"Madonna, who for so long was pushing the boundaries of what women could and should be able to do, has instead become the most powerful avatar of our terror of aging."

"Everything about her appearance signals that she has capitulated to some very punishing beauty standards that insist women’s value lies only in their performance of youth.... After a childhood so influenced by her boldness, and years of being encouraged to express myself unapologetically, I confess I felt a sense of betrayal that she seemed to have finally succumbed to society’s expectations. But as uncomfortable as it can be for me to recognize, I wonder if Madonna isn’t simply once again forcing us to confront some hard truths. That deep down, we are not perhaps as bold or fearless as we’d like to believe ourselves to be. That none of us want to age, or lose our beauty or the power that comes with it. That in the end, we are all vain creatures desperate to hold on to, by any means possible, a shred of youth. Transgression is out; filler is in. Instead of being uniquely, aspirationally free, is she — are we all — trapped?"

Writes Glynnis MacNicol, in "Madonna Has Become an Avatar for Our Fear of Aging" (NYT).

MacNicol is 48. She doesn't really know how we all feel, but I'd just like to say, at age 76, that it certainly isn't youthful to be desperate about clinging to youth. And we're not "all... trapped." If all the singing about expressing yourself has value, it should mean respecting who we really are, not hating it to the point of attacking it with needles and knives.

***

People are talking about Madonna because her new album arrives today: "Madonna’s Confessions II is her best album in 20 years/A celebration of the dance floor that incorporates tributes to her earliest days on New York’s club scene, the queen of pop’s new music is engineered to make you move, or indeed, sweat" (Independent).

"I think the doom is coming primarily from women in their 20s and early 30s who would historically be looking to marry or to have children."

"And the exhaustion and the sense of pessimism is coming from not seeing a path forward to those things in the structures that have been presented as the traditional ways to approach both. And I don’t fault them for that."

Said Glynnis MacNicol, in "Why Is Marriage Less Attractive Than Ever? The era of relationship discontent" (NYT).

"I think with online dating — even in my experience of it — the gamification leaves you with this sense of, you know, I don’t like this one; I’ll move on to the next one.... Previously, there was no comparison. The only avenue to happiness and satisfaction was through marriage and motherhood. Anyone outside of that was the lonely spinster aunt in the attic.... And then you add to that, in a country that does not provide child care or much support for women who do want to be parents, you hear a lot of stories about that path in life and how punishing it is. And in comparison to the alternative, when the alternative for the first time in history is starting to look far more enjoyable, I think contributes to this sense of, well, what is the point of this?"

I'm giving this my old and seldom-used "paradox of choice" tag.