The Times, October 8 2013
I think we can all agree that on one point, at least: Annie Lennox is spot on.
The “overtly sexualised performances” of many young female pop stars these
days are indeed “depressing”. I defy anyone to watch Miley Cyrus jiggling
her tiny bottom against (fully clothed) Robin Thicke’s welcoming groin at
the MTV Video Music Awards while caressing a giant foam finger and not come
away feeling a touch sad.
It’s not just the porny, man-pleasing content of many performances by, say, Cyrus and Rihanna that makes the heart sink. It’s that they are so desperately, nakedly attention-seeking. When it comes to shrieking “Look at meeeee!” they put tantrumy toddlers to shame.
“It seems obvious that certain record companies are peddling highly styled pornography with musical accompaniment,” wrote Lennox, the former Eurythmics singer, on Facebook. “As if the tidal wave of sexualised imagery wasn’t already bombarding impressionable young girls enough.”
Again, who would pick a fight with that? If Cyrus’s record company believes her songs stand on musical merit alone, then why the need to flog them with videos in which she appears stark naked and simulating oral sex with a sledgehammer? Which comes first with some female artists these days, the music or the idea of selling it with a tit video?
The fashion and documentary photographer Terry Richardson has helped to rebrand Cyrus from squeaky clean Hannah Montana on the Disney Channel to pouting provocateur. In a recent set of shots he has her doing something suggestive with a fizzy-drink can. Sinéad O’Connor wrote an open letter to Cyrus urging her not to let the music industry “make a prostitute” out of her.
Lennox tells me that if she sounded like a “prude” she regretted it, but that she feels “sad” for parents who find themselves powerless against the onslaught of such sexual imagery.
“What parent on the planet do you know who would be happy with their seven-year-old or even younger girl or boy watching [this stuff] — and what message are they getting?” she says. “There would be something wrong with you for not wanting to protect your kids from that. I’m speaking as someone who has been a boundary-pusher in the past. I respect pushing boundaries, but it depends which issues you are pushing. And this boundary is going to porn. I use the word because that’s what it is. Porn is porn is porn. Let’s just be frank about it. If you lie down with your legs wide open and bend over with your backside sticking up in the air, if you simulate masturbation, that’s porn.”
She agrees that sometimes the music seems almost incidental, secondary to the real big sell: the video. “This is about getting as much attention as possible and it works,” she says. “It’s a market-force collusion.”
Lennox’s aim, she says, is not to target individual artists (in fairness she doesn’t name any) but the phenomenon itself. “As long as there’s booty to make money out of, it will be bought and sold,” Lennox says. “It’s depressing to see how these performers are so eager to push this new level of low. Their assumption seems to be that misogyny — utilised and displayed through oneself — is totally fine as long as you are the one creating it. As if it’s all justified by how many millions of dollars and YouTube hits you get. It’s a monetised form of self-harm.”
Perhaps noting the attention Cyrus has been getting, the singer Ke$ha has posted photos of her own bare backside on Instagram along with a (clothed) legs-akimbo shot.
Maybe we should pause here, however, and ask whether we risk working ourselves into a moral panic over what may simply be generational difference? These products are, after all, not made for us; the artists don’t want our approval. We’re too old. Many people clutched their pearls and professed the end of civilisation over Elvis’s pelvic thrusts and nothing bad happened (except to him, obviously).
Sex and raunch has always been used to sell. Madonna’s crotch-grabbing and dry-humping of the stage caused shock at the time but society didn’t turn into Sodom and Gomorrah. Cyrus, at 20, can make her own decisions, even if we fogies perhaps wish it wasn’t sticking her tongue out suggestively a bit like, come to think of it, Mick Jagger. But they do present a warped image of female sexuality.
