Like A Virgin (song) - Legacy

Legacy

After the song and its video were released, "Like a Virgin" attracted the attention of family organizations who complained that the video and the song, promoted sex without marriage and undermined family values, offering an unsavoury image of Madonna as a whore. Outraged moralists condemned her as a sex kitten and sought to ban the song and the video. Conservatives were angered that Madonna dared to portray religious symbolism and the virginal wedding attire in a sexual context. Clerk noted the song attracted an unprecedented level of attention from social groups compared to any female singer's song. "The main problem was that most of them listened superficially to the lyric of the song, imagining that it detailed or called on an innocent's sexual initiation." While one section of the population were outraged at the scandal, other were taking joy at the very notion of a virginal Madonna, who retorted by saying,

I was surprised by how people reacted to "Like a Virgin" because when I did that song, to me, I was singing about how something made me feel a certain way – brand-new and fresh – and everyone interpreted it as I don't want to be a virgin anymore. Fuck my brains out! That's not what I sang at all. "Like a Virgin" was always absolutely ambiguous.

The song's influence was most profound on the younger generation. Madonna's public persona of an indomitable, sexually unashamed, supremely confident woman struck a chord with them. Biographer Andrew Morton noted that most of Madonna's admirers were females, who were born-and-brought-up with an image of old-fashioned stereotypes of women as virginal brides, or as whores, or with feminist values that rejected the use of a woman's looks for her self-advancement. Author William McKeen of Rock and roll is here to stay: an anthology commented that with the song, Madonna became the last word in attitude and fashion for young girls of that time. He compared that image of Madonna with that of Barbie. McKeen explained that Madonna intermixed middle-class ideas of femininity with examples of what femininity meant to her, which was having equal opportunity. She offered an aggressive sexuality that implied it was acceptable for women not only to initiate relationships, but also enjoy them. In addition, according to Morton, at a time when eighties fashions were promoting flat-chested, stick-thin women as ideals of beauty, the more curvaceous Madonna made average girls feel that it was fine to be in the shape they were. A new word called 'Madonna wannabe' was introduced to describe the thousands of girls who tried to emulate Madonna's style. At one point, Macy's allotted an entire floor area to the sale of Madonna-look clothing, including cut-off gloves, rubber bangles and lacy leggings, which prompted Madonna herself to later comment "that's a riot, because I was just making the best of my situation." University professors, gender-studies experts and feminists earnestly started discussing her role as a post-modernist style and cultural icon. According to author Debbi Voller, "Like a Virgin" gave rise to the icon Madonna.