getting better, and the women who refrain will become more obvious. We are being sold aging as a product: natural, a little work, subtle work, obvious work. John Berger wrote about publicity that it is not selling us products or even each other as brands: “Its promise is not of pleasure, but of happiness: happiness as judged from the outside by others. The happiness of being envied...” The anti-aging market desperately needs us to stew in comments, thoughts, and anxieties about how we think others are aging and how others think we are aging. What happens in a world where we spend a little less time doing that?