Beacon Broadside

Today’s post is from Kevin M. Scott, co-author (with Carmine Sarracino) of The Porning of America: The Rise of Porn Culture, What It Means, and Where We Go from Here, forthcoming from Beacon Press in Fall 2008. Scott teaches courses in American literature and culture and directs the English education program at Elizabethtown College.

Talk about teachable moments. Two days before the "topless Miley" stories broke all over television and online, my class and I were discussing the young star of the Disney show, Hannah Montana.

My endlessly digressing American Studies class, fifteen young women and one lonely fellow, saw a connection between the subject and period we were studying—the representation of women in Cold War-era popular culture—and the current phenomenon of young female stars being offered up onto the altar of a lecherous public consumption.

Knowing, as they do, how easy I am to distract, they asked me what I thought of Miley Cyrus, who plays a normal high school kid who moonlights as a rock star. (Don’t we all remember that kid from our own high school days? No?)

I said, roughly, "Well, the music makes my ears bleed, BUT, considering the options, if my daughter were to be a fan of the star, I would probably decide to shut up and let her have her fun."

What I was referring to, of course, is the star’s well-groomed and
G-rated image. Compared to the coverage given to figures like Britney,
Lindsay, Paris, and the Olsen twins, Miley has been, well, both
wholesome and, in a weird and vague way, feminist.

Like many parents (especially in that small subset who also
happen to be cultural scholars), I was reacting to the sense that many
of us have that the porned culture we inhabit is hunting in our
children’s world like a thief in the night.

Specifically, it seems as if our daughters are being targeted
by waves of media—both in popular culture and in the "serious" media
that covers the escapades of young female stars—that first encourage
conformity to a new and virtual brand of highly sexualized identity and
then thrills to their destruction. And so we encourage our daughters to
adopt sexual identities that will eventually destroy them. Well done,
us.

This is why many parents sigh with relief when the occasional
Miley Cyrus comes along. And she isn’t without precedence. Hilary Duff
transitioned, within the current cultural regime, from child star to
recording artist and actor. Even now, at 21, she doles out the sexy
images of herself in small and comparatively mild doses. Soon she’ll be
appearing in a couple of respectable independent films and an artsy
comedy with John Cusack called War, Inc. Nice work, if you can get it.
And Miley very clearly wants it.

Yet parents also watch Cyrus’ career with a certain amount of
fear. They see their daughters commit to her, to her image and, often,
to her ideas as carrying special and somehow divine weight. And they’ve
seen it before. Britney was famously a "virgin" during most of her peak
years. What if Miley hooks them and then does a moral nosedive? Will
their daughters be discovering their own sexuality at the very moment
that Miley gets caught without her knickers in public?

In my class, my students took a much more Machiavellian stance
on Miley’s actions. Several saw the move as her opening gambit, likely
conceived by her handlers, to move toward a more sexual, and even
"skankier," public identity. Others saw the move as an effort to thread
the needle between her squeaky clean image and the more adult image
that she’ll need to develop if she wants to be acting in her twenties.

For her part, Miley backtracked like crazy, saying that she was
manipulated into taking the picture, and that she is embarrassed and
regrets the photo shoot. (She mentioned that her Christian faith would
help her through it, which is a nice touch.) To my student’s ears—and I
should say that they are students in our honors college—this only
provided more evidence that she is triangulating between the various
public desires for her, as virgin or whore.

I don’t know, of course, what she or her handlers intended, if
anything. So far, the aura surrounding Miley Cyrus suggests to me that
it’s constructed with the kind of extreme care normally given to
presidential campaigns and Papal visits. Largely, I agree with Cyrus’
early comments, printed in Vanity Fair, along with the photos, that the
image is "artsy." Yet there can be little argument that the girl in the
photo—looking over her shoulder at you, with her lips plump and red,
and her hair tousled as if awakened in the bed, nude, and clasping her
satin sheets around her—is suggesting pleasures more adult than the age
on the driver’s license she can’t yet possess would say is appropriate.

Then again, as a "Dad," I saw her ribs poking out and thought, "Man, somebody feed that kid."