The teenage pre-Empress Theodora [allegedly] set the bar pretty high with that geese-eating-grain-off-her-lady-bits (aka Leda and the Swan) routine in the sixth century.
I watched it and wasn’t particularly offended. The performance was mostly just silly and kind of boring. Though as a whole (meaning including her official video for that song) Miley’s sexualization strikes me as… hollow is the best word I can use. The best I can compare it to is when a teenager or early college student really gets into Nietzsche or Plato and the like but doesn’t really understand it. Where they’re trying really hard to use all this deep philosophy and apply it to everything, but it gets ridiculous when they start trying to compare their job at McDonald’s to the Allegory of the Cave.
The sexualized act is just… not sexual. While, intellectually, I get that it’s supposed to be sexual, they just feel like motions to me. Like, she’s performaning actions and moving certain ways, but they don’t really feel linked to anything sexual. Like she doesn’t really know what she’s doing. It reminds me of high school where people thrusting their hips was funny because… uh… sex is funny when you’re a teen I guess. I keep just wondering when she’s going to try to do a straight-faced no-irony cover of Elektronik Supersonik. Because it feels like a parody of sexuality that forgot it was a parody.
I mean, if you’re going to go insane with the sexuality at least go all in and be Ke$ha. At least Ke$ha is fun about it.
Though, as always, my main objection is that for a song ostensibly about being able to do whatever you want and having fun partying (and possibly fucking) it is an excessively boring song, video, and performance. 80BPM is not a party song, at least not without far more effort than they put into that thing.
Is it wrong for me to have been more amused watching Mika Brzezinski freak out about it, demand firings at MTV, and indignantly upbraid everyone else on her set and even on those of other shows to dare to disagree, than the actual Miley act?
As Mister Rik points out, one of the elements of “shock” about MC is the contrast with her spiritual predecessors from a decade-plus earlier, such as Britney S. who started off with “naughty-schoolgirl tease,” and then went deliberately step-by-step working it up to “trainwreck sex goddess”. But that’s part of the issue: while at Disney, Spears and Aguilera were just part of the company players – they only became headliners AFTER they’d moved on and adopted an overtly sexy image, so the audience did not feel uncomfortable about them heating the act up as time went by. Miley OTOH has the Hanna Montana albatross around her neck. (BTW: note to tween girls and their parents: Hanna Montana died three years ago. Find another idol.) Jon LaJoie brings up his take about this (completely SFW) saying* “we’ll watch others do this and we’ll be fine because we can’t picture them as kids”*. It’s all about “OMG my tween daughter can see this!!”. Well, time to do some parenting for cryin’ out loud.
I’m with Jragon in that Miley (or Team Miley) comes across as trying too hard, and is substituting shock for maturity. But, she’s only 20, that demographic both as audience and as creator tends to confuse shock value for maturity a lot, hopefully she’ll get over it. Still, since she has been acting up for a few years now, it’s hard to explain why people just now claim to be stunned.
The performance was just so-so musically, confusing in concept and staging, sort of trainwrecky at times, she is not that good a dancer and her apparent ongoing tribute to Gene Simmons was distracting. By VMA standards it was just average IMO. For cryin’ out loud it was a duet with Robin Thicke, what did they expect, art?
I think you and Mister Rik are forgetting that 10+ years ago there were people who were shocked by Britney Spears’s music videos and VMA performances. There weren’t a bunch of articles on Huffington Post about her 2001 “Slave 4 U” performance because Huffington Post didn’t exist then, but I remember there being plenty of “What’s the world coming to that something so offensive could be shown on MTV!” in response to it.
Please tell me there’s cites? maybe pics?
I wasn’t all that impressed with Miley’s “sexuality” or the “choreography” or theme of the song, but there’s one thing I do like about Miley. She has a healthy, fit body and isn’t stick-thin like showbiz always demands. That a great thing to project to young girls/women.
Healthy? Really?! :dubious:
Oh, I certainly remember the outrage, (and the earlier outrage at some of Madonna’s performances). But the outrage at Madonna and Britney wasn’t coming from their fans. From what I’ve seen regarding Miley, a lot of the WTF?! is coming from her fans. They seem as baffled and disgusted as anybody. And again, I think it’s because, where Madonna and Britney proceeded 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, etc., Miley has gone 1, 2, 3, 4, 11.