Lennox says that Madonna is “a very savvy businesswoman” who knew “damn well” what she was doing, but adds that incorporating her “sexual self” into her videos and calling it empowerment was different to the sort of videos we are seeing today. “What I think I am seeing is a kind of misogyny that has turned into itself,” she says. “That by taking part in [it] is almost like being the pimp and the prostitute at the same time.”
If an artist has a fanbase of young children, she adds, then she effectively says: “‘I’m now going to do this porny thing on morning TV and awards shows and you’re going to watch me do it.’ Then you really have a big issue.”
Joan Smith, the journalist, critic and author of Misogynies, agrees. Of Cyrus she says: “If she thinks she’s doing something groundbreaking and essentially liberating, why is it only ever her that doesn’t have clothes on?”
She says she understands that some confident young women may want to show off their bodies, but unfortunately rather than their appearing to be sexually free and empowered, the end result can be interpreted entirely the other way: that they are playing up to pornographic images.
She says the abrupt change of image has parallels with Britney Spears (another singer whose childhood was spent largely appearing on the Disney Channel) going from one extreme to the other. “It’s like a little girl who, instead of growing up and borrowing her mother’s clothes, has grown up and thrown them all off.”
Cyrus said recently that stripping off helped her express “purity of emotion. People try to make everything so thought out when sometimes there’s no real reason why. It’s my body. I want what I do to be memorable and so do my fans. I’m just living, just being.”
And that’s fine, Miley, provided you realise that the Wrecking Ball video, in which you straddle a giant ball stark naked, is a turkey and that while you might call it freedom of expression, millions of men might see it differently.
Still, if we middle-agies rend our garments and beat our breasts too loudly over such artists, isn’t there a danger we will make our daughters more determined to watch them out of defiance? That our disapproval will imbue them with cool? (My own nine-year-old is more shocked that Steve McDonald in Coronation Street smokes than by any racy pop-star video). Most young children won’t understand the sexual content anyway and older teenagers may have moved on to edgier bands.
Lennox agrees that parental disapproval can increase a product’s cachet. “It is a real conundrum,” she says. “It’s a double bind.” Lennox says that when her two children were younger and into Eminem she “froze” when she heard some of the content. Her children accused her of “not getting it”, the eternal parent-child refrain.
As Lennox says, though, if we turn a parental blind eye to such videos, what is the next logical step? “Are we going to see the labia? What about penetrative sex? Let’s have some of that,” she says. “I think sexuality is wonderful and boundary-pushing is great — where it’s appropriate. I don’t want to be a prude, but why should parents feel so impotent?”
My 11-year-old daughter isn’t going to emulate the singer just because she watched Hannah Montana when she was 7, Alice Thomson believes
I went to my first Hannah Montana concert at 42. I can’t remember what I wore, but I enjoyed it. Miley Cyrus was on time, she wafted round the stage in nothing more raucous than a pair of leather shorts and a pink T-shirt, she had a sweet voice and I was back home by 10pm having drunk water. The three seven-year-old girls I took loved it. They knew the words, had the blonde wigs and bought the pencil case.
Then I saw the Disney film Hannah Montana: the Movie. Not on my own, of course: my daughter came too. It was inoffensive family fun, a cross between The Waltons and Pippi Longstocking with dungarees, hay bales and the Hoedown Throwdown. I could probably still recite the lyrics to The Climb, a good, old-fashioned song about doing your best.
I knew her dad was Billy Ray Cyrus, the country star of Achy Breaky Heart – not my favourite song, but never mind — and that her real name is Destiny. She seemed slightly more twee than Angelina Ballerina, but better than the Rainbow Magic fairies as girl obsessions go and my daughter eventually moved on.
So I wasn’t prepared when I saw Miley Cyrus, now 20, in her latex bra and G-string, gyrating on stage at the MTV Video Music Awards, a foam finger rubbing her crotch, her backside gyrating, twerking against a 36-year-old man. She then suggested that licking a sledgehammer,grinding a demolition ball and panting with her tongue hanging out is her idea of sex. I couldn’t look, it was so degrading. She can’t even drink yet in America. When she told viewers this weekend on Saturday Night Live: “Hannah Montana was murdered,” it was a relief. Now we just have to lock up Cyrus.
