Her critics haven’t got a prayer

I can’t understand all the fuss about Madonna, says Sarah Rodrigues in The Daily Telegraph. The 63-year-old singer posted a series of photos to Instagram on Wednesday, “in which she appears clad in fishnets, a thong, Louboutins and a bondage-inspired bra”. Online commenters were furious. “Having self-respect at this age will suit you better,” chastised one. “I am ashamed of what my idol becomes,” wailed another. “Others have simply asked, despairingly, ‘Why?’”

Where have these people been for the past 40 years? “Madonna has always been shocking.” In the 1980s she danced in lingerie, in a field of burning crucifixes, in the video for her smash hit Like a Prayer. It earned her a reprimand from the Vatican. In the 1990s she released a book called Sex, replete with photographs of her “pleasuring herself over a mirror and engaging in a threesome”. The idea that we should be shocked by a few racy pictures now is laughable. Besides, whatever anyone wants to say about her – “her talent, or lack thereof; her dress sense, or lack thereof; her plastic surgery (surely not lack thereof)” – Madonna is no fool. “She has carefully crafted and curated a long and very lucrative career out of being provocative, raunchy, divisive, shocking, irreverent, blasphemous and seemingly promiscuous.” And good for her. That ability to shock is precisely why she’s endured.