Before Madonna ever crossed the borderline into super-stardom, she was a “tortured” teen who had trouble landing a date.  “Straight men did not find me attractive,” she told Harper’e Bazaar in the December issue.  “I think they were scared of me because I was different.”  (ya think…)

Madonna on the cover of Harpers Bazaar

The iconic singer was never conditioned to follow mainstream standards of femininity mostly because her mother died when she was 5.  It wasn’t until she started hanging out in gay clubs that she finally felt comfortable in her own skin, she said.  “I didn’t have a female role model. I was always very aware of sexual politics, growing up in a Catholic-Italian family in the Midwest, seeing that my brothers could do what they wanted but the girls were always told that they needed to dress a certain way, act a certain way. We were told to wear our skirts to our knees, turtlenecks, cover ourselves and not wear makeup, and not do anything that would draw attention,” she said.

“Going to high school, I saw how popular girls had to behave to get the boys. I knew I couldn’t fit into that.  So I decided to do the opposite.  I refused to wear makeup, to have a hairstyle.  I refused to shave.  I had hairy armpits,” she explained.  “The boys in my school would make fun of me,” she continued.  “They called me, ‘hairy monster.’  You know, things like that.”

Madonna also spoke to Bazaar ahead of the U.S. release of her polarizing directorial debut.  The new project, “W.E.,” is a cinematic retelling of the story of Wallis Simpson, the American divorcee who famously married King Edward VII, the British monarch who abdicated his throne in 1936.

“The movie is all about the cult of celebrity,” she told Bazaar. “We like to put people on a pedestal, give them one character trait, and if they step outside of that shrine-like area that we blocked out for them, then we will punish them.”

She said the parallels to her own life were obvious.  “I think my behavior and my lifestyle threaten a lot of social norms, like the movie does,” she said.  She also hinted that her relationship with her 24-year-old boyfriend, French breakdancer Brahim Zaibat, is becoming more serious.

“I don’t necessarily like to use the word lover because it sounds like they just come over and have sex with you. I aspire to more than that, and I need more than that,” she said. “Someone to share my inner life with. That’s extremely important. It’s also important that my children admire and respect this partner that I would choose for myself. Especially for my sons, who have their father, (ex-husband Guy Ritchie), but they need a male role model as well.”

Look for a copy of The December issue of Harper’s Bazaar on the news stands now.  The woman has come from eating out of NYC garbage bins in the early 80′s to major stardom over the past 3 decades!  Pretty amazing what you can do when you have “Ambition…”

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