Lasers on crotches and bums, straddling a man in a toilet cubicle, Sabrina Carpenter on her knees – these are just three scenes from Madonna’s recent 10-minute Confessions II film, released ahead of her 15th album of the same name dropping tomorrow. As suggested by its title and raunchy club scenes, the project is a follow-up to the Queen of Pop’s landmark 2005 album, Confessions on a Dance Floor, which saw the singer find liberation in dance music.

But, of course, sexually explicit imagery is by no means a new addition to the Madonna canon. Over her 40-year-long career, the prototypical pop star has been a symbol of sexual liberation and bodily autonomy, and has caused more than a few controversies along the way. From being banned from MTV in the 90s to, by her own account, being excommunicated from the Catholic Church no less than three times, a new Madonna album is guaranteed to make someone, somewhere clutch their pearls. 

So, with her newest release and rumours of a Glastonbury headline on the horizon, we look back at ten of Madonna’s most controversial moments.

10. “WHAT IT FEELS LIKE FOR A GIRL” (SEPTEMBER, 2000)

Madonna’s music videos have frequently been banned from TV over the years – but this time it wasn’t for her sexual imagery. In the Guy Ritchie-directed video for 2000 single “What It Feels Like For A Girl”, Madonna embarks on a high-octane crime spree with an old lady accomplice, blowing up petrol stations, running over men on the street and ramming into police cars. The video, along with the lyrics “'You think that being a girl is degrading / But secretly you'd love to know what it's like,” is intended to highlight society’s double standards towards women – but it was still sanctioned by TV stations for being too violent. 

9. KISSING BRITNEY SPEARS AND CHRISTINA AGUILERA (AUGUST, 2003) 

15 years after its original release, Madonna’s “Like A Virgin” became the subject of controversy once again during a live rendition at the VMAs alongside Britney Spears, Missy Elliot and Christine Aguilera. In the performance, Madonna kisses both Spears and Aguilera on the lips in a move that allegedly wasn’t included in the song’s rehearsals. While it might seem fairly tame nowadays, the kisses made global headlines at the time – egged on by a salacious camera cut to Spears’ then-boyfriend Justin Timberlake, who looked slightly uncomfortable. 

8. “PAPA DON’T PREACH” (JUNE, 1986)

Featuring the lyrics “Papa don’t preach, I been losing sleep / But I made up my mind / I’m keeping my baby,” this song managed to piss off people on all sides of the political spectrum. While some conservative Americans argued the song represented a pro-life message, others criticised it for allegedly glamourising teen pregnancy – and Planned Parenthood even called for radio stations to reconsider airing the song. Speaking about “Papa Don’t Preach” in the wake of its release, Madonna announced “It is a message song that everyone is going to take the wrong way.” She wasn’t wrong. 

7. “OPEN YOUR HEART”  (JANUARY, 1987)

Less than a year after “Papa Don’t Preach”, Madonna caused controversy once more, this time for featuring a strip club in the video for “Open Your Heart”. Widely regarded as beginning Madonna’s long-running relationship with sexual imagery, the video is also notable for including depictions of gay couples (for a mainstream pop star during the Aids crisis, this was controversial enough). But, to be fair, showing a child trying to enter a strip club was never going to go down well, was it?

6. BLOND AMBITION TOUR (APRIL – AUGUST 1990)

Doubling down on her feud with the Catholic Church a year after the release of “Like A Prayer”, Madonna’s Blond Ambition tour continuously drew parallels between religion and sex. In response, Pope John Paul II branded it “one of the most Satanic shows in the history of humanity” (ironically, it doesn’t even make our top five Madonna controversies) and led a protest movement that caused one of the tours’ Italian dates to be cancelled.

But that’s just one of many controversies this tour became engulfed in. Elsewhere, Toronto’s police force threatened to arrest Madonna for “lewd and obscene behaviour” if she went ahead with a stimulated masturbation scene during the performance of “Like A Virgin” (the arrest never took place), while her spiky, Jean Paul Gaultier-designed bra made headlines for allegedly overly-sexualising the female body.

