That people are still arguing about her-over whether she's too old, too brazen, too narcissistic, too sexual, too deluded, too Botoxed, too shameless-underscores the scope and endurance of Madonna's oeuvre.
The gold standard, I think, is Melissa Febos's 2021 book, Girlhood, which is part memoir, part cultural criticism, part historical analysis.
We tend to romanticize girlhood and things that are "girly" as being somehow soft, cosseted, or frivolous, and yet the reality is that it's often a time that is so much darker than that, filled with emotional violence and shock.
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