I haven’t heard anything at all about Cyrus’s fans being shocked or confused, although I haven’t been following this “controversy” closely. But I did click your link for the “We Can’t Stop” video, and within the first 45 seconds (all that I watched) Cyrus was shown wearing a skimpy costume and rolling around in bed, hanging her tongue way out of her mouth, and spanking a black woman. So that’s basically her VMA performance right there.
The “We Can’t Stop” video was posted on Vevo more than two months ago, and Wikipedia tells me that it was quite successful – it even broke some Vevo records prior to the VMA performance. Of course one reason the video might have been viewed so much would be that Cyrus’s fans considered it shocking, but if that’s the case they couldn’t truly have been shocked all over again when they saw her very similar VMA performance. They may not have liked it, but anyone who’d seen the video had fair warning that Cyrus had changed her image since her Hannah Montana days. I’m sure plenty of people who watched the VMAs hadn’t seen this particular video, but it seems unlikely that many Miley Cyrus fans tuned in to the VMAs without having first seen the video that she was nominated for.
That looks REALLY 'shopped. Look at her physique in the video. She has muscles.
Nor unwelcome news to any one! Laissez les bon temps rouller, et laissez Miley Cryus be as much of a hooor as she wanna be, man! 
her Wiki page talks about “salacious” performances
Ugh. That page makes my brain twerk.
I don’t have a problem with people being offended by it. But, for goodness sake, it isn’t news. It’s not that big a deal at all. All you are doing is exactly what she wanted–giving her publicity. Just post that it was shocking and disgusting or whatever, and them move on.
I should not still be seeing newly written articles about this!
BTW: her hair is still what makes the whole thing unsexy to me. I know some girls who can handle it, but it just makes her look fugly.
A good rule of thumb for Miley is when your tongue is longer than your hair, it’s time to grow out your hair.
This could be a Miley smiley if the tongue were 3 times longer. -> 
Hmmm. Maybe I need to watch the video after all.
This has been said by more than two posters, but I’m too lazy to quote more than two.
Do you really think this performance was choreographed by a wholesome 21-year-old girl confused about her sexuality? That the million dollar entertainment enterprise that is Miley Cyrus wanted to be sexy but failed? Everything else in Miley’s life was choreographed, but this is a teenager rebelling against her corporate handlers? Just like Christina Aguilera, Britney Spears, Katy Perry, oh, wait…
She did not want to put on a proper “sexual” performance. Whatever that means. She was intentionally being sexually careless because that’s what sells records. There is a genre of pop music that young adults like that features rich young adults parting without giving a shit about any consequences. The whole point of these songs is that the people partying affirm their right to behave irresponsibility.
Examples:
Ke$ha - Tik Tok. Listen to the lyrics. The whole song is about her doing irresponsible things and not giving a shit. She moves around like a drunk during the video. Do you think that’s because she can’t dance?
Far East Movement - Like a G6. Rich people drinking all day and feeling good about it.
I read someone on reddit say that the apex of this genre is Millionaires - Party Like A Millionaire. Here is the chorus: “I do what I want middle finger in the air. Gonna party party party like a millionaire. Gonna dance like a slut, and I don’t even care. Gonna party party party, like a millionaire.” That pretty much sums up the genre.
Now it’s time for Miley Cyrus to cash in. Her dancing, or whatever you want to call it, fit the ideology of this genre perfectly. She was being sexually careless. The kind of sexually that will get adults going “be more careful, someone will think you’re a whore” and that was the point. The message is that she can be as irresponsibly as she wants and no one can stop her. I thought doing the performance with a 40-year-old sleazy man whore added to the whole careless attitude Cyrus was trying to convey.
Read the song lyrics if you want more evidence. She sings about doing whatever she wants - drugs and sex included - and how no one will stop her.
You’re saying that Disney had less influence over her when she was a child?
I’m not arguing that Miley Cyrus is the greatest entertainer alive. But she’s not some confused young adult who’s “struggling to understand her sexuality”. She and her corporate handlers had a plan that they executed perfectly and everyone who says “she’s behaving like a whore” is only going to earn them more money.
Okay an unofficial poll:
Who thinks that the real Miley Cyrus personality is more like
a) Hannah Montana
b) The character she now portrays, or
c) Who you see is her, a train wreck in progress.
I vote for option a. A fairly white bread kid trying to act a part for the sake of her career. No Lakai, but I think the character they had her play was closer to the real her and less of an acting stretch.