Message: There is no valid non-phony way to grow up therefore remain a child your entire life.
Unfortunately Miley and her ilk have decided to go one step further: Remain childish your entire life.
Posted on 09/06/2013 5:14:59 AM PDT by Kaslin
Some defenders of Miley Cyrus' VMA performance don't understand what all the outrage is about. Justin Timberlake tweeted, "She's young. Take it easy on her." Lena Dunham worried about "slut shaming." Russell Simmons wrote "Just saw @MileyCyrus. What did I miss. She was having fun. #twerkmileytwerk." And Adam Lambert tweeted " ... Listen if it wasn't ur cup of tea -- all good but why is everyone spazzing? Hey -- she's doin something right. We all talkin."
Cyrus seemed to endorse Lambert's any-attention-is-good-attention rationale. She boasted on Twitter that "Smilers! My VMA performance had 306.000 tweets per minute. That's more than the blackout or Superbowl! #fact."
Doubtless if Cyrus had undressed completely and performed a literal (rather than pantomime) sex act on stage, her Twitter numbers would have been even higher. Ditto if she had twisted the head off a small animal or defecated live and in color. A product of the celebrity culture, she seems incapable of making judgments based on anything higher than buzz. If she did either of those things, would Lambert wonder why everyone was "spazzing," and would Dunham condemn "slut shaming"? It's hard to say.
How many of Cyrus' young fans will interpret her behavior as a normal part of growing up? How many will confuse lasciviousness with sexual maturity?
Meghan Cox Gurdon, The Wall Street Journal's wise children's book reviewer, noted in a recent Hillsdale College speech that there is a vein in "young adult" fiction of ugly, horrific and sexually revolting material aimed at kids between 12 and 18. Girls cut themselves with razors until their bellies are a "mess of meat and blood," and boys don magic glasses that reveal "impaled heads and other black-rot body parts: hands, hearts, feet, ears, penises." The authors and publishers justify these themes as "heartbreakingly honest."
The subversives who undermine good taste always seem to invoke "honesty" or "reality". But as Gurdon rightly objects: "Books tell children what to expect, what life is, what culture is, how we are expected to behave -- what the spectrum is. They form norms ... And teenagers are all about identifying norms and adhering to them."
No one who has ever observed a group of 15-year-old girls -- nearly identical in their hair styles, clothes and speech -- can doubt this.
Miley Cyrus' performance was not just another case of a salacious and degrading bid for attention. Because of who she was -- a Disney star with a loyal following of young girls -- and because of what she did, she has introduced something even darker to the mainstream culture. She is indirectly legitimizing child porn.
Miley Cyrus became a sensation as "Hannah Montana," a wholesome Disney pop star. Millions of pre-teen girls adored the show and followed Cyrus' career. She is hardly the first celebrity to attempt to shock her audience by shedding her ingenue image. Britney Spears, Lindsay Lohan and others have plowed this ground. But Cyrus did more than cast off her innocence. She used innocence itself as a lecherous come on.
Cyrus, 20, began her vulgar dance by appearing in a teddy bear costume with dancing teddy bears as back up. She later exchanged this for a flesh-colored bra and panties and a large foam finger that she put to lewd uses.
I haven't ever seen child porn, but I would bet that a great deal of it uses images of innocence and childhood -- like teddy bears -- for the delectation of its audience. Cyrus has now taken this perversion mainstream.
Child porn, like every other kind of pornography, once relegated to a seedy underworld, is now as close as a cellphone. It's bobbing along in the twilight, close to the surface of American lives, but kept from full view by the last remaining shreds of propriety that our culture enforces.
The existence of the Internet has probably already eroded some of the shame that pedophiles once felt. Learning that hundreds of thousands of others share one's perversion must be cathartic.
But how much more liberating to see the themes of child sexual abuse portrayed approvingly at the VMA awards?
American popular culture continues to prove that there is no rock bottom, and everyone who shrugs that it's no big deal is a little bit complicit
Message: There is no valid non-phony way to grow up therefore remain a child your entire life.
Unfortunately Miley and her ilk have decided to go one step further: Remain childish your entire life.
Often time it DOES take hitting rock bottom to begin the process of repentence.
The unfortunate state of mankind beset by human nature, which by the way our founding fathers were so well acquanted with that they built our form of government with the foibles of human nature considered.
If only we had listened and held them in high esteem.
Many generations of women came to flowering sexual maturity without engaging in THAT....
needs more tongue action.
and why do people that stupid deserve to have articles about them??
I am so glad my grandchildren never cared for her..they did not watch much TV anyway while growing up so that was one good thing..
I don’t watch watch MTV or hardly any TV and I have seen pictures and stuff about this. It’s shoved into their faces whether they watched or not.
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Remember paris hilton? Several years ago there was a ‘sex tape’ making its way around the world through the internet. I didn’t see it and have no interest in seeing it. Shortly after, her popularity soared.
miley cirus had a wholesome clean image, until now. Apparently her career was tanking, so she or her producers decided to go slut. And now everyone is talking about her. I don’t know if it has helped her career, and I don’t care.
Why is it that wholesome goes nowhere, and slut sells?
Did the Romans of the Imperium reach rock bottom?
Since when?
They reached their rock bottom when the Roman empire fell.
I think Cyrus’s “performance” was more stupid than lewd. The danger in what she did is influencing young teens to act stupid.
She was baptized in a Southern Baptist church in 2005.
Her godmother is Dolly Parton.
She is an avid supporter of gay rights. She has a tattoo with two stripes on her ring finger symbolizing equal rights for gays.
By 2011 she had a personal worth of 120 million dollars.
Leni
God, that’s funny! bravo !!!
One of the first things I learned in A.A. 33 years ago.
True. That is definitely not photoshopped.
I have decided that for me personally, there is only one way to look at the total decline of morality and civil behavior in society: It’s all Bible prophecy and there is nothing we can do about it. Keep your faith strong, don’t give in, don’t accept what you know is wrong because it’s popular opinion, take care of yourself and your family, sit back and let it happen.
If you have looked over your kid's shoulders (before you took over the TV) you would have seen that the morphing of the mean has been underway for over a decade. MTV was bad enough when it first started with fisheye views of performers' noses. Then it expanded into a social crusade.
Much of this dreck is presented as 'edgy' because that gets people to look. Next season it is passe.
From the naughty start of soap opera infidelity to today's splatter flicks (to video game slaughter and hardcore porn) has been a long road, each step desensitizing and normalizing increasingly perverted and salacious and violent behaviour until that is presented to children and teens (and even witless adults) as normal life...and thus, for many, it becomes so, because the bar of their expectations has been inexorably lowered by the media.
Even on "comedy" shows, 1/4 of the cast are homosexual, intelligent Caucasian males are a rarity, and Christian values have been all but pushed off the screen.
But let one show like Duck Dynasty squeak through, and people flock to it. That tells me there is hope for America, that most people aren't buying what MTV has to sell (although many are).
There is still a lot of decency here, it just isn't being sold on TV.
One other thing you can do: fellowship with others of similar mind and take very small steps to rebuild the culture on a small scale. That could happen a million ways. Invite one other family over for “clean movie night” or (if you’re a parent) find a small group of other parents who feel the same way you do about your culture and have the kids do activities together. It’s from small things that Judeo-Christian values will survive.
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