Lock up your stallions! Madonna is on tour again, and strongly hinting that her attraction to horses goes way beyond the whispering stage. Indeed, in an effort to prove that tasteful bestiality is not an oxymoron, the June issue of W magazine devotes 58 pages to photographs of Madonna prancing around a stable that looks like a high-tech horse jail in her polyurethane bra and leather bridal. One lucky steed gets a glimpse of her udders. For another, she drops to her knees and administers a two-fisted tail-job.
But those are just the place and show pics—the winner features Madonna and a black beauty in the apparent aftermath of some very thorough breeding. The horse lays on its side, completely out of it. The singer lays on the horse, her legs splayed slightly, her eyes shut in spent satisfaction as she puffs a post-coital cigarette.
In theory, this is pretty edgy stuff: Hey, look, Madonna slipped a horse some roofies and date-raped it! In addition, the 141-year-old entertainer (in horse years) looks stunning throughout the portfolio, her muzzle smooth and glossy, her flanks trim, her back muscles rippling in such gaudy, swollen relief they seem on the verge of ejaculation. But despite the kinky hints of the love that dare not whinny its name, the photos are too self-consciously composed to generate any sense of transgression. Playing like a very long, very slow perfume commercial, the spread may inspire a few W subscribers to purchase one of the Dolce & Gabbana corsets on display, but for most people who view it, boredom will set in long before shock or titillation.
Madonna employs the equestrian erotica theme in her concert tour, as well, but that's just the beginning of her efforts to provoke. Like approximately two out of every three Americans, she has nothing nice to say about George W. Bush, juxtaposing images of him and Osama bin Laden during one video montage and improvising naughty lyrics about him in another number. And in an attempt to impersonate either Jesus or a gay sword-thrower's imperiled assistant, she accessorizes a billowy red blouse and a pair of royal purple boots with a chic crown of thorns, then mounts a massive mirrored cross as the video monitors flash images of starving Third World urchins.
What this particular crucifixion means isn't entirely clear, but that's the point: Madonna knows her glib, self-aggrandizing appropriation of sacred Catholic iconography will always prompt a few retaliatory sound bites from outraged men of the cloth. In her heyday, she could count the Vatican and the Pope himself amongst her most vocal detractors, but apparently only William Donohue of the Catholic League has time to watch Entertainment Tonight these days, because few others have responded to her latest antics. "Poor Madonna keeps trying to shock," the B-list finger-wagger needled. "But all she succeeds in doing is coming across as a boring bigot."
Perhaps, but there's a more charitable way to view her, too. Sure, Madonna no longer represents the cutting edge of provocation—she could gang-bang the last 10 winners of the Kentucky Derby live onstage, nail herself to her mirrored cross using stakes carved out of endangered elephant tusks, and even so there'd be someone doing something on the Internet that made all that look tame. But to criticize her failure to shock is to misread her current value: Her function is no longer to offend, it's to console. Indeed, every time she dirty-dances with an Arabian stallion or stages a schlock crucifixion, it's a reminder that once upon a time, in a faraway place where there was no such thing as suicide bombers or bird flu, life was so wonderful that Madonna's silly agitprop was actually considered a minor threat to the social order. No wonder people are paying as much as $350 a ticket to see her.