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

Do I Feel Bad for Miley Cyrus?

When I wrote about Miley Cyrus not long ago, I was most struck by how profoundly Cyrus had already become a pure product of American culture. Disney, by creating Hannah Montana, has traded on Cyrus' status as celeb-daughter and wannabe pop star to feed the aspirations of scores of young girls across America to become not artists so much as celebrities. Weird. The result for Cyrus has been an attempt by Disney to hyper-stage manage her life, and, in particular, her coming of age as an adolescent. The last thing they want is for any whiff of sexuality to attach to her; but the last thing Cyrus and her parents want is for her to go the way of child stars who can't make the transition to successful adult pop-stardom. Which makes me kinda sympathetic to Nayeli's argument that it'd be interesting if Cyrus did become a spokeswoman for LifeStyles condoms: It'd be inspiring to see a young woman at a sexual threshold refuse to take part in the pretense that she and her peers are not coming of age. And it's a good message for all teenagers: if you are going to have sex (and guess what, they are), just do it as safely as you can. On the other hand, eavesdropping on this whole debate only makes me twinge more with regret that Cyrus—much like the character she plays on Hannah Montana—is so beseiged by pop culture and the media that the ethical decisions she has to make revolve around whether she should be a spokeswoman for a product or whether to appear on a Vanity Fair cover. If she really wanted to send a message to  her peers, why not back away from endorsements of any kind and do some low-key volunteer work or donate to a safe-sex ed program? You'd be killing two birds with one stone by rejecting the self-consciousness and hyper-packaged nature of being a young pop star while doing a bit of good.