Last Sunday night, I sat in my common room and tentatively watched the VMAs. I prepared myself to throw my shoe at the TV when Taylor Swift won her gazillionth award. I also waited to see if my prediction of an N’Sync reunion performance rang true when JT got on stage.
But first, I watched as Miley Cyrus came on stage to perform “We Can’t Stop.” I’ll admit, the performance was like a car wreck that I couldn’t keep my eyes off of. The facial expressions mixed with her poor twerking skills gave me second hand embarrassment. However, as I scrolled through the many facets of social media that night and the next morning, I couldn’t believe what I was reading. Words such as“whore,” “slut” and “gross” were all over my newsfeed.
Big time news stations such as NBC asked viewers their opinions on the performance via Facebook and I found it appalling that the majority of the people slut shaming Cyrus were women. One user posted, “Quit giving this trash heap of a slut more time.” Another user, Ursula Berger, actually suggested that Robin Thicke should have controlled Cyrus’s behavior when they were on stage together stating, “Mr. Thicke you should of stopped the performance.”
What a great suggestion, Ursula! Instead of suggestively dancing on stage in front of millions of viewers, Miley should have stayed at home and made a sandwich for Mr. Thicke! Please. This whole argument against Cyrus is making me sick. Today’s pop music is full of artists who use hyper sexual dance routines. Rihanna is known for giving a fan a lap dance every time she performs her song “Skin” during her concert tours.
What is it about Miley Cyrus’s performance that makes it any different than other pop artists? A lot of her fans watched her grow up from being a Disney Channel star, and, though it may come as a shock to see Hannah Montana twerking on stage in a nude crop top and booty shorts, it’s time for the rest of the world to just move on and accept that Miley Cyrus isn’t 13 years old anymore.
It’s ignorant to completely disregard people’s beliefs on what is appropriate and what is inappropriate. However, if you find a young woman twerking on stage to be an abomination, then you can’t also ignore her onstage partner, Robin Thicke. There’s an obvious double standard here and society needs to wake up and accept the fact that a woman’s sexual behavior is her own business and choice.
Robin Thicke’s own mother was first to attack Miley Cyrus when reacting to the performance. In an interview with Yahoo! she stated, “I just keep thinking of her mother and father watching this. Oh, Lord, have mercy. … I was not expecting her to be putting her butt that close to my son.” So nothing was wrong with your precious 36-year-old son grinding up on a 20-year-old young woman and singing a song about consensual rape?
On the flip side, Thicke did receive some heat after he released the music video for “Blurred Lines.” It was banned on many sites in different countries for its derogatory representation of the women in the video. The music video shows topless girls in thongs parading around Robin Thicke, T.I. and Pharrell who are all fully clothed.
When Thicke sings the hook, “I hate these blurred lines,” there’s a shot of one of the girls lying down with a small stop sign on her bare naked bottom. The timing of the lyrics with this shot represents the blurred lines Thicke is talking about, when, according to Thicke, “stop” really means “go.” In an interview with GQ, Thicke attempted to defend his controversial video by stating, “We tried to do everything that was taboo. Bestiality, drug injections and everything that is completely derogatory towards women. Because all three of us are happily married with children, we were like, ‘We’re the perfect guys to make fun of this.’ People say, ‘Hey, do you think this is degrading to women?’ I’m like, ‘Of course it is. What a pleasure it is to degrade a woman. I’ve never gotten to do that before. I’ve always respected women.’”
Thicke’s pathetic attempt at defending his music, even if it was in jest, ended up making him sound more offensive than his song already was. Many things in society are taboo, but poking fun at these things will certainly not open up a beneficial conversation that will help eliminate the problem at hand. If it did, then more artists would be creating videos shining a positive light on children molestation, domestic violence and sexual abuse.
Fortunately, most artists don’t find these reenactments to be such a “pleasure,” as Robin Thicke would say. “Blurred Lines” conveys the idea that when a woman says no, she really means yes. This faulty concept reinforces a rape culture.
While Miley Cyrus brought forth her right of sexual expression, Robin Thicke used his chart topping song, music video and performance to reveal and champion the misogyny that underlays a good amount of male pop and R&B music today. Cyrus’s performance was definitely far off from her days of being Hannah Montana on the Disney Channel, but I doubt any college woman or man can say they have the same image or uphold the same values they did when they were 13.
Almost 100 years has passed since women’s rights activists have helped women gain the right to vote on equal grounds with men. I can only hope that in this new millennium we can acknowledge that men and women are also equal in regards to their sexual rights.
Vanessa Righeimer can be reached at vanessa.righeimer@spartans.ut.edu