Miley, Cha Cha DiGregorio, and the Big Fish
(4/29/08; edited 9/25/13)
The media is frantic over this delicious, new Miley Cyrus controversy – if you haven't heard, just turn on the TV, radio, or computer – and is currently spewing it like a bottle of just-popped-champagne all over party guests. Somewhere, the Editor-in-chief of Vanity Fair Magazine is holding up that photo of Ms. Cyrus, dancing and waving it around like Cha Cha DiGregorio with the winning trophy in Grease. You know: "The best dancer at St. Bernadette's."
Anyway, beneath the candy-coated media hype, there is a valid underlying issue here. It's the same issue that my sister is dissecting for my step-niece, whose mother recently enrolled in a beauty – er – scholarship pageant… then self-tanned her, highlighted her hair, painted her face, and showed her how to smile and wave as to emphasize her sportswear outfit. She's 8.
No, the issue is not that there are kiddie-pageants or half-nude pop idols in magazines or even that some members of Miley's predominately prepubescent female fan-base may one day turn playmates due to her graphic photos. Thing is, I doubt they have to flip through Vanity Fair to see a barely-dressed woman – or girl. Really, who cares if Miley is a virgin or if she is fucking each and every Jonas brother? There are many more millionaire divas out there who sell sexy to our youth, even if Miley won’t. Your daughter is watching them, too.
The issue isn't that it's there – the issue is that it's everywhere. It's the pervasive notion that Sexy is the Holy Grail of femininity. In this case, though, the value is not in beauty or sexiness itself. Rather, it’s in the things that we perceive beauty to yield – Fame and fortune with relatively little effort. Desire. Goodness. Respect. Love.
Most girls will not grow up to be models, actresses, or singers – industries in which women have a certain work-related obligation to uphold an image. However, the byproduct of years of chasing that same image will linger in the girl that grew up to be a doctor, a teacher, a chef, a mother, or any one of the numerous other roles that women fill outside the peripheries of media. That byproduct is insecurity, and it can manifest in a variety of ways: for some, in a quest to adopt certain looks or behaviors; others will silently withdraw, hating women or just themselves.
Who do we blame? Isn’t that what we want: someone to point to and condemn? When you get down to it, we are all guilty of perpetuating the cycle. We all buy into it in one way or another. What can we do about it? I don't know… "Blow up your TV. Throw away your paper. Go to the country – build you a home. Plant a little garden. Eat a lot of peaches. Try and find Jesus on your own." Well, that's one answer – and, believe me, I've thought about it. This is a problem that I find unintelligible because it’s simply too close. I am, after all, a woman.
As for Miley – and maybe that even younger looking model hanging 10-feet tall in the window of the Abercrombie store as well – there is truth in the cliché: money talks. The only reason it's there, is because on some level you, me, all of us pay for it. Vanity Fair's website literally crashed yesterday due to millions of hungry consumers looking to gobble up the day's juicy gossip. I'm sure the hard-copies are being snatched up also. Opinions are like dollars—everybody's got one. If your opinion is that a 15-year-old shouldn't be used in a sexually explicit way to sell magazines, than use yours wisely and don't buy it. My opinion is that we have a bigger fish to fry.
xo, Lisa
"What a strange illusion it is to suppose that beauty is goodness." Leo Tolstoy
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