Miley kisses a woman on stage yesterday

THERE has been hand-wringing in the mainstream press in recent years about the precociousness of girls today, about their increasingly sexualized attire and behavior. But none of this commentary approaches the perceptive analysis of Thomas F. Bertonneau in the previous entry on the pop phenomenon Miley Cyrus, who is 17. As Mr. Bertonneau points out, popular culture is waging an active assault on girlhood. But of course, as we know, popular culture is waging war on everything and anything that is good, wholesome, normal or sacred.

Mr. Bertonneau writes: 

First, the directors of that video take the girl …. and (pardoning the expression) strip her of every semblance of normative girlhood. To say that the visual construction prostitutes the girl would not be too strong a description. Instead of the pulled-out-of-the-closet wardrobe of the Kraja girls, we have the metal-and-leather garb of a pornographic dominatrix. (Laura’s term, “sexual fascism,” is to the point.) Next, the elements of music, lyric, and dance are reduced to a lifeless mechanical minimalism. Musically rhythm dominates in what is basically a sexual throb; there is no real melody, as such. The girl’s dance-steps are stiff and strutting – and perpetually open-legged. The imagery is crudely demonic. One dancer-figure, who kisses Miss Cyrus halfway through the number, is not only facially demonic, but his body is made up to appear as though a blade had slashed it repeatedly. We have, in sum, the sexual theme of a prostituted girl and the sacrificial theme of a mutilated body.

Whether the singer understands the rudimentary lyric is beside the point. The refrain, “I can’t be saved,” is deliberate provocation. Miss Cyrus sings without life; her dancing is also stiff and corpselike. Watch the lurching way she comes down the stairs at the beginning of the performance. (Perhaps she is reacting unconsciously to the betrayal of her actual, but suppressed, girlishness.) All of this the producers offer to us as an esthetic object. But it can only be an esthetic object on the reversal of everything that the word esthetic – or the word art – implies. Hence from a normative perspective, it is not art, but anti-art; and Miss Cyrus is not a girl, but an anti-girl. She is not pretty; she is sweaty and ugly. Not that we haven’t seen it all before in spades – but this is a particularly studious exercise in what its advocates call “transgression,” by which, of course, they mean something that is, to them, good.

                             — Comments –

Karen I. writes:

Miley Cyrus has a chubby-cheeked little girl face that clashes with her new look. She looks like a child playing a game of dress-up gone wrong. No matter how trashy her handlers try to make her look or how much makeup they plaster on, they cannot change the fact that she has a child’s face.

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