Flashback Wednesday — Little Miley, All Grown Up

May 2, 2018
Posted by Jay Livingston

Miley Cyrus was on Jimmy Kimmel last night defending her tweet of two days earlier. The tweet retracted an apology of ten years earlier. I mean, I guess saying “fuck you” constitutes a retraction.

I had blogged about the controversy at the time (here), noting that the photo did not deliver on what the tabloid headlines promised – “Racy,” “Topless,” “Half-naked,” etc., and that the salaciousness seemed to be in the mind of the beholders.*

It wasn’t what Miley Cyrus was showing – a beach photo of her in a scoop-back, one-piece bathing suit would have shown more skin – it was what she wasn’t showing but that the viewers knew was there. “Seemingly bare breasted,” was how the Daily Record put it (just under the headline “It’s not Art – It’s Porn.”). What made the photo “racy,” at least to these observers, was not the sight of her bare breasts but the thought that she either had just bared them or might be about to.

Honi soit qui mal y pense. Which is basically what Miley told Jimmy last night.

“It was everyone else’s poisonous thoughts and minds that ended up turning this into something it wasn’t meant to be so I actually shouldn’t be ashamed, they should be.”

The title of my post was “Good Girl, Naughty Picture” and if there was any sociological content, it was the cultural context that went beyond mere Miley and her employer at the time.

The problem for Disney seems to be how to have their teen-age girl stars be attractive without being sexual. That was hard enough in the 1950s, when Annette was prima inter pares among the Mouseketeers, and as Dave Barry put it, some of the letters on her jersey were closer to the screen than others. Still, like a good Disney kid, she acted happily unaware of the changes puberty had brought. Not till she left Mouseworld did she go on to make all those beach films. (“Hi, I’m Annette, and these are my breasts,” cooed Gilda Radner in the SNL parody.)

As if to prove me and Miley right, for years after that, my post would still get visits from people who had Googled strings like “naughty pictures of 15-year olds.” I hadn’t intended the title as clickbait (did that term even exist in 2008?), but in checking back now, I see that the post has gotten three times more action than others from around then. Oh well, come for the porn, stay for the sociology.**

-------------------------

* The headline writers room at most tabloids seems to be staffed exclusively by middle-school boys giggling over their double-entendres.

** Google, in a sop to the privacy concerns of its users, has mostly stopped providing bloggers with information about which search-strings brought people to their blog . . .  or at least, I can’t find it any more.