What is the consensus among Madonna stans about that first-person story in the 1992 SEX book where she describes the joy of raping a Puerto Rican pre pubescent boy? With all the David Choe stuff I keep being reminded of that story because, it’s essentially the same thing. A public figure creates a plausible-sounding narrative of themselves as a rapist (and rapes that in both cases also involve racist degradation and stereotyping of the victim), and presents the rape in a positive light. In Choe’s case, he later claims it was all fiction, and to be fair, no one but himself (no acquaintance of the survivor, no survivor) ever spoke of the event. Likewise with Madonna, to be fair, no actual person ever claimed she had sexually abused them in this way. So are these rapes? Maybe, maybe not. Like Choe she dug her own grave by sharing the story. The idea both stories are fictional cannot be dismissed (these people do make up shit for a living) and we can still harshly criticize or even boycott an artist for the audacity of being racist and making light of rape, without necessarily needing to believe they actually raped people.

Nonetheless, as far as I can tell, Madonna never even bothered to offer a Choe-style “apology,” she never withdrew the story or claimed it had been a misjudged piece of fiction, as Choe claimed. So, without even such a claim by her, I am tending more to regard this story as having elements of truth. Maybe she exaggerated the nature of what happened, but since she once told us she raped someone and she has never said otherwise in years since, I have no difficulty believing it.

Yet, very oddly, both Madonna and her stans’ narrative around the SEX book is that it would play much better today than it did then—that Madonna was a prescient voice whose critics were purely driven by prudery and religious conservatism. I say all this as a huge fan of ‘90s Madonna in general and Erotica era in particular (it is undoubtedly Madonna’s best album) but the SEX book was a huge mistake that had little to do with the album, and little to do with sex for that matter. It was an edgelord provocation our culture would now regard as reactionary punching-down, at best, and even if other aspects of the book are not inflammatory in the same way, I can’t think of a defense for including even one story of that nature.