First of all, I have been remiss in posting on this blog
recently. This is mostly because I’ve been busy graduating and trying to find a
job but also because I haven’t found a subject I’ve wanted to write about
enough to feel like the post would be good. I write at my best when I’m
passionate about something, or more often, when something pisses me off.
So, to Miley Cyrus.
This isn’t really a post about Miley Cyrus herself. I’m aggressively
annoyed every time anything like this happens – someone does something remotely
controversial and “news” outlets everywhere keep on writing about it long after
the story is dead. I’d love to not write about this, I’d love to live in a
society where people don’t care about this kind of thing. But, unfortunately,
culture is so often dictated by the masses and the masses care about this, so
it becomes important to discuss the real issues in play here.
The majority of the coverage of Miley’s VMAs performance and
her new music video has ranged from misogynistic slut shaming to people “genuinely
concerned about her welfare”. People seem to either think she’s a harlot or
that she’s “going through something” when in reality it’s probably neither.
Miley Cyrus is just doing what everyone expects her to do. She’s doing what
society wants her to do, being the person society needs her to be for her to
stay interesting, stay relevant. All these “think-pieces” about her mental
state or whether her performance was “inappropriate” are just reinforcing the
virgin/whore dynamic which so insidiously and wholly permeates every aspect of
our culture and our society. To be a woman means treading a fine line between
these binaries. It means picking and choosing which one would best suit the
situation, which one will get you judged the least. Miley spent years playing
the virgin as a child star surrounded by sexualised images of women and being
prevented from actually coming of age in her own time in order to continue the success
of the franchise. She’s not a child star anymore, so what is there left for her
to do? What else can she be now other than “the whore”? The public has been objectifying
and sexualising her way before it was legal or decent to do so, but now she’s
taking that into her own hands, now she’s sexualising herself, now she’s
choosing to be naked in a music video or to dance provocatively onstage, now
she has agency, the very same people who posted the egregiously creepy and borderline
paedophilic “all grown up” articles as soon as she hit 16 are denouncing her
for being a slut. Denouncing her for doing the thing they wanted her to do, for
being the person they forced her to be.
This isn’t even new. It’s been going on for decades. It
happened to Drew Barrymore, it’s the entire reason for the movie Spring
Breakers and now it’s happening to Miley Cyrus. Every time a female child star
stops being a child she is shunned for becoming too sexual, too wild, too much
of a “whore”. Drew Barrymore stopped being Gertie, stopped being the girl the
patriarchy wanted to take care of, to protect, and started being a woman,
started having power, having agency, and so she was denounced. Miley Cyrus
stopped being the wide-eyed country girl and now society has no idea how to
handle her. The world is scared of women with power and Miley – rich, famous
and only 20 years old – has a hell of a lot of it. So they put her in her
place, they dismiss her as a slut, as someone having a breakdown, rather than
confront the possibility that perhaps this woman who can and should do exactly
as she pleases, is merely playing the game by the rules they invented for her.
It’s telling that the words being thrown around about Miley are the two most
commonly used insults to dismiss women or to “put them in their place”. Slut- a
word with no real meaning intended to shame a woman into hiding her sexuality,
or perhaps more accurately, only showing it to the male using the slur –
chastises her for owning that which society commodifies anyway. Crazy tells the
world that she is not worth paying attention to, that her voice shouldn’t be
heard.
This issue is overwhelmingly gendered. Male child stars come
of age by taking on a serious role – Daniel Radcliffe in Equus, Josh Peck in
The Wackness – whereas female child stars must exhibit their sexuality to mark
their transition into adulthood. The attention paid to Lindsay Lohan and more
recently to Amanda Bynes, rarely centred on their substance abuse issues or
their criminality but instead revelled in stolen upskirt photos and explicit
tweets. Society is both fascinated and repulsed by female sexuality, especially
that of women in the media whose lives have been public since they were
children. It is interesting to note the recurrence of comments akin to “what
must Billy Ray think?” in all the talk about Miley Cyrus, the media themselves
acting like an overprotective father abhorred by the idea of their “little girl”
growing up. In a society where adult women are reduced to their sexuality, how
else could Miley show the world she’s no longer Hannah Montana? The world gave
her no choice but to trade on her sex appeal and then demonised her for it.
This double standard forced upon women invades every aspect
of female life. You are expected to wear make-up but then chastised for trying
too hard. You are expected to look “attractive” when you go out but are
reprimanded for taking too long to get ready. You are told you must be
beautiful but when you make the effort to conform to their ideal, you are
ridiculed for your work. Women have too many shoes, too many clothes, too many
beauty products but the world tells us time and time again that without those
things we are ugly and if we are ugly we are worthless. We are expected to be
sexually available for any male who wants us, expected to take street harassment
as a compliment and never turn down a come on, but if we adhere to those rules
we’re whores who’ll put out for anyone who asks. As Ally Sheedy’s Allison so succinctly
puts it in The Breakfast Club “Well, if you say you haven't, you're a prude. If
you say you have you're a slut. It's a trap”.
Society fetishizes innocence which is both a linguistic
oxymoron and an impossible reality. Catholic
school-girl porn, the demonization of female pubic hair and of course the
afore-mentioned “all grown up” articles, all make youth, and by association
virginity, desirable yet when a woman who society is used to seeing as a girl
wields her sexuality like a weapon she is shunned, painted with a red A and
assumed to be mad. The camera sexualises women no matter their age. The media
asked why Jodie Foster’s parents would let her play a prostitute at 13 but no
one questioned the director or the writer for creating a character sexualised
so young. Taxi Driver is a classic and Bugsy Malone is still performed in
schools. Similarly no one directed their ire towards Robin Thicke, the 36 year
old married man writing songs about date rape, using women as objects and simulating
anal sex with a 20 year old on stage. No one asked about the VMA directors, or
those responsible for putting the show together, no one blamed the guy directing
Wrecking Ball. They blamed the woman, and they blamed her for becoming what
they all wanted her to be.
Of course there are issues surrounding cultural
appropriation and the racism involved in Miley’s VMA performance but I am
nowhere near qualified enough to comment on them. These issues however are of
course not what the media is focusing on. The world is just yet again punishing
a woman for owning the sexuality they define her by and it’s sending a
sickening message to women everywhere: your sexuality is not your own, and as
soon as you claim it for yourself, as soon as you try to take control of the
identity we’ve forced upon you, we’ll hound you for it.
