{"id":5980,"date":"2013-08-28T09:40:35","date_gmt":"2013-08-28T13:40:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.gadflyonline.com\/home\/?p=5980"},"modified":"2013-08-28T09:43:59","modified_gmt":"2013-08-28T13:43:59","slug":"miley-cyrus-and-the-pornification-of-america","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/miley-cyrus-and-the-pornification-of-america\/","title":{"rendered":"Miley Cyrus and the Pornification of America"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Miley_Gadfly_585x585\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cIn a market that sells high heels for babies and thongs for tweens, it doesn\u2019t take a genius to see that sex, if not porn, has invaded our lives. Whether we welcome it or not, television brings it into our living rooms and the Web brings it into our bedrooms.\u201d\u2014Jessica Bennett,\u00a0\u201cThe Pornification of a Generation\u201d<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a strange irony to the fact that on the same week of the 93rd\u00a0anniversary of the ratification of the 19th\u00a0amendment to the U.S. Constitution, a milestone achievement for the women\u2019s suffrage movement which resulted in women finally being able to vote, the headlines are dominated by the antics of pop star Miley Cyrus, who used this year\u2019s MTV Video Music Awards (VMA) as a forum for twerking, gyrating, stripping and other sexually defiant acts. Curiously enough, apart from concerns about Cyrus\u2019 questionable taste in dance moves, no one else seems to find this convergence the least bit jarring or incongruent.<\/p>\n

Welcome to the pornification of American culture, served up MTV-style.<\/p>\n

\u201cDid Miley Cyrus \u2018Flirt With Bad Taste\u2019 Or Dive Right In?\u201d asks NPR. \u201cMiley Cyrus\u2019 VMAs Performance: Offensive or Awesome?\u201d posits Billboard<\/em>. \u201cGaga Who? Miley Cyrus Snatches Crown for Queen of Obscene at VMAs\u201d declares Yahoo Music<\/em>. One reporter noted that 20-year-old Cyrus\u2019 performance at the Video Music Awards, which started with the former Disney teen idol doing a burlesque routine with oversized teddy bears and ended with her using a foam finger to imitate having sex with herself and the audience, \u201cleft Gaga in the dust with her gratuitous show of both skin and gesturing this year.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a sorry coming-of-age declaration from a girl who, for most of her life, has been America\u2019s little darling, the star of Disney\u2019s Hannah Montana<\/em> and a self-avowed Christian who reportedly wore a purity ring as a testament to her virginity. Yet Cyrus\u2019 VMA performance of her hit single \u201cWe Can\u2019t Stop\u201d was no less shocking than its companion music video which features the 20-year-old making out with a doll in a swimming pool, twerking, faking orgasm, and rough-housing with other women while men look on. Thirty-seven days after being released, \u201cWe Can\u2019t Stop\u201d became the fastest clip to reach 100 million views on a major music video website. One blogger actually praised the music video \u201cas a high-spirited celebration of the freedom that young women are blessed with today to fully explore and celebrate their sexuality.\u201d<\/p>\n

Frankly, in an age in which we routinely witness the pornification of American youth through popular music, film and culture, the outraged response by critics and fans alike to Cyrus\u2019 performance seems like just so much hypocrisy. After all, these are many of the same people who made Lady Gaga a musical force to be reckoned with. Gaga was just 23 when her chart-topping \u201cBad Romance\u201d single came out. The companion video packs a lot of messages\u2014none of them wholesome\u2014into a five-minute musical in which the singer is kidnapped, drugged, and forced to sell herself as a prostitute to the highest bidder. The video ends with a scantily clad Gaga lying on a bed in a post-coital pose beside the smoldering skeleton of her \u201ccustomer\u201d while her pyrotechnic bra emits fire.<\/p>\n

