The XX Factor: Slate women blog about politics, etc...

Put Your Clothes Back On, Miley!

I am about to enter into the realm I never imagined I'd find myself, the parental equivalent of the liberal being mugged. In this case, the mugger is Miley Cyrus, or maybe Disney, or Vanity Fair—whoever is most responsible for that photo of a topless 15-year old Cyrus barely holding the bedsheets up. Which is actually less off-putting than the recently leaked photo of her slithering around with her boyfriend. Or BBF, or FWB, or whatever.

Here's my problem with the phenomenon. Yes, teenage starlets burn this way. But don't they usually do it in stages? In my memory, the Olsen twins were innocent child stars and then they slowly morphed into tabloid fodder. This seems the natural sexual-awareness trajectory of anyone their age, only somewhat exaggerated. Now there are shows we all consider clean: Hannah Montana and High School Musical, for example. And by any watchdog's standards they are: no sex, no exposed flesh, no cursing. This ensures that children as young as 6 or 7(such as my daughter) will know all about them and love them. She doesn't see anything bad. She just listens to lots of teenagers sing and dance and go on and on about who's dating whom and who's in love and who broke up, etc. They are innocent and knowing at the same time. I can't easily say to her: Don't watch that, you don't want to be like that underage sexpot, do you? Because the actors look as cute and innocent as the Teletubbies. But something about all this sanitized high school chatter leaves me uneasy. Why does a 6-year old need to know so much about dating and breaking up? 

I can anticipate the objections to this argument: Americans are always fetishizing childhood innocence. They need to imagine their children as clean and gossamer-white in order to protect them. And there is an element of truth in this. I read that popular Lin Burress blog on this subject which was quoted in the New York Times and it made me cringe. (She complains about 5-year olds trying on make-up. Who could read anything dirty in that?)  

So I guess, as a parent, I'm just begging for less confusion. When I was a pre-teen in the '70s, the culture was probably more sexed up. I was a little younger than Miley Cyrus when I saw Fame. That was probably about as much bare flesh as I could handle. But it seemed distant and dangerous to me. The actors who played high school kids back then looked practically as old as my parents, or at least my uncle.  There was no confusing them with my (relatively) squeaky clean schoolmates. 

Late breaking news. Cyrus has now apologized for the photos, calling them "inappropriate" and "silly," See, there she goes again: "Silly?" What 15-year-old uses the word "silly?" That's a 6-year-old pander for sure.