Why Miley Cyrus is not The Problem

It seems that due to an unfortunate turn of events it has become incumbent upon me to have an opinion about Miley Cyrus. This is a shame. For the six years or so since Wikipedia tells me she “rose to prominence” I have managed to get through my life blissfully unopinionated about Miley Cyrus.

Until Monday of this week I knew only three things about Miley Cyrus:

1)    That she is or was an actress of sorts who played or plays the fictional character Hannnah Montana (though I’m afraid all I know about Hannah Montana is that she is a fictional character played by Miley Cyrus)

2)    That she is the daughter of Billy Ray Cyrus but produces pop music so offensively vacuous that it makes Achy Breaky Heart sound like Milton (and let’s not forget that Achy Breaky Heart contains the lyrics “Myself already knows that I’m ok”)

3)    That my ridiculous friend Kim likes her (which, as anyone who knows Kim will attest, means she must be awful)

This, as far as I was concerned, was all and more than anyone needed to know about Miley Cyrus. But as you will be aware unless you have spent the last week living in a paper bag Miley Cyrus has made headlines this week by ‘twerking’ with Robin Thicke at the MTV Video Music Awards. I realise there is scarcely a word in that sentence my parents would understand, but it’s happened, and it’s become the biggest news of the week. Yep, bigger than Syria. It has also, apparently, become the most tweeted about event in history. When the history books are written (presumably in 140 characters) unbelievably, Miley Cyrus’s name will be in them. So it seems that if I am going to be able to pass the time at the water cooler this week I am going to need to have something to say about all of this. Here, then, is my tuppence worth on Miley’s tuppence.

Obviously Miley Cyrus and everything about her is awful. Embarrassingly, ostentatiously awful. If it weren’t, my ridiculous friend Kim wouldn’t like her. She is of course the personification of everything that makes The World These Days a terrible place, in which the brains of our children are slowly rotting and we will one day all end up staring at large screens projecting Top Gear and eating slime. But it would be unfair I think to blame Miley Cyrus entirely for this. Slightly unfair anyway. Because Miley Cyrus, and all her concomitant abominableness, is of course the product of something bigger and more problematic here.

For at least the last couple of decades the music industry has more and more deliberately waged a war of attrition on women’s clothing. The objectification of women’s bodies in music videos has become so blatant, so much like self-parody, that it’s hard to know what’s tongue-in-cheek and what’s just jaw-droppingly offensive. So blurred have the lines become that I’m sure most music video directors don’t even know whether they’re being ironic any more.

And on the subject of blurred lines, it is surely to Robin Thicke (who clearly lives up to his cockney rhyming slang nickname, as well as the homophone of his surname) that we must point the finger of blame, if a finger is to be pointed, for the horror show that was Sunday night’s MTV Music Video Awards performance. Because it is of course HIS SONG, Blurred Lines, and its atrocious music video that the two of them recreated on stage that night. To read the coverage of the incident this week you might easily forget there were two of them involved in the performance: one twerker and one twerkee.

The Oxford English Dictionary now defines the verb to twerk (yes, I know) as follows: “dance to popular music in a sexually provocative manner involving thrusting hip movements and a low, squatting stance.” They might have added, “usually performed by a woman against the crotch of a man”. Miley’s twerking was in fact an apt visual metaphor for everything Woman is figuratively allowing Man to do to her in performing such a move. Shame on her for allowing it; but shame on him for standing there, probably with an erection and a shit eating grin on his face, and letting her demean herself in this way.

Enough has already been said about Thicke’s music video, some of it far too po-faced and hysterical – it is after all a bit of fun involving consenting adults, and probably more knowing than it’s been given credit for. But it is, I’m afraid, videos like that which are telling young women this is what men want from them. And that, really, is the fundamental problem here. That is the reason a presumably fairly intelligent woman, probably a multimillionaire, with little to gain except some dubious publicity, would get up on stage in a flesh coloured two piece and dance to popular music in a sexually provocative manner involving thrusting hip movements and a low, squatting stance: because that’s what everything in popular culture is telling her we want to see.

It’s just a shame that Blurred Lines is such a good pop tune. Otherwise more of us might have voted with our ears and not listened to it on Spotify, or watched it on MTV. But unfortunately it is catchier than an Aerobie with the bubonic plague. That, coupled with the fact that even the most enlightened heterosexual men invariably enjoy watching impossibly attractive young women walking around with too much lipstick and no bra on, is what kept it at number one for so long. You can’t deny it: in Thicke’s own inane words: you know you wannit.