I can understand why Annie Lennox says that she’s disturbed and dismayed at the way sexual imagery has pervaded pop — smiley Miley is acting like a prostitute looking for a pimp. This wasn’t a drunken mistake: she evidently rehearsed her show for hours using a chair to perfect her twerk. Steve Chmelar, the inventor of the foam finger, chastised her for degrading an “honourable icon”. Brooke Shields, another former child star and Cyrus’s film mum, was not amused. It’s going to be an interesting Christmas at the ranch with her Baptist family.
“You’ve got to move on,” my now 11-year-old daughter said. “Why do you care? Only sad old men will watch her.” But doesn’t she want to emulate her? “No. I don’t want to gyrate around the school stage naked just because a singer I once liked at the age of 7 is doing it,” she explained.
She’s right: as the girls poured out of her secondary school yesterday afternoon they may have rolled up their skirts but most were wearing brogues or netball kit. None of them would now listen to Miley Cyrus any more than they would play with My Little Pony.
Maybe we’re all protesting too much. Almost all saccharine pop princesses break free and horrify adults with their antics when they grow up. She was never pretending to be a feminist. Now that Rihanna, Lady Gaga and Ke$ha are all in thongs, it’s become a uniform; she has to go one step further.
She’s not being exploited, she’s the one attempting to manipulate the audience. As she says, she wants a reaction from the mothers and approval from the fathers. That’s how she is hoping to get the sales and she wants a distraction from her rich life. We’re the ones embarrassing ourselves, urging her to cover up and wear a decent frock. We’ve got to grow up and ignore it.
The former Hannah Montana star and Rihanna are no real threat to my daughter: she doesn’t take them seriously, says Will Hodgkinson
For a father with an 11-year-old daughter, Miley Cyrus’s transformation from Disney princess to bad girl is alarming. One moment she is singing a saccharine pop song in the desert in the children’s show Hannah Montana; the next she is licking a sledgehammer in the music video to her single Wrecking Ball. How do you explain this kind of thing?
As it turned out, I didn’t have to. “Miley Cyrus is rubbish,” said my daughter, when I asked her opinion of a pop star whose new incarnation as a pot-smoking, tongue-lolling, booty-shaking rebel, which coincides with the release of her album Bangerz, has been the marketing coup of the century. “It’s embarrassing and the songs are terrible. It’s too much. It’s tacky.”
Admittedly, my daughter has been educated (or indoctrinated) by her rock critic father from a young age, but she claims that none of the girls in her state primary in southeast London, not even the ones who like One Direction, are fans of Miley Cyrus: uncensored. While everyone from militant feminists to reactionary moral crusaders has taken a prurient stance, the girls seem to realise something the adults don’t: Miley Cyrus is uncool.
As a father to a girl not far from adolescence, I don’t feel threatened by the influence of Miley Cyrus or similarly sexualised pop stars such as Rihanna because my daughter doesn’t take them seriously. Perhaps she and her friends unconsciously realise, as Sinead O’Connor rightly pointed out, that Cyrus and Rihanna have allowed themselves to become commodities, conduits for other people’s ideas, and that is never a good look.
Instead, the girls admire Debbie Harry for her great style and for Blondie’s back catalogue of killer pop songs (introduced to a new generation via One Direction’s cover of One Way or Another), and the recent No 1 I Love It by Icona Pop is a favourite, not only because it’s such a perfect slice of euphoric electro-pop but also because the two Swedish girls who make up the band look as if they’re having so much fun in the video. We should give Cyrus’s core audience of pre-teen girls some credit: they know when they’re being sold a dud.
