Sexualizing Miley: Are Billy Ray and Tish Cyrus Letting Her Be The New Lolita?
Does anyone else find it ironic that men in a polygamy cult in Texas are being locked up for sexually exploiting teenage girls while here in medialand, a half-nude photo of 15-year-old Miley Cyrus in Vanity Fair is being touted as art?
Is it OK to sexualize a fifteen-year-old if it is in the pages of a high falutin' magazine and her parents seem OK with it? Or is this really not much different from parents in a cult acquiescing to having their teen daughters wedded and bedded?
I'm not sure that it is all that different. In both cases 15-year-olds, who are well under the age of consent, are being exploited because they are viewed as sexually attractive. And in both cases, their parents are allowing it to happen.
Miley may not have been forced to have sex with a creepy old man but she is being put out on display like a modern day Lolita and you can bet a lot of creepy old men will be eyeballing her bare shoulders and back and having nasty thoughts about her other parts that appear to be bare. Yuck!
"Parents aren't supposed to let their 15-year-olds pose in sexily suggestive ways," points out Dr. Keith Ablow, a psychiatrist and author of Living the Truth. And I have to agree. Parents are supposed to throw a fit when their teen daughters try to leave the house dressed in skirts that are too short and tops that are too tight. Parents are supposed to try and protect their teen daughters from becoming sexually active at an early age.
They aren't supposed to allow them publicly to declare themselves to be sex objects especially if they happen to be role models for even younger girls. "Hollywood has planted a flag and the hill they've taken is that you don't have to be 16, 17, or 18 to announce that you want to be sexy," points out Ablow. Fifteen is now OK.
It almost makes the controversy over Britney Spears dancing in a short school girl kilt and knee socks in her "Baby One More Time" video, when she was 17, seem so antediluvian. The Cyruses would be wise though to learn a Big Lesson fast from the Spears family, now awaiting the birth of 16-year-old Jamie Lynn's first baby, as they also try to cope with Britney's bipolar disease.
Exploiting and Lolita-izing your teen daughter for fame and fortune runs a high risk of leading to heartbreak for the very one that you claim to love and cherish.
Billy Ray and Tish Cyrus have said that the half-nude photo of Miley was taken after they left the Vanity Fair photo shoot with famed photographer Annie Leibovitz. But does that really let them off the hook? First of all, Leibovitz is a brilliant photographer who brilliantly got Demi Moore to pose nude and nine months pregnant for the cover of Vanity Fair, and also recently convinced A-list actresses Keira Knightley and Scarlett Johansson to pose nude together for another cover. Leibovitz knows the news value of a nude photo, especially a really provocative one — as in an underage nude photo.
Secondly, I can't believe Miley's parents were somehow ambushed by these semi-bare photos of their daughter. They had to be aware the photos were taken. Miley would have told them. She was probably excited by it all! She may have even brought home polaroids of the photo from the shoot. Even if she didn't, her parents could probably have asked to see the photos if they were concerned. After all, she is underage and the whole Cyrus feature was done co-operatively with the magazine.
Finally, if Billy Ray and Tish Cyrus were truly outraged by Miley's sexy photo, they could have raised a ruckus with Leibovitz and Vanity Fair, long before the ruckus that started when the pictures went public.
So what exactly were the Cyruses thinking? Is it part of the Miley career plan to sexualize her at 15 as a way to wooing an adult audience that will see her as more than Hannah Montana? Are her parents worried that she might never be able to make the crossover? Isn't a billion dollars of Hannah Montana revenue in 2008 alone enough to give the girl a break and just let her be a teen girl?
"She was an icon in our house. I am so disappointed. She was our last idol standing," laments Sally Lee, editor in chief of Parents magazine and the mother of two young daughters, 7 and 11, who also happen to be huge Miley fans. Sexualizing 15-year-old Miley is part of a juggernaut encouraging teen sexuality believes Lee. "It's a slippery slope and we're going down it fast."
Well Lee is probably right, sexual activity among teens is big and Miley's sexy poses won't exactly discourage other 15 and 14-year olds from wanting to look sexy too.
Chandra Czape-Turner, executive editor of CosmoGIRL! thinks Miley is a good kid. "She is a good role model and while she may have slipped, we have to give her a break. I think she's learned a lesson and I do think her parents are loving and very involved."
OK, I agree that Miley deserves a break. She is just 15. Let's just hope that her parents have learned a lesson too — a BIG ONE!
Follow Bonnie Fuller on Twitter: www.twitter.com/bonniefuller
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There are millions of girls in this country younger than Miley Cyrus who have already be sexualized and exploited, and you're in a snit over one girl's bare back! Herakles, Alcmene, and Zeus!
She's 15, she's a pop star with a TV show. She's already a sexual being. The only thing that gives me the creeps is watching Christian organizations that have a stranglehold on Disney, trying to shame a teenage woman into apologizing for a photo shoot that wasn't even as racy as people are pretending. Stop fighting over Miley's body, America! You look stupid.
Being forced or coerced to have sex with older men and bear their children is COMPLETELY different from NOT being forced to pose with your back bare, showing less than you would at the beach in your bikini.
