Parenting a teen or a preteen cannot be easy these days. I guess I’m lucky my two children have reached adulthood without a major disaster or heartache. Still, my heart goes out to parents struggling to bring up their progeny with a minimum of physical, psychological, emotional or spiritual damage. Especially these days when “bad examples” or faulty role models abound—in real life and especially in the media.
I have one person specifically in mind, and her name is Miley Cyrus.
You must have watched or even just glimpsed Cyrus’ antics onstage at the Video Music Awards, a “performance” that made “twerking” a household term, and lent a whole new meaning to the act of sticking one’s tongue out.
“Suki” or regular viewers of the E! Channel should know by now that in reaction to the tsunami of negative comments on social media about her appearance and behavior on the VMAs, Cyrus has hit back with tweets about how she doesn’t pay attention to naysayers. She even pulled out the sexism card, remarking how she had been at the receiving end of verbal spankings even as her male partner, the singer Robin Thicke who shared the stage with her, seemed to get off easy, even as he kept grinding and rubbing his groin against Cyrus’ backside.
But the release of the music video to promote her new album did little to restore Cyrus’ image back to her “Hannah Montana” days, the squeaky-clean teen who strove to balance the worlds of normalcy and pop teen idol-dom. Indeed, the music video shows an even racier version of Cyrus than was seen on the VMAs, with the blond singer, her hair cropped close to her skull, mounted on a wrecking ball while dressed in her “birthday clothes” and provocatively licking the head of a sledgehammer.
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Commentators, who were initially critical of Cyrus, have since come around to the view that the drastic change of image has been but part of a natural “evolution” on the singer’s part, as she strove to put Hannah Montana behind her and assume a more adult, if racy, image.
True, she is not the first pop idol to emerge, like a butterfly from a cocoon, with an entirely different image, shocking and titillating her fans. But no one has pursued controversy, or sought to shock, quite as avidly as Cyrus has. I wonder if her parents, especially her father, country crooner Billy Ray Cyrus (who also played Hannah’s dad in the show), had a hand in the recrafting of her persona, and if not, what they have to say about the whole sordid business.
Even as Miley took her first tentative steps toward self-transformation, I couldn’t help wondering what she was up to. It was one thing to seek to grow out of Disney princess-hood, but did she have to move to the other extreme of trashy and tawdry? The VMAs and the music video have brought the transition, from virgin to vamp, to an entire other dimension. It’s like she and her handlers are telling us that it’s one or the other: that a young woman is either a saint or a siren, no room for the real woman in between these two states.
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Fortunately, we get a sobering note on the entire Miley brouhaha from another pop star who is herself no stranger to scandal.
After Cyrus claimed that the music video for the song “Wrecking Ball” was “inspired” by the video of “Nothing Compares 2 U,” Irish singer Sinead O’Connor issued an “open letter” to the 20-year-old, warning her that she’s being “pimped” by the pop industry.
Saying she was writing “in the spirit of motherliness and with love,” O’Connor said she was “extremely concerned” that “those around you have led you to believe, or encouraged you in your belief, that it is in any way ‘cool’ to be naked and licking sledgehammers in your videos. It is in fact the case that you will obscure your talent by allowing yourself to be pimped, whether it is the music business or yourself doing the pimping.”
But O’Connor, who is remembered for publicly tearing up a photo of the Pope to protest the Vatican’s position on many moral and social issues, has an urgent message as well not just for Cyrus but for all young women. “Nothing but harm will come in the long run, from allowing yourself to be exploited, and it is absolutely NOT in ANY way an empowerment of yourself or any other young women, for you to send across the message that you are to be valued (even by you) more for your sexual appeal than your obvious talent.”
She adds: “The music business doesn’t give a s–t about you, or any of us. They will prostitute you for all you are worth, and cleverly make you think it’s what YOU wanted.”
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O’Connor’s message to Cyrus: “You are worth more than your body or your sexual appeal… You have enough talent that you don’t need to let the music business make a prostitute out of you.”
In response, Cyrus implied in a tweet that O’Connor had no right or capability to be telling off young women because she (O’Connor) had mental health issues in the past.
To which O’Connor replied, in a Facebook post: “Miley…really? Who the f–k is advising you? Because taking me on is even more f–kin’ stupid than behaving like a prostitute and calling it feminism.”
Don’t you just love it when celebrities, dressed or undressed, lunge at each other’s throat?
The thing is, I don’t think either Cyrus or O’Connor are necessarily profiting from this heated give-and-take. But fanning the flames of discord is certainly allowing the likes of E! and other show-biz programs, not to mention the producers and distributors of “Wrecking Ball,” to make a mint.
If only Miley’s followers are learning from this exchange and profiting by it, in turn.