Every year at the MTV Video Music Awards, the producers try to find a flashpoint they can exploit for publicity the next day. After the reaction has been exhausted, everyone forgets that Madonna ever kissed Britney Spears, or Kanye West stormed the stage when Taylor Swift was given an award instead of Beyonce, and gets on with their lives. It's been a week since the singer Miley Cyrus performed at this year's ceremony, aeons in terms of today's news cycle, but what's interesting about Cyrus's actions is that she wasn't manufacturing an incident that producers could package and sell as a talking point, she was just reflecting behaviour. Cyrus is trying to free herself from the shackles of being a child star, and the quickest route to speed up that process is by transforming into a sexual being. At the VMAs, she performed her tune We Can't Stop, the video of which is a collage of meaningless images attempting to depict the wildness of youth.
Shape-throwing
After that, Robin Thicke, a singer who has one of the biggest hits of the summer with the creepy Blurred Lines, appeared fully clothed while Cyrus was in a flesh-coloured bikini and what seemed like a deranged state, sticking out her tongue repeatedly, rubbing her crotch with a giant foam finger and bending over in front of Thicke (she's 20, remember, he's a 36-year-old married father, so I don't know who should be more embarrassed).
In the States, Cyrus has attracted criticism for the performance being racist, as well as everything else. Cyrus is fond of twerking, a sexually overt dance move that has emerged from West Africa to the Caribbean to the US to Europe as the late-night dancefloor shape-throwing of choice. The appropriation of African American culture by young white Americans is nothing new, but poking fun at body types and not having the self-awareness to examine the complexities of the “white girl doing a black dance” dynamic is another thing. But this wasn’t another award show gimmick.
Cyrus’s outrageous and uncomfortable antics demonstrates how sexually abusive popular culture has become. Sexual reactivity – the acting out of inappropriate sexual behaviour – is a fairly common response to sexual abuse. I am not insinuating in any way that Cyrus is taking her cues from sexual abuse, but she is the product of a sexually abusive society. If the trauma of sexual abuse can lead to inappropriate behaviour in an individual, then surely it can be argued that the trauma of taking cultural and behavioural cues from one’s environment can lead to inappropriate sexual exhibitionism.
Cyrus is not setting the tone; she is reflecting distorted yet very obvious cultural norms. Ever since Madonna simulated masturbation on a bed during her Truth Or Dare tour, it's been hard for pop stars to keep pushing boundaries without accidentally ending up in the gutter. While pop music previously set the trends of dance, fashion, hairstyle and phraseology of youth culture, it has become more reflective, soaking up trends rather than dispensing them.
Pornographic flavour
A pornographic flavour is now intrinsic to so much of the media young people are consuming. Cyrus herself seemed oblivious to the connotations, probably because porn is just background noise now, ever- present and all-consuming. Sticking her tongue out in a porn-themed haka and acting in her own pornographic montage, allowed her to assume she was the protagonist. Yet she stripped off and bent over while the lads stayed fully dressed, stationary and ogling. The men in Cyrus's performance – Robin Thicke, 2Chainz and Kendrick Lamar – were incredibly passive. What would the reaction be if Thicke arrived on stage in a thong, or Lamar lowered himself over the crowd in order to shake his ass at the audience, or if 2Chainz was bending over in front of a woman? People would call it outrageous. The distortion of what sexual liberation actually is, or how Cyrus has confused it with being a porn star, is a problematic issue for young people: for women, how can you have sex without being called a slut? For men, how can you care for someone without being told by your peers to move on to the next one?
I can’t imagine being a teenager now, when hardcore pornography is available on phones on the bus into school, where a huge amount of sexual learning comes from watching porn, where sexual encounters are videoed and shared. It is hugely problematic that pornography is this omnipresent, considering the vast majority of pornography degrades women. If all the sexual imagery young people are seeing is about women being degraded, how are men going to act towards women? And how will women think they’re meant to act? Parents needn’t worry that their kids will take cues from Miley Cyrus’s culture – she’s the one taking cues from theirs.