"Madonna at Sixty," a New York Timesfeature published Wednesday, has been met with some detailed words of disapproval from its subject, who characterized the piece in a subsequent Instagram note as "further proof that the venerable [Times] is one of the founding fathers of the patriarchy."
The Madame Xcreator preceded the criticism of the publication and society at large with some words of support for artist/photographer/friend JR, who based the accompanying NYT Magazine cover on a classic Steven Meisel portrait.
"The journalist who wrote this article spent days and hours and months with me and was invited into a world which many people [don't] get to see, but chose to focus on trivial and superficial matters such as the ethnicity of my stand-in or the fabric of my curtains and never-ending comments about my age which would never have been mentioned had I been a MAN!" Madonna said Thursday. "Women have a really hard time being the champions of other women even if they are posing as intellectual feminists."
Madonna also specifically mentioned an aside in the piece from writer Vanessa Grigoriadis, who—after a quote from the pop icon in which she said she "felt raped" in the wake of the leaks-battling Rebel Heart rollout back in 2015—noted that "it didn't feel right to explain that women these days were trying not to use that word metaphorically."
Per Madonna's note Thursday, she's "allowed to use" such an analogy due to the fact that she was raped when she was 19. "I'm sorry I spent five minutes with her," she said. "It makes me feel raped."
Read Grigoriadis' full profile here. Below, you'll find the full message of disappointment from Madonna.
Mykki Blanco, who collaborated with Madonna on the forthcoming Madame X single "Dark Ballet," also stepped in with some words of support and a plea for everyone to ditch ageism, period.
"Artists create, that's what we do and we should be allowed to create until we choose not [to]," Blanco said. "Ageism is so silly because.......we will all age."
Madame X, Madonna's first new album in more than four years, is out June 14.