Sheesh.
I see nothing wrong with the photo, except that it was published in a national magazine. The photo is beautiful and one I would think a young lady might want for herself, but the fact that that photo was chosen for publication was a decision based on money. There is a big controversy about it and people will now buy the magazine to see it.
There's no such thing as bad publicity.
I didn't even know who this girl was (I thought there really was a Hannah Montana)..
This controversy is worth a bundle..br
Groan. Another nag on her soapbox telling us how we should feel about this non-issue. Christ, Bonnie, why aren't you publicly chastising Anne Geddes for her "sexualization" of infants? As many commenters have already said, this is a sexual image only if you are a pervert.
Also, bipolar is a disorder. Not a disease.
The very idea of someone as despicable as Bonnie Fuller offering her thoughts on exploitation is laughable. That woman would sexualize Jesus himself if it would sell a few more magazines. Arianna does herself and the reputation of her site as a place for journalism no favor by including the thoughts of one of America's foremost tabloid scandal mongers.
We sink further into the quagmire that is Iraq, even as we slouch toward war with Iran. Gas is headed north of 4 bucks a gallon, home foreclosures are at a record high, and middle class wages are stagnant. So what are we talking about in this election year? Lapel pins, bowling scores, and a teenage girl's bare back!
All of this got me thinking about the 1987 Arnold movie, The Running Man. There is a part where the character Amber Mendez (played by Maria Conchita Alonso) is caught snooping around and she is sentenced to be a "Runner" in the psychotic game show "Running Man." As she is introduced to the TV audience a list of her crimes is read, including this one: "she sleeps with two and sometimes three different men in a single year!"
That movie captured perfectly the current state of affairs in America: we're a locked-down police state, and the media keeps us distracted with lurid tales of sex and violence. I've got to pick up the novel, which was written by Steven King under the pseudonym Richard Bachman. The Wikipedia entry makes the novel sound even more prophetic than the movie.
We are not, in fact, "a locked down police state," GeorgeSalt. Do you even know what the term means? Yes, there are more pressing issues in America than some kid's bare back, but this is not the kind of "wag the dog" issue you allude to. The parental pimping of underage and teenage superstars is an issue entirely worthy of discussion, as are many issues aside from politics.
Sounds to me like you need to watch better films and read better books. I've never heard a more lowbrow recommendation for a book in my life.
The Schwarzenegger film is insightful and prophetic? According to Wikipedia (that user-corrupted font of lazy man's wisdom), the Stephen King novel is even better? Where do I sign up!
"The Running Man" was one of four stories in "The Bachman Books." The short novel was far better than the movie, and another story in the book "The Long Walk," was far better than that one.
Your "locked-down police state" comment would be hilarious if it weren't so profoundly stupid.
That Ms. Fuller, a purveyor of middle-brow schlock, is shocked because there is nudity in art proves she doesn't have a clue about good art.
Though I find her a bit celebrity obsessed, Annie Leibovitz is a great artist. One hundred years from now her work still will be exhibited in museums around the globe. Yet once again the unsophisticated Puritanism deep in the soul of most Americans rears its ugly head in condemnation of art.
A beautifully composed photo of a wildly popular teen celebrity beginning to reveal her bare back is an exquisite metaphor for a girl growing up into a beautiful young woman. To paint this image as some kind of tawdry pornography speaks volumes about the twisted minds who look for perversion everywhere.
My guess is what Ms. Fuller is really upset about is the fact that soon she will no longer be able to exploit Ms. Cyrus as a child star in the magazines she publishes.
This post is just more evidence that American culture has become an oxymoron.
Sorry to disagree. Annie Leibovitz IS a great artist. But she had a bad day when she ALLOWED this photograph to be published. What makes it pornography are not the picture's aesthetic qualities but that it was willingly peddled to a mass audience.
Like judge Potter Stewart once said "I know it (pornography) when I see it.". This picture would be fine in an art book or as part of an artist's portfolio. But it does not belong all over the mass media and the internet. It does not take a lot of insight into the pornographic nature of glamor magazines and Hollywood (pornography is NOT nudity) to see this affair for what it is. Fine art it ain't. I wonder what a DA would do if a similar picture of a lesser known girl showed up on the hard drive of a known pedophile? Would he marvel at the beauty of the picture and the taste of the collector or would he press charges?
As for Miley Cyrus, the girl will have plenty of opportunity to pose in the nude and expose herself in any which way she wants as soon as she is an adult IF the then mature person chooses to do so! For now parents, editors and photographers should have known better.
"This picture would be fine in an art book or as part of an artist's portfolio. But it does not belong all over the mass media and the internet."
These phrases are the definition of elitist. The idea that art is art only if it is segregated into adult ghettos that only a few privileged or sophisticated elites can appreciate is offensive in its condescending lack of egalitarianism.
Portaying all Hollywood as pornographic in nature is . . . is . . . words escape me. Are you priggish or insulated or sick or? To try and say that all things originating in Hollywood like film, television, video games, and the internet is pornographic in nature is the definition of a close-minded puritanical prude. I am guessing that if you ever stumbled upon dogs or cats having sex in the wild, just as nature intended, you would find it pornographic.