Thus, for those wondering if Cyrus will be the next Lady Gaga, a better question to ask is what are the consequences of a whole generation of pornified Gagas coming of age, given that so many of our young women have been raised to think that Gaga and Cyrus and the many other gyrating, minimally clad celebrities and models who pass for \u201csex symbols\u201d today are the pinnacle of womanhood.<\/p>\n

As commentator Dixie Laite writes for Bust <\/em>magazine:<\/p>\n

I can\u2019t punish a young ambitious woman for noticing that sex sells. Madonna knew it when she crawled the VMA stage very much\u00a0not<\/em><\/strong>\u00a0\u201cLike a Virgin\u201d. Rihanna, Beyonce, Britney and countless others have climbed that ladder to fame\u2026 Last time I looked, we as a nation absolutely adored this so-called slutty behavior. I see people voting with their dollars and their attention to Playboy\u2019s Bunnies, Victoria\u2019s Secrets, strippers, people who\u00a0dress like strippers<\/em>, and girls who\u2019ve gone wild. Miley\u2019s crime seems to be that she \u201cwent too far\u201d\u2026 she took all the things we accept and take for granted as ok every day and threw them all together into one jiggling jambalaya\u2026 [H]ad lots of barely-clad models come out gyrating around Robin Thicke, I doubt anyone would have thrown a hissy. I believe the word people would have used is \u201chot\u201d\u2026 Yes, Miley Cyrus is now, more than ever, America\u2019s Sweetheart. Only this time, it\u2019s no\u00a0fantasy Disney America, it\u2019s the\u00a0real<\/em><\/strong>\u00a0America.<\/p>\n

Real America, indeed. \u201cPop culture and porn culture have become part of the same seamless continuum,\u201d explains theatre historian and University of Illinois professor Mardia Bishop. \u201cAs these images become pervasive in popular culture, they become normalized… and… accepted.\u201d<\/p>\n

This foray into porn culture\u2014the increasing acceptability and pervasiveness of sexualized imagery in mainstream media\u2014is where pop culture takes a dark turn. \u201cVisual images and narratives of music videos clearly have more potential to form attitudes, values, or perceptions of social reality than does the music alone,\u201d notes author Douglas A. Gentile in his book Media Violence and Children<\/em>. In fact, music videos, which are found daily in 75-80% of the homes of 9- to 14-year-olds, are among the worst culprits constantly bombarding young people today with sexual images and references.<\/p>\n

Children between the ages of 8 and 18 spend approximately 30-120 minutes a day watching music videos\u201475% of which contain sexually suggestive materials\u2014and with the advent of portable technology, children\u2019s television and music are often unmonitored by parents or guardians. Not only does this accelerate adolescent sexual behavior (girls between the ages of 12-14 are two times more likely to engage in sexual activity after being exposed to sexual imagery), but it increases the likelihood of more sexual partners.<\/p>\n

Between the celebrity worship and the hyper-sexed imagery found in the pop stars\u2019 videos, young people\u2014especially young women\u2014today are getting double-teamed. Indeed, Nancy Bauer, a Tufts University professor, argues that as “adoration of celebrities as idols or role models is a normal part of identity development in childhood and adolescence,” young girls often look to celebrities as moral exemplars. This adoration can manifest itself from something as simple as putting up posters of the celebrity to more destructive behaviors. In this way, Miley Cyrus singing about \u201cshaking it as if we\u2019re at a strip club,\u201d masturbating on stage with a foam finger, twerking her posterior rhythmically or giving a lap dance to a virtual stranger on stage becomes the embodiment of behavior to be studied and emulated.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, you don\u2019t have to look far to find Cyrus\u2019 behavior being mimicked by the younger set. Earlier this year, 28 teenaged girls and 3 teenaged boys at a San Diego high school were given two-day suspensions for shooting a twerking music video that was posted on YouTube in which the girls \u201cgyrat[ed] against a wall while standing on their hands,\u201d while the boys looked on. More recently, Alexis Murphy, a 17-year-old Virginia girl who went missing, reportedly as a result of a forced abduction, repeatedly tweeted videos of herself twerking, sticking her tongue out provocatively (a move Cyrus seemed especially proud of), not to mention talking frankly and with uncensored language about sex and drugs.<\/p>\n