Bangerz is bound to be a hit, despite having a banal quality typical of an album driven by a huge (and, as it turns out, phenomenally successful) marketing campaign. The danger Miley Cyrus and similarly objectified pop stars pose to our youth is overplayed. Far more dangerous is the long-term effect objectification will have on the pop stars themselves.
It’s not just the porny, man-pleasing content of many performances by, say, Cyrus and Rihanna that makes the heart sink. It’s that they are so desperately, nakedly attention-seeking. When it comes to shrieking “Look at meeeee!” they put tantrumy toddlers to shame.
“It seems obvious that certain record companies are peddling highly styled pornography with musical accompaniment,” wrote Lennox, the former Eurythmics singer, on Facebook. “As if the tidal wave of sexualised imagery wasn’t already bombarding impressionable young girls enough.”
Again, who would pick a fight with that? If Cyrus’s record company believes her songs stand on musical merit alone, then why the need to flog them with videos in which she appears stark naked and simulating oral sex with a sledgehammer? Which comes first with some female artists these days, the music or the idea of selling it with a tit video?
The fashion and documentary photographer Terry Richardson has helped to rebrand Cyrus from squeaky clean Hannah Montana on the Disney Channel to pouting provocateur. In a recent set of shots he has her doing something suggestive with a fizzy-drink can. Sinéad O’Connor wrote an open letter to Cyrus urging her not to let the music industry “make a prostitute” out of her.
Lennox tells me that if she sounded like a “prude” she regretted it, but that she feels “sad” for parents who find themselves powerless against the onslaught of such sexual imagery.
“What parent on the planet do you know who would be happy with their seven-year-old or even younger girl or boy watching [this stuff] — and what message are they getting?” she says. “There would be something wrong with you for not wanting to protect your kids from that. I’m speaking as someone who has been a boundary-pusher in the past. I respect pushing boundaries, but it depends which issues you are pushing. And this boundary is going to porn. I use the word because that’s what it is. Porn is porn is porn. Let’s just be frank about it. If you lie down with your legs wide open and bend over with your backside sticking up in the air, if you simulate masturbation, that’s porn.”
She agrees that sometimes the music seems almost incidental, secondary to the real big sell: the video. “This is about getting as much attention as possible and it works,” she says. “It’s a market-force collusion.”
Lennox’s aim, she says, is not to target individual artists (in fairness she doesn’t name any) but the phenomenon itself. “As long as there’s booty to make money out of, it will be bought and sold,” Lennox says. “It’s depressing to see how these performers are so eager to push this new level of low. Their assumption seems to be that misogyny — utilised and displayed through oneself — is totally fine as long as you are the one creating it. As if it’s all justified by how many millions of dollars and YouTube hits you get. It’s a monetised form of self-harm.”
Perhaps noting the attention Cyrus has been getting, the singer Ke$ha has posted photos of her own bare backside on Instagram along with a (clothed) legs-akimbo shot.
Maybe we should pause here, however, and ask whether we risk working ourselves into a moral panic over what may simply be generational difference? These products are, after all, not made for us; the artists don’t want our approval. We’re too old. Many people clutched their pearls and professed the end of civilisation over Elvis’s pelvic thrusts and nothing bad happened (except to him, obviously).
Sex and raunch has always been used to sell. Madonna’s crotch-grabbing and dry-humping of the stage caused shock at the time but society didn’t turn into Sodom and Gomorrah. Cyrus, at 20, can make her own decisions, even if we fogies perhaps wish it wasn’t sticking her tongue out suggestively a bit like, come to think of it, Mick Jagger. But they do present a warped image of female sexuality.
Lennox says that Madonna is “a very savvy businesswoman” who knew “damn well” what she was doing, but adds that incorporating her “sexual self” into her videos and calling it empowerment was different to the sort of videos we are seeing today. “What I think I am seeing is a kind of misogyny that has turned into itself,” she says. “That by taking part in [it] is almost like being the pimp and the prostitute at the same time.”