A worldly DA would laugh you out of his office. This is just a teen celebrity trying to control her image. An image of a girl growing up into a young woman. An image tamer than almost any photograph of people in their swimwear.
I guess you prove my point. Only a repressed puritanical pervert could imagine this to be pornography. Art, whether fine art or mass produced schlock is meant for all members of society, not just an elitist few. Maybe that is one of the problems in this country, not enough people are exposed to the edifying mind-opening
it never ends. it's like the mute dwarf in the randall jarrell poem miming his astonishment over and over. some type of mundane, quasi-erotic exhibitionism and it starts all over again- the shock, the astonishment at the utterly commonplace. the dwarf, acting out his astonished reaction over and over, mimicing his initial shock long after the inital event and the initial horror have transpired is the far more horrifying spectacle, wherein the normal is never normal, wherein we are invited to experience horror over and over again as ritual. or, like twitching flatworms, complete absense of anything like memory, learning or adaptation leaves us completely unaware and unprepared for what is inflicted no matter how many times the act repeats. how can they sustain shocked outrage, deep concern, dire jeremiads at the literally weekly contrived exhibitionism of teen-aged careerists? they're like some kind of greek chorus. this shocked concerned public is the only irreplaceable element of the scheme and the only one that doesn't get paid.
A young woman with a bare back and shoulders is supposed to be a sexualized image? I'm sorry, when did we all move to Afghanistan, because I missed it ..? The fuss over this image -- and those other very tame pictures of her on the internet -- is completely nuts. She's a 15-year-old, behaving like a 15-year-old. She's coming of age and exploring her new womanhood (with the twist, of, course, that it's in the glare of the media spotlight -- sadly for her). Nothing she has done is inappropriate. It's the adult response to it that is so extremely distasteful.
This is Disney b.s., efforts to control the property they own. There is nothing inappropriate about the photos. They are beautiful. The fact that we live in a society in which little girls are sexualized and sold on a daily basis makes it understandable that someone could confuse these photos with, for example, Britney Spears writhing over a soda bottle while old men jerk-off. Not the same thing.
It's particularly amusing to see Disney leading the charge. I realized years ago that the Disney cartoons usually take the young girl character and turn her into the simpering hopeless helpless dependent weak whiney crying stereotype, waiting for the strong, intelligent boy to rescue her. What a lesson they're teaching with that mysogynistic crap.
But even worse is that grown men cartoonists at Disney often distort the little girl character's bodies to make them into little barbies, with the 15" waist and rather enormous buttocks. It makes me wonder what these cartoonists' fantasies are.
Anyway, this is a bunch of nonsense. There's nothing inappropriate about the pictures. If we cannot distinguish between perverted and pretty, then the Republicans have truly succeeded in destroying the common sense of people in this country.
This picture is only sexual if you are a pervert. Are pictures of naked babies sexual? (If so, someone put a stop to all that Anne Geddes cuteness immediately!) It's an innocent picture of a pretty girl more covered than she would be in a red carpet gown. I mean, honestly, I saw more of her body on Idol Gives Back. This is more than a little bit ridiculous.
There are plenty of perverts looking at this picture right now. And some are doing more than just looking. One wonders if Miley Cyrus was aware of that when she let Mrs. Leibovitz take the picture?
The problem lies with the awareness of the person in the picture. She looks perfectly innocent, does she not? THAT is exactly what the perverted mind is constantly seeking. Is Mrs. Leibovitz a great fine art photographer? Yes. But the people most tittilated by this picture won't really care. Mrs. Cyrus might realize that by now. One can only hope she does and has the mental capacity to learn the right lesson from it. Otherwise the media might well have a feast on Brittney II just a few years down the road. And if that is not pornography, I don't know what is.
Wait. What are you saying? Since some pevert gets his rocks off this picture or some underwear shot in a Sears catalogue, we should stop letting those pictures be published? Do you understand how you've just knelt down and kissed the alter of fear? Bad people are certainly out there, but letting them dictate how normal people act lets them control society.
I do agree that its wrong to sexualize a 15 year old. However, Miley is an actress and was simply taking part in creating a photo with Annie Leibowitz. This does not put her or her parents in the same category as polygamists who marry off their young daughters to creepy old men.
Remember a 15 year old Brooke Sheilds in her provacative Calvin Klein commercials? She has gone on to be a wonderful role model for women and have a good career. I'm sure Miley's parents would have thought it was an innocent photo and not a reflecxtion of her character. Maybe it was also a brilliant career move - we are talking about it, after all, aren't we?
This is disgusting. You compare the RAPE of thirteen year old girls to a picture of a bare back? The true "irony" is that your detachment to the rape is reflected by the fact that there are more editorial posts on Hannah Montana appearing before millions of children "naked" except for strategically sewn fabric that covers her body while serving as decoration, than on those poor girls in Texas being repeatedly raped and forced to raise the products of their violation.
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