Word: madonna
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There are a few straightforward love songs like "Rain" and "Bad Girl," a lonely lament that echoes her Desperately Seeking Susan days. For the most part, Erotica is a first rate piece of work, although it lacks the sparkle of Madonna's earlier efforts. Musically, she's staring at the ceiling through a lot of this album, but she still puts on one hell of a show...
Part two of the Madonna's promotional bacchanalia is The Book, appropriately titled Sex. For regular readers of Playboy, Penthouse and Swank, the purchasing procedure for Sex will be remarkably familiar. The book is kept behind the counter, and you must provide positive identification to prove you're eighteen years or older, which entitles you to the privilege of laying down $50 for this piece of "erotica." The book is packaged in mylar (no peeking!), and once unwrapped, it cannot be returned--publisher's rules...
...jump through these hoops and become one of the 750,000 lucky owners of Sex. You have the spiral-bound tome in your hot little hands and you open the aluminum cover. What do you see? First, there's the safe sex disclaimer, where Madonna tells us that these delightful little tableaux represent her fantasies, which of course don't involve condoms. But if she were to ever act them out, protection is definitely on the agenda. She then introduces herself as Dita, your hostess and the hero(ine) of Sex. What follows is a written defense of pornography...
...pretty explicit (e.g. the double page spread of Madonna's crotch) but not terribly erotic, in the sense that there's not much left to suggest. And, considering Madonna's antics in the past few years, the most shocking thing about the book is the revelation that she dyes her pubic hair, too. The half-tone black and white print quality is nothing special, and the book is somewhat flimsy--at one Boston newspaper office, the copy I saw was falling apart after less than a day (and an unspecified number of trips to the bathroom...
...redeeming value of this book really has nothing to do with its shock value or its publishing quality. It's the splendid arrogance of Sex that really sets it apart. By publishing slick photo sex for mass consumption, Madonna, the promoter, makes a bid for America's fantasy life on an unprecedented scale. She has pushed her image as a mass media sex object to its logical extreme. This is porn-shop feminism in full bloom...