Op-Ed: Slut-Shaming Miley Cyrus

Yes, Miley Cyrus, aka Hannah Montana got nasty at the VMA Awards Sunday night. She pranced around in a twisted little bodysuit with an animal face on it with her breasts highlighted by the pink ears. She played with one of those big foam hands we see at every sporting event, the outstretched finger a stand-in for a phallus, which she put here, there and everywhere. Then the furry body suit came off replaced by a flesh-colored bra and panties. Not skimpy–actually kinda grandmother-y--but flesh colored, so maybe at the back of the hall she looked kinda naked in a Barbie doll no-nipples and no pubic hair (like anyone even has that anymore) kind of way.

Did I like it? No, because I didn’t find the performance nor the outfits particularly artful or ironic. (I preferred seeing Katy Perry under the Brooklyn bridge.) Do I think Miley should be vilified for her performance? Not unless we’re going to string up Lady Gaga and Rihanna and Nicky Minaj and the grandmother of it all, Madonna. And let’s not forget Janet Jackson’s infamous wardrobe malfunction.

Yes, we know this is allegedly a family program–if your family walks around singing lines like "Yeah, I had a bitch, she ain’t as bad as you/Let me be the one you back that ass to."

Because, in all the "Oh Miley, whatever happened to Hannah Montana!" we seem to forget the prancing and dancing was with Robin Thicke, to his incomparably sexist summer ditty, "Blurred Lines," which is all about–in case you’ve been off the planet and missed it–how consent is kinda sorta a matter of opinion. The guy’s opinion.

In the display at the VMA, Miley was pretty much the "good girl" of the song’s lyrics to whom Thicke’s song’s narrator says over and over again "I know you want it" because "the way you grab me/must wanna get nasty."

If the Will Smith/Jada Pinkett family was covering their mouths in moral horror at the performance, it should have been at what Thicke was singing as much if not more than at Miley’s pseudo-fellatio with her foam finger. After all, Jada Pinkett campaigns against sex trafficking and rape culture and even has her own documentary video on the topic.

Thicke’s "Blurred Lines" video–ten times raunchier than the VMA performance–was one of the finalists for Video of the Year, as well as Male Video Artist of the Year. (Justin Timberlake, perennial nice guy, won for "Mirrors.")

Really disturbing for this critic is how the LGBT community slammed Miley over her performance. The same people who made both Madonna and Lady Gaga stars for their hypersexual performances are calling out Miley today. Yet back in Feb. 2011, Lady Gaga showed up on 60 Minutes–a news program, not the VMA Awards–in the same undies Miley wore on Sunday: flesh colored bra and panties. She told a gob smacked Anderson Cooper she didn’t feel like getting dressed that day. Oh, okay.

And actually it was okay, because Gaga is all about in-your-face, push-the-envelope performance. This was part of her self-promotion and self-packaging.

But she was never Hannah Montana, Disney star and beloved icon for little girls everywhere.

Is that the real issue about Miley Cyrus’s performance? She’s supposed to stay her child-star self forever?

The outrage over Miley’s performance seems both over-the-top and more than a little hypocritical. The Video Music Awards aren’t impromptu. They are planned and rehearsed and stage blocked well in advance. Think the producers didn’t know what Miley would be wearing and what she’d be doing? Think again.

If stones are to be tossed they should be tossed in a number of directions. If the idea is to keep Miley pure as the driven Hannah Montana snow, then don’t pair her with Robin Thicke and his anthem to no-really-means-yes rape culture. Don’t act like Thicke and the VMA producers were clueless about the plan here: the plan was to sexualize Miley and since she’s a terrific actress (which people also forget), she played it up. How much of her performance was a big f*** you to the people who have manipulated her image for over a decade?

And then there is our own LGBT community. Come on, folks, why the smack down? Did you forget that Miley is all of 20 and has been a staunch supporter of LGBT rights and marriage equality for several years? No, she’s not Lady Gaga, but she’s up there with Macklemore, isn’t she? The last time she got the kind of Twitter barrage she got from her VMA performance was when she came out for marriage equality and got a marriage equality tattoo (pretty permanent statement there).

The bottom line, so to speak, on Miley’s performance is–STFW? It was raunchy, yes–in keeping with the song Thicke was singing. Was she sent in the wrong direction by others? Absolutely. They dressed her up to look like a child and then had her prance around to rapey lyrics. Can you say pedophile’s dream?

But at 20, do we hold her 100 percent accountable for a performance that was scripted by others or do we ask why she was chosen to sing and dance with Thicke in the first place? Why are we slut-shaming her when it took a VMA village to put her on that stage?

Girls grow up. So do child stars. The transition isn’t always seamless. But a young woman who has always had good politics, even if she’s made a few wrong career moves at the ripe old age of 20, shouldn’t be slut-shamed by anyone. The real wrong done at the VMAs was spotlighting Robin Thicke and dragging Miley Cyrus into it. That idea didn’t come from Miley Cyrus. It came from the VMAs.

Miley Cyrus is trying to grow up. It’s our skewed social mores that want women to look like girls and girls to look like women. Miley Cyrus played along with the music we listen to. She’s not to blame.

We are.

Victoria A. Brownworth is an award-winning journalist, editor and writer. She has won the NLGJA and the Society of Professional Journalists awards, as well as the Lambda Literary Award and has been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, Baltimore Sun, Philadelphia Inquirer, The Nation, and Village Voice, among others. She is a regular contributor to The Advocate and SheWired. Her most recent book is From Where We Sit: Black Writers Write Black Youth, winner of the Moonbeam Award for Cultural/Historical Fiction 2012. Her novella, Ordinary Mayhem, won Honorable Mention in Best Horror 2012.

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