If an artist has a fanbase of young children, she adds, then she effectively says: “‘I’m now going to do this porny thing on morning TV and awards shows and you’re going to watch me do it.’ Then you really have a big issue.”
Joan Smith, the journalist, critic and author of Misogynies, agrees. Of Cyrus she says: “If she thinks she’s doing something groundbreaking and essentially liberating, why is it only ever her that doesn’t have clothes on?”
She says she understands that some confident young women may want to show off their bodies, but unfortunately rather than their appearing to be sexually free and empowered, the end result can be interpreted entirely the other way: that they are playing up to pornographic images.
She says the abrupt change of image has parallels with Britney Spears (another singer whose childhood was spent largely appearing on the Disney Channel) going from one extreme to the other. “It’s like a little girl who, instead of growing up and borrowing her mother’s clothes, has grown up and thrown them all off.”
Cyrus said recently that stripping off helped her express “purity of emotion. People try to make everything so thought out when sometimes there’s no real reason why. It’s my body. I want what I do to be memorable and so do my fans. I’m just living, just being.”
And that’s fine, Miley, provided you realise that the Wrecking Ball video, in which you straddle a giant ball stark naked, is a turkey and that while you might call it freedom of expression, millions of men might see it differently.
Still, if we middle-agies rend our garments and beat our breasts too loudly over such artists, isn’t there a danger we will make our daughters more determined to watch them out of defiance? That our disapproval will imbue them with cool? (My own nine-year-old is more shocked that Steve McDonald in Coronation Street smokes than by any racy pop-star video). Most young children won’t understand the sexual content anyway and older teenagers may have moved on to edgier bands.
Lennox agrees that parental disapproval can increase a product’s cachet. “It is a real conundrum,” she says. “It’s a double bind.” Lennox says that when her two children were younger and into Eminem she “froze” when she heard some of the content. Her children accused her of “not getting it”, the eternal parent-child refrain.
As Lennox says, though, if we turn a parental blind eye to such videos, what is the next logical step? “Are we going to see the labia? What about penetrative sex? Let’s have some of that,” she says. “I think sexuality is wonderful and boundary-pushing is great — where it’s appropriate. I don’t want to be a prude, but why should parents feel so impotent?”
My 11-year-old daughter isn’t going to emulate the singer just because she watched Hannah Montana when she was 7, Alice Thomson believes
I went to my first Hannah Montana concert at 42. I can’t remember what I wore, but I enjoyed it. Miley Cyrus was on time, she wafted round the stage in nothing more raucous than a pair of leather shorts and a pink T-shirt, she had a sweet voice and I was back home by 10pm having drunk water. The three seven-year-old girls I took loved it. They knew the words, had the blonde wigs and bought the pencil case.
Then I saw the Disney film Hannah Montana: the Movie. Not on my own, of course: my daughter came too. It was inoffensive family fun, a cross between The Waltons and Pippi Longstocking with dungarees, hay bales and the Hoedown Throwdown. I could probably still recite the lyrics to The Climb, a good, old-fashioned song about doing your best.
I knew her dad was Billy Ray Cyrus, the country star of Achy Breaky Heart – not my favourite song, but never mind — and that her real name is Destiny. She seemed slightly more twee than Angelina Ballerina, but better than the Rainbow Magic fairies as girl obsessions go and my daughter eventually moved on.
So I wasn’t prepared when I saw Miley Cyrus, now 20, in her latex bra and G-string, gyrating on stage at the MTV Video Music Awards, a foam finger rubbing her crotch, her backside gyrating, twerking against a 36-year-old man. She then suggested that licking a sledgehammer,grinding a demolition ball and panting with her tongue hanging out is her idea of sex. I couldn’t look, it was so degrading. She can’t even drink yet in America. When she told viewers this weekend on Saturday Night Live: “Hannah Montana was murdered,” it was a relief. Now we just have to lock up Cyrus.
