Madonna is very unhappy about “Madonna at Sixty.”

That’s the title of the recent New York Times Magazine profile of the pop diva, a piece of journalism so needlessly long, I wondered if I might be 60 myself by the time I finished reading it (and Madonna herself, dead).

It turns out I’m not a day older.

And Madonna is alive and livid.

She isn’t mad about the length of the piece.

She’s angry about its focus: the theme that ties the profile together is not her music, nor her fashion choices (she wears an eye patch these days), but her age.

And it’s true: the profile’s author, Vanessa Grigoriadis, a mom of 45, refers to both herself and Madonna in the piece as “older mothers.” It’s clear throughout that she wants the diva’s personal take on getting up there.

Grigoriadis writes, “When we talked about aging, I was surprised when she [Madonna] turned the issue back on me. ‘I think you think about growing old too much,’ she said later. ‘I think you think about age too much. I think you should just stop thinking about it.’ ”

If only she had stopped writing about it.

Last week, after the profile landed online, Madonna posted a scathing critique to Instagram, condemning Grigoriadis for focusing on her age.

“The journalist who wrote this article spent days and hours and months with me,” Madonna writes, “but chose to focus on trivial and superficial matters such as … never-ending comments about my age, which would never have been mentioned had I been a MAN! Women have a really hard time being the champions of other women even if they are posing as intellectual feminists. I’m sorry I spent five minutes with her. It makes me feel raped. And yes I’m allowed to use that analogy, having been raped at the age of 19.”

Yikes.

My heart goes out to Grigoriadis, a woman who has to wake up every morning with the knowledge that Madonna feels personally violated by her journalism.

Some may even think she has good reason to feel this way.

After all, sexist double standards in the entertainment industry abound. Old studs such as George Clooney date younger women on screen and off, whereas actresses Madonna’s age play mothers to women 10 years their junior.

When Caitlyn Jenner appeared on Vanity Fair, the remarkable thing about that cover wasn’t, in my mind, that it debuted a transgender woman to the world, but that it debuted a 65-year-old woman in lingerie. Older women are rarely sexualized.

Madonna is. She’s Madonna after all. On her new record, Madame X, she sings:

“Show me how you move your body

I said come, do it good

You know how I like to party.”

On her 2012 album, MDNA (a play on the drug, MDMA) she sings, “Now that your name pumps like blood in my veins/It pulses through my body/igniting my mind/And it’s like MDMA and that’s okay.”

Is it really, though?

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This is, in the end, why it’s difficult to sympathize with the queen of pop when she scoffs at questions about her age — and why it’s fair for journalists to pose them.

It seems Madonna wants to be taken seriously, not as a sexually proud woman who happens to be 60 (nothing wrong with that and more power to her), but rather, as the life of the party.

And not just any party but the after-party.

At Coachella.

It seems she wants us to believe that, when the lights go out at one of her 8:30 concerts, she’s dropping molly backstage, when let’s face it, she is probably dropping Epsom salts into a bathtub.

Unlike many other, older, successful pop stars who make half-hearted or shoddy efforts to keep up with trends (I’m looking at you Celine Dion), it seems Madonna is obsessed with keeping up.

For a long time this obsession was a gift and a key element to her success.

Lately, though, it seems as though it’s more of a curse, like her drive to stay current comes at the expense of her artistry.

If parroting adolescent pop stars is her passion, that’s totally cool. But she shouldn’t be surprised when people ask questions — namely, “Are you tired?”

For me, this question doesn’t come from a place of judgment, but from curiosity.

Having recently exited my 20s, and very quickly having lost the ability to stay up past midnight, I’m relieved to fall out of touch, to feel both my grasp on popular culture and my waistband loosen.

I know: I’m not Madonna. Madonna doesn’t want to spend her evenings in a recliner with a magic bag draped around her neck, watching old TV shows.

And yet, her defensiveness and subsequent anger about perfectly reasonable questions regarding her age — it is as though 60 is something to sweep under the rug, rather than celebrate — suggests that maybe the diva protests too much. Maybe reclining before Columbo is exactly what she wants to do (in between bumps of Molly, of course).

I know women are supposed to find relief in the mantra that age is just a number.

But I find far more relief in the reality that it’s not.

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