And then we wonder why our young women are being preyed on, trafficked and abused? As Jessica Bennett notes in \u201cThe Pornification of a Generation\u201d for\u00a0Newsweek<\/em>:<\/p>\n

All it takes is one look at MySpace photos of teens to see examples\u2014if they aren\u2019t imitating porn they\u2019ve actually seen, they\u2019re imitating the porn-inspired images and poses they\u2019ve absorbed elsewhere. Latex, corsets and stripper heels, once the fashion of porn stars, have made their way into middle and high school\u2026 Celebrities, too, have become amateur porn stars. They show up in sex tapes (Colin Farrell, Kim Kardashian), hire porn producers to shoot their videos (Britney Spears) or produce porn outright (Snoop Dogg). Actual porn stars and call girls, meanwhile, have become celebs. Ron Jeremy regularly takes cameos in movies and on TV, while adult star Jenna Jameson is a best-selling author.<\/p>\n

How we got to this place in time, where children are sexualized at an early age and trotted out as easy targets for all manner of predators is not really all that hard to decipher, but it requires a certain amount of candor.<\/p>\n

First, there is nothing sexually liberating about young women\u2014young girls\u2014reducing themselves to little more than sex objects and prancing about like prostitutes. Second, this is a dangerous game that can only end in tragic consequences: there are sexual predators out there only too eager to take advantage of any innuendo-laced sexual \u201cinvitations\u201d being put out there, intentional or not. Third, if it looks like porn, sounds like porn and imitates porn, it is porn, and it is devastating on every front, turning women into objects for male aggression. Fourth, no matter what its champions might say about the First Amendment and women\u2019s liberation, pornography in all its forms\u2014whether overtly packaged as skin flicks and mags or more subtly disguised by pop culture as trendy music videos and precocious clothing\u2014is about one thing only: money. Fifth, parents: turn off your cell phones for a change and tune into what your kids are watching, reading, listening to, and whom they are emulating. Your child is no different and no less vulnerable than any other.<\/p>\n

And finally, none of these things happen in a vacuum. Those concerned about the emerging police state in America which I detail in my book A Government of Wolves <\/em>should be equally concerned about the pornification of America: they are two sides of the same coin. As Aldous Huxley notes in his introduction to Brave New World<\/em>:<\/p>\n

As political and economic freedom diminishes, sexual freedom tends compensatingly to increase. And the dictator (unless he needs cannon fodder and families with which to colonize empty or conquered territories) will do well to encourage that freedom. In conjunction with the freedom to daydream under the influence of dope and movies and the radio, it will help to reconcile his subjects to the servitude which is their fate.<\/p>\n

Consider this: during a week in which news reports on NSA mass surveillance, militarized police forces, and a war brewing with Syria were vying for attention, CNN\u2019s number one news story was Miley Cyrus\u2019 VMA performance. Sounds like the death knell of an empire to me.<\/p>\n

WC: 1978<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There\u2019s a strange irony to the fact that on the same week of the 93rd anniversary of the ratification of the 19th amendment to the U.S. Constitution, a milestone achievement for the women\u2019s suffrage movement which resulted in women finally being able to vote, the headlines are dominated by the antics of pop star Miley Cyrus, who used this year\u2019s MTV Video Music Awards (VMA) as a forum for twerking, gyrating, stripping and other sexually defiant acts. Curiously enough, apart from concerns about Cyrus\u2019 questionable taste in dance moves, no one else seems to find this convergence the least bit jarring or incongruent.<\/p>\n

Welcome to the pornification of American culture, served up MTV-style.<\/p>\n

READ MORE.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":5979,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,214,218,212],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5980"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5980"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5980\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5984,"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5980\/revisions\/5984"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5979"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5980"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5980"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5980"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}