5. “JUSTIFY MY LOVE” (NOVEMBER, 1990) 

While MTV were one of a handful of TV stations to continue airing “Like A Prayer”, they drew the line at “Justify My Love” the following year. Lifted from Madonna’s first greatest hits compilation album, the video for the track depicted Madonna participating in an orgy in a hotel room, complete with multiple creative camera solutions to avoid showing nipples on-screen. What appears to have been the straw that broke MTV’s back, however, was the video’s added allusions to gay sex, with cultural critic Mark Crispin Miller noting that it was “perfectly all right for MTV to broadcast sadomasochism couplings and events as long as the images don't violate a certain heterosexual norm.”

Madonna then found herself in even more controversy when she released a remix of the song titled “The Beast Within”, which included the spoken-word line: “I know your tribulation and your poverty and the slander of those who say that they are Jews, but they are not. They are a Synagogue of Satan.” The track was immediately branded antisemitic by multiple Jewish organisations. Responding to these criticisms, Madonna announced: “People can say I am an exhibitionist, but no one can ever accuse me of being a racist.”

4. CONFESSIONS TOUR (MAY – SEPTEMBER, 2006)

Completing her Holy Trinity of (alleged) excommunications from the Catholic Church is Madonna’s Confessions Tour, promoting her Confessions on a Dance Floor album from the previous year. In true Madonna style, the show featured frequent religious and sexual themes – including Madonna staging a Crucifixion, complete with Crown of Thorns, while a background screen displayed the number of children orphaned by Aids. This time, however, it wasn’t Pope John Paul II who lambasted Madonna, but his successor, Pope Benedict XVI.

Elsewhere, the tour was threatened with legal action in Germany and Moscow, and the scene was cut from NBC broadcasts. As always, Madonna defended her actions, stating in the wake of the tour: “I believe in my heart that if Jesus were alive today he would be doing the same thing.”

3. LATE SHOW WITH DAVID LETTERMAN (MARCH, 1994)

In this now-infamous interview with Letterman, Madonna is introduced as having “slept with some of the biggest names in the entertainment industry” before facing repeated probes and jabs about her sex life. The Queen of Pop, meanwhile, who later admitted to smoking a joint before getting on stage, hits back at Letterman, quipping, “You’re a sick fuck, I don’t know why I get so much shit.” Notoriously, Madonna also says the word “fuck” 14 times throughout the interview, making it the most-censored American network television talk-show in history. 

Recalling the incident on The Howard Stern Show, Madonna said: “One time, I was mad at [Letterman] when I said the f-word a lot. I was in a weird mood that day. I was dating Tupac Shakur at the time, and he had got me all riled up about life in general. So, when I went on the show I was feeling very gangsta.”

2. “LIKE A PRAYER” (MARCH, 1989)

You know when you get on your knees to pray? Yeah, kind of like that. “Like A Prayer” was already controversial for its heavily sexual lyrics, but the subsequent music video for the track took this to a whole new level. Allegedly created out of Madonna’s desire to be more provocative than ever, the track depicted an interracial love affair that leads the couple to be murdered by the Ku Klux Klan – while also weaving an elaborate parallel between religious and sexual ecstasy.

The video was subject to immediate backlash. Then-Pope John Paul II called for a boycott of Madonna, the video, and all subsidiaries of the Pepsi Corporation – who had just launched a collaboration with the singer. Ultimately, Pepsi dropped their partnership with Madonna and all TV stations apart from MTV refused to play the video. Speaking about the video that same year, Madonna said: “Art should be controversial and that’s all there is to it.” 

1. SEX (OCTOBER 1992)

Perhaps the pinnacle of her many provocations, Madonna’s 1992 photobook Sex would be considered wildly controversial even by today’s standards. Released alongside her fifth album, Erotica, the book depicts Madonna in a range of fully nude, sadomasochistic positions. It also included cameos from Naomi Campbell, Vanilla Ice, Big Daddy Cane and even a distant member of the German royal family, Princess Tatiana von Fürstenberg. Unsurprisingly, the book was subject to widespread backlash and many retailers refused to stock it, but Sex has since received praise as a landmark post-feminist work.