Two of our authors talk about our reactions to THAT performance:
By Madeleine Whybrow
As a feminist, I am
quite happy to defend Miley Cyrus’ right to strut her stuff on stage without
being called a slut or a whore. It’s her body; she can do what she damn well
wants with it! But, when I watch that
video of her, something still doesn’t quite feel right.
It’s totally okay for
one female singer to give a sexualised performance, it’s even okay if a whole
bunch of female singers give a sexualised performances. What’s not okay is when nearly all of today’s female singers have acts
involving some sort of sexualisation.
It is now taken as
given that if a woman wants to sell her music, she’s going to have to strip
off. If you’re a male artist, however, the quality of your music will cut it -
you can keep your kit on.
The message is clear:
if you’re a woman your worth as a sex object is as just important as any skill
or talent you may have. If Miley wants to be dressing and acting as she did,
that’s fine but if she, or any other woman, feels she has to behave like that
then it really, really isn’t.
By Nicki Fudge
Whilst watching Miley Cyrus’ performance I, like many of you
I’m sure, found myself gasping and laughing in horror repeatedly. When it got
to the part where Mr Thicke shuffled about awkwardly in his liquorice allsorts
suit, with Miley twerking and crotch-grabbing around him, I found my brain
screaming, “THIS is what the music industry has come to? THIS?”.
But, I totally agree with Madeline when she says that Miley
is completely entitled to dance and behave as she wants. It is the media
reaction to her actions that I find hilariously ironic, but not entirely surprising.
The media can only handle one kind of ‘sexy’. They can
only handle the writhing, ‘cute’ sexiness of pop stars like the Pussycat Dolls,
Cheryl Cole and Beyonce. They cannot deal with crazy masculine thrusting from Miss
Cyrus, just like they are completely unable to cope with Lady Gaga as a pop entity.
As Caitlin Moran comments, despite the fact that Gaga is undoubtably sexual in
her performances, she refuses to conform to the simplistic sexual ‘image’ of
the majority of female pop acts. According to Moran, Gaga had to beg for her
record label not to use an ‘ordinary’ borderline soft porn image of her on the
cover of her first album, because she didn’t want to conform to the rest of the
pop world.
And that’s the irony: that the media have absolutely no
problem with the overt sexualisation of the music industry, nay they encourage
it yet, when Miley chooses thrust in an aggressively sexual manner surrounded
by adults dressed as teddies, they cause a giant fuss. She has been labelled ‘deeply
disturbed’, ‘troubled’ and ‘desperate’ by many media outlets, and there have
been increasing questions over her sanity. The media could be right about Miss
Cyrus, and I’m sure we’ll all have front row seats if they are! But I remember Lady Gaga being labelled all of
those things by the media when she shot to fame, and she still hasn’t had the
huge public meltdown the media have clearly repeatedly wished upon her.
We feel uncomfortable watching aggressively sexual
performances like Miley’s because we are not used to them. And yet we are so
de-sensitised now to overtly-sexualised pop stars like Katy Perry, probably
because we grew up with Britney and Christina dancing provocatively around our
childhood music scene, that we no longer find those disturbing. Overt
female sexuality has become a fundamental (and sadly ‘normal’) part of the pop industry.
Like I said, the media reaction to her performance is
ironic, but not surprising. In their eyes, only one type of female sexuality should
exist, and that involves female musicians writhing around in oil and a bikini, with
a long mane of hair, aimed squarely at selling to a male audience.
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