I can understand why Annie Lennox says that she’s disturbed and dismayed at the way sexual imagery has pervaded pop — smiley Miley is acting like a prostitute looking for a pimp. This wasn’t a drunken mistake: she evidently rehearsed her show for hours using a chair to perfect her twerk. Steve Chmelar, the inventor of the foam finger, chastised her for degrading an “honourable icon”. Brooke Shields, another former child star and Cyrus’s film mum, was not amused. It’s going to be an interesting Christmas at the ranch with her Baptist family.
“You’ve got to move on,” my now 11-year-old daughter said. “Why do you care? Only sad old men will watch her.” But doesn’t she want to emulate her? “No. I don’t want to gyrate around the school stage naked just because a singer I once liked at the age of 7 is doing it,” she explained.
She’s right: as the girls poured out of her secondary school yesterday afternoon they may have rolled up their skirts but most were wearing brogues or netball kit. None of them would now listen to Miley Cyrus any more than they would play with My Little Pony.
Maybe we’re all protesting too much. Almost all saccharine pop princesses break free and horrify adults with their antics when they grow up. She was never pretending to be a feminist. Now that Rihanna, Lady Gaga and Ke$ha are all in thongs, it’s become a uniform; she has to go one step further.
She’s not being exploited, she’s the one attempting to manipulate the audience. As she says, she wants a reaction from the mothers and approval from the fathers. That’s how she is hoping to get the sales and she wants a distraction from her rich life. We’re the ones embarrassing ourselves, urging her to cover up and wear a decent frock. We’ve got to grow up and ignore it.
The former Hannah Montana star and Rihanna are no real threat to my daughter: she doesn’t take them seriously, says Will Hodgkinson
For a father with an 11-year-old daughter, Miley Cyrus’s transformation from Disney princess to bad girl is alarming. One moment she is singing a saccharine pop song in the desert in the children’s show Hannah Montana; the next she is licking a sledgehammer in the music video to her single Wrecking Ball. How do you explain this kind of thing?
As it turned out, I didn’t have to. “Miley Cyrus is rubbish,” said my daughter, when I asked her opinion of a pop star whose new incarnation as a pot-smoking, tongue-lolling, booty-shaking rebel, which coincides with the release of her album Bangerz, has been the marketing coup of the century. “It’s embarrassing and the songs are terrible. It’s too much. It’s tacky.”
Admittedly, my daughter has been educated (or indoctrinated) by her rock critic father from a young age, but she claims that none of the girls in her state primary in southeast London, not even the ones who like One Direction, are fans of Miley Cyrus: uncensored. While everyone from militant feminists to reactionary moral crusaders has taken a prurient stance, the girls seem to realise something the adults don’t: Miley Cyrus is uncool.
As a father to a girl not far from adolescence, I don’t feel threatened by the influence of Miley Cyrus or similarly sexualised pop stars such as Rihanna because my daughter doesn’t take them seriously. Perhaps she and her friends unconsciously realise, as Sinead O’Connor rightly pointed out, that Cyrus and Rihanna have allowed themselves to become commodities, conduits for other people’s ideas, and that is never a good look.
Instead, the girls admire Debbie Harry for her great style and for Blondie’s back catalogue of killer pop songs (introduced to a new generation via One Direction’s cover of One Way or Another), and the recent No 1 I Love It by Icona Pop is a favourite, not only because it’s such a perfect slice of euphoric electro-pop but also because the two Swedish girls who make up the band look as if they’re having so much fun in the video. We should give Cyrus’s core audience of pre-teen girls some credit: they know when they’re being sold a dud.
Bangerz is bound to be a hit, despite having a banal quality typical of an album driven by a huge (and, as it turns out, phenomenally successful) marketing campaign. The danger Miley Cyrus and similarly objectified pop stars pose to our youth is overplayed. Far more dangerous is the long-term effect objectification will have on the pop stars themselves.
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