‘The best way to seduce someone,” Madonna wrote in 1992 in her book Sex, “is by making yourself unavailable.” What excellent advice, I have been thinking these last few weeks while a woman I know has been posting endless sexy selfies and kid pictures on the internet. Along with updates about what a rebel she is, what an “unapologetic bitch”, and with so many #hashtags thrown in that it’s like trying to read sentences written in Alphabetti spaghetti with added hedgehogs.

She never bothered with social media before, but now she’s all over Instagram and Twitter like a rash. It’s not that I mind because I’m against being noisy on the internet, or because she’s 56 and has four children, but because this woman, unfortunately, is Madonna. Which is why the things she said in the 90s have been coming back to me.

When I say I know her, I don’t, but she was such an important part of my youth that I feel like I do. Or rather, not knowing Madonna was such an important part of my youth and of millions of other people’s, that watching her announce her existence on the hour, every hour – it’s like she’s turned into Harry Enfield’s old character, the one who keeps popping up saying, “Only meee!!”

She’s not the only one of my teenage idols to have lost the plot: this week I learned that Alex James from Blur had David Cameron round to his New Year’s Eve party in the Cotswolds. I mean, I knew that spending a million quid on cocaine, which he admitted to in his memoirs (Alex, not Dave), must have caused some damage to his brain, but I didn’t know it was that bad. Samantha Cameron accompanied her husband to this party and was said to have had such a good time that she was “seen playing a leg as a guitar at one point”. I would like to personally thank the Camerons for not using photo-sharing sites at this sensitive time.

But I remember when Madonna published that ground-breaking, beautiful, filthy book, Sex, and a boy at my sixth-form college had managed to get hold of a copy. He told us about it in registration, said he’d been up all night reading it. I’d heard she was planning to write a lot about her life in this book – for the first time, I was going to find out how she really felt. I asked him, on tenterhooks, what she had said. “Oh,” he replied, “I was more looking at the pictures, to be honest.” Scales descended from my eyes.

Well, now I know how she really feels. When Madonna posts updates such as “Shutting the fuck up is gluten free. Add that to your diet”, I think, yep, that’s probably aimed at your ex-friend Gwyneth Paltrow. (And quite funny, let’s be honest. Her journey into the chattier bits of the internet began hilariously when she did a live chat on Reddit and someone asked what they needed to do to make her go on a date with them. “Send photo,” she answered. They wrote back: “Madonna please my beauty is on the inside”, to which she replied, “I still need to see it.” “If you were a gay man,” another user asked, “would you be a top or a bottom?” “I am a gay man,” came Madonna’s reply.)

Now, just in case we haven’t got the message of selfiedom, her new song is called Bitch I’m Madonna, and she’s promoting her album Rebel Heart by posting pictures of herself and other noted rebels with a black rope scrawled over their faces. Bound, perhaps, like some kind of slave. These people include Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King and Bob Marley, because apparently the battle of one of the highest-earning white people in the world is almost identical to those who fought for emancipation of an entire subjugated people. When challenged about this, she responded, and I have typed this out exactly as she wrote it, so bear with me: “This is niether a crime or an insult or racist! I also did it with Michael jaclson and frida khalo and marilyn monroe”.

I realised then, looking at the un-spellchecked words of my heroine, that it isn’t teenagers who should have their phones taken off them, it’s parents. And so, if one of Madonna’s children could intervene right now and flush mum’s mobile down the toilet, she will thank you for it one day. We all will.

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