WHY BE A VIRGIN?

REBEL | SINGER-SONGWRITER | ACTRESS | PRODUCER

Known for pushing boundaries in songs and imagery, Madonna’s fashion style, provocative performances and music influenced and liberated females from conventional standards. Undermining longstanding societal norms, she posed in Playboy with full body hair, used religious icons in unholy ways, sanctioned premarital sex and unwed pregnancies to change forever a woman’s limits and expressions.

Rebellious and influenced from childhood by her Catholic upbringing, religion became the topic of her most controversial works. Her mother died when she was five and Madonna developed her own unregulated voice without traditional rules and regulations that set female beauty norms like the use of makeup and shaved legs and underarms.

Madonna is a shift-shaping freedom fighter whose nerve to push social boundaries only increases her popularity.  Everything she does catches wind and causes controversy, from her survival and exposure of domestic abuse to her video portraying an interracial couple long before it was a societal norm. Yet her perfectionism and versatility made Madonna a superstar in dance, music, film, theater and fashion. She replaced The Beatles for the most gold-certified singles in the US, had the highest-grossing tour of any female artist, won a Golden Globe and Academy Award, written both a children's book and a soft-core pornographic coffee-table book that became the most successful of its kind. In 2008, she was named the world's wealthiest female musician by Forbes magazines.

Her power and force have dramatically shifted feminine traditions from archaic cultural norms to more individualistic expressive ideals.