Fans express concern over Madonna – but why are people still commenting on women’s looks?

After recently announcing a world tour, music icon Madonna appeared at the Grammy Awards on Sunday to introduce Sam Smith and Kim Petras as they performed their award-winning hit, Unholy. But, despite the pair’s show-stopping performance, viewers had more to say about Madonna’s face – begging the question: why are people still commenting on women’s looks?

“This legit looks like a Madonna impersonator with pics of the real Madonna in the background. She really fucked up her face,” one person said on Twitter, with someone else writing: “Always admired and respected Madonna but what she’s done to herself, her face makes me so sad. We live in a world and society where a strong badass women still felt she had to do this to herself to be relevant, to be seen.”

Other people leapt to the singer’s defence, pointing out that pressure to conform to society’s beauty standards is the issue. “Even when madonna was 30, people always had something to say about her appearance, her body, her face or even her hands,” a fan tweeted, adding: “You guys talk about ‘age gracefully’ but… nothing is enough for you.”

“I cannot with people dragging Madonna. She’s a queen. She can do what she wants with her face,” someone else wrote. “People can have autonomy over their bodies!”

Taking to her own social media to wade in, life coach and author of The Selfish Romantic: How To Date Without Feeling Bad About Yourself, Michelle Elman, criticised one person who shared a side-by-side photo of Madonna with someone else around the same age. “Body shame is body shame,” Elman said on Instagram. “Attack the system, not the individual.”

“This is where we must think deeper, more critically,” she went on, stressing that people often change their appearance – through plastic surgery, for example – due to insecurities that have been triggered by society.

Elman rightly points out that society teaches us that “old women are invisible” and that “in order to be profitable you need to stay young.”

“[Society] says the way you look is always the problem,” she continued. “The individual is just a product of the system that they aren’t good enough as they are.”

Sadly, Madonna isn’t the only woman – famous or not – who’s been subjected to such comments. It’s an issue that transcends age groups too. Take Geordie Shore’s Charlotte Crosby, for example, who was the focus of a two-part TV series back in 2021 titled, Celebrities: What’s happened to your face?.