What's the deal with the Miley Cyrus reactions? What a whore, what a slut, how grotesque, people losing their appetites, professing desires to tear their own eyes out, likenesses drawn between girl's arse and raw chicken, images of dogs wearing her flesh-coloured two-piece - anyone would think she poisoned us all with chemical weapons. Miley Cyrus slapped some arse, shook her own and everyone carries on like zealous self-righteous monks with a hankering for burning-woman's-flesh.
I thought the first half of the twenty-year-old's performance at the VMAs was pretty tame. She's not the best dancer. I've seen YouTube clips depicting dancing toddlers with more fluid to their movement than Cyrus had. To be honest, I cringed more from her attempt to be “urban” than I did when she put her face in another woman's bum. And then she stripped off her cutesy leotard with the sparkly bear emblazoned on its front, revealed a flesh-coloured two-piece and spent the remainder of her time on stage gyrating.
It was a symbolic transformation. In part ramming the final nail into Hannah Montana's coffin and signalling the birth of another half naked sexually overt female popstar. But most significantly, it was a transformation choreographed to coincide with Robin Thicke's entrance and the performance of his highly criticised track Blurred Lines. His song is famous for its overt sexism. The music video features Thicke, Pharrell and T.I. standing around in suits - symbol of male power - surrounded by women wearing nothing but flesh coloured g-strings - symbol of female what? What is that exactly?
The blokes sing and rap about how they're gonna' take a “good” girl and turn her into a “nasty” one because, you know, good girls are all gagging for it really. While the naked women - they really are naked, there might not be any vagina on show but I haven't even seen my own tits that much - stand around wiggling their breasts and pulling facial expressions not unlike fish when they're flapping about on land, gasping for air, only the women look less intelligent, and far more grotesque than Miley Cyrus' does with her tongue hanging out.
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Yes, Robin Thicke's clip is grotesque. The women in his clip are grotesque. The male gaze/virgin-touched-for-the-very-first-time nature of his clip is grotesque.
As for Miley, as more rational heads have pointed out, she's killing-off her Disney persona because she is not a little girl anymore. Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera did the exact same thing to their Disney personalities. Cyrus and Spears even share the same manager - Larry Rudolph - and both threw off their innocence and re-emerged with little clothing and music produced by Pharrell - Slave 4 U in Spears' case and he is co-producing Cyrus' LP Bangerz - that's the same Pharrell standing around in a suit surrounded by naked pouty women in Robin Thicke's clip. Spears, Aguilera, Cyrus - coincidence? When you consider that Justin Timberlake managed to emerge from beneath his Mickey Mouse ears with his clothes still on it begins to look more like a conspiracy.
There is a pattern here. Young women who think the only way to prove they have entered adult-hood and they're empowered, is by taking their clothes off. And yet while they're stripping down, they're still expected to retain some sense of the demure. Rihanna and Beyonce do overt sexualisation all the time, but it alternates between “oh dear, I'm such a naughty girl”, “Grrr I'm a temptress come to spank you” or “I'm a slave. A slave to my carnal desires [for you]”. All titillating constructs we are accustomed to, that we come to expect and are now comfortable with. But as a woman, popstar or not, you must never ever carry on sexually like this: “Woooooo! Yeah! This is fun! Let's rub our crotches and hump!” because that would be unseemly, wouldn't it? That would not be a construct that is expected of you. That's what we expect from men. That would be too crude for a woman. That would be deemed grotesque.
Cyrus' performance was presumably to invoke the helpless fish of Thicke's clip - hence the flesh coloured underwear - but instead of pouting for six minutes with her boobs out, she let her tongue hang out like a horny boy. She rubbed her crotch in a manner that male performers do all the time. And she was into it. She was confident. She was having fun. What did everyone else want her to do? Keep the teddy bear on and titter shyly behind her hand like a geisha?
Yeah people would have preferred that wouldn't they. Now she's a mutt. She's an ugly little dog in nude underwear. Ew, look at her arse, it looks like a raw chicken's arse. If we keep saying this stuff, that raw chicken-arsed mutt, and hopefully other women, will stay in their places/desirable roles/kitchens and won't dare to behave in ways we don't like them to behave in. Oh but we don't want them to keep their clothes on and cease portraying themselves as sexual beings who - secretly or not - want it badly. No, no. Take it off. Undulate, shake it, suggest it; hey, as long as you're pouting you can even say it out loud. Just make sure you strut around the way we like you to, else we'll start figuratively burning you at stakes.
Post VMAs performance...
