Madonna, ‘Erotica’: A song about power

Madonna
‘Erotica’

Highest UK Top 40 position:
Number 3 on October 25, 1992

1. I’ll be your mistress tonight

People on Twitter have started using the phrase “slut era” a lot recently, often as the punchline to a joke about how little sex they’re having:

In general, Gen Z twentysomethings have less sex than their Millennial predecessors, and both generations look like nuns compared to those of us who were of age in the 90s. Gen X, by all accounts, just couldn’t keep it in their pants.

Back then, we didn’t say “slut era”, but we did say, “hey, it’s the 90s!” a lot to indicate the laissez-faire, fin-de-siècle spirit of the age. We’d survived AIDS; we were probably going to die of the Y2K bug. Why not just get drunk and bang?

The Divine Comedy’s 1998 single ‘Generation Sex’ opens with a woman talking about having sex with as many people as possible, which she justifies by saying, “hey, it’s the 90s!”

However, ‘Generation Sex’ is not a celebration of free love. Instead, it says:

Generation Sex respects the rights of girls
Who want to take their clothes off
As long as we can all watch, that’s okay

Here, there is a hint that something is not quite right in sexual politics.

The 90s were the age of the Ladette, the empowered woman who slammed pints and shagged strangers. But ‘Generation Sex’ asks some important questions about the true balance of sexual power. Who is performing? Who is watching? And who is really in control?

Throughout the 90s, Madonna was asking those same questions.

2. Will you let yourself go wild?

1992 saw two landmark events in the history of sex.

The first was Basic Instinct, a neo-Hitchcockian movie about a sexually confident woman who may or may not be a serial killer. It’s famous for a moment where Sharon Stone uncrosses her legs, giving the world a very brief flash of her vagina.

Now, these days you can’t turn on Channel 4 or HBO without seeing genitals, but things were different in 1992. Movies showed a lot of T&A, but anything south of the border meant that you were watching pornography (or, worse, European art cinema.)

Basic Instinct was one of the first mainstream Hollywood movies to show a vagina, and the world went absolutely bananas over it.

Some voices argued that the film was empowering because Stone’s character uses her sexuality to control gullible men. In this sense, she’s just carrying on the tradition of classic femmes fatale in film noir.

Elsewhere in 1992, Madonna was just coming off her insanely successful Blonde Ambition tour, during which she had caused outrage by doing things like pretending to masturbate onstage. She inked a new megadeal with Time Warner to launch a new company, Maverick, through which she could produce records, movies, TV shows, and books.

No one quite expected that a book would be among the first of her new projects. But her fifth album, Erotica, appeared on the same day as her first book, simply titled Sex.

The book came in a foil wrapper, like a condom, and it was bound in aluminium, because the contents were so hot that they would burn through paper.

Sex contained some poetry and prose, and a title page that simply said “I’LL TEACH YOU HOW TO FUCK”. There were also dozens of explicit photographs, and I’ll let Wikipedia describe the contents:

…nudity, simulations of sexual acts, bondage, homosexuality and analingus, with accessories such as knives, whips, masks and chains;however, intercourse is never shown. Actress Isabella Rossellini, rappers Big Daddy Kane and Madonna’s then-boyfriend Vanilla Ice, model Naomi Campbell, gay porn star Joey Stefano, actor Udo Kier, socialite Princess Tatiana von Fürstenberg, and nightclub owner Ingrid Casares and unknown models are featured in the book. Its heterosexual photos involve only Madonna and Vanilla Ice.

If you didn’t have $50 to spend on a copy, you could get the gist from the ‘Erotica’ video, which is essentially a Behind The Scenes tour of the book:

The reaction to Sex was almost universally negative, with feminists decrying it as pornography and Penthouse editor Bob Guccione Jr saying:

Madonna has overstayed her welcome. She’s becoming the human equivalent of the Energizer Bunny, flashing us her breasts in every magazine that’ll let her.

But Madonna did not repent; if anything, she doubled down, appearing in a Basic Instinct clone called Body Of Evidence, in which she has quite graphic sadomasochistic sex with Willem Dafoe.

Few people in the media took Madonna’s side. The world mostly agreed with Bob Guccione, that this was a tragic plea for attention from a fading star who would be soon forgotten.

3. I’d like to put you in a trance

Basic Instinct is a homage to Alfred Hitchcock. In that scene, Sharon Stone is dressed up to look like Kim Novak in Vertigo.

Hitchcock’s films are all about looking—Norman Bates peering through the peephole before Psycho’s shower scene, or James Stewart as a peeing tom in Rear Window. All of Hitchcock’s movies ask questions like: what are you really seeing? What are you not seeing? Who is controlling what you see?

In recent years, we’ve had lots of revelations about what was really going on in the 90s. Miki Birenyi of Lush recently published a memoir about how the happy-go-lucky Britpop scene was brutal behind the scenes, and how Ladette culture was not liberating but in fact regressively sexist.

We’ve also discovered that Sharon Stone was tricked into doing the leg-crossing scene in Basic Instinct. In her recent memoir, she wrote:

After we shot Basic Instinct, I got called in to see it. Not on my own with the director, as one would anticipate, given the situation that has given us all pause, so to speak, but with a room full of agents and lawyers, most of whom had nothing to do with the project. That was how I saw my vagina-shot for the first time, long after I’d been told, “We can’t see anything—I just need you to remove your panties, as the white is reflecting the light, so we know you have panties on.” Yes, there have been many points of view on this topic, but since I’m the one with the vagina in question, let me say: The other points of view are bullshit.

Sex and Erotica are Madonna’s personal vision. She had collaborators (Steven Meisel took the photos) but she controls what we see. Madonna understood that it doesn’t matter what you do in front of the camera because all the real power lies behind the camera. She figured this out long before Sex, and she’s always made sure that she controlled how she was presented to the world.

And that is, perhaps, her greatest achievement.

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