File beneath "wishful thinking" if you must, but apprehend me out: What if Miley Cyrus' alienated achievement at the VMAs on Sunday night was a parody? A willful, atoning apology – of herself, of VMA conventions, of the demands on changeable performers, even of her adolescent aerialist Robin Thicke?
Take the moment that abounding admirers (including me) acquire beheld as the a lot of disturbing: the allotment area Miley mimed analingus on an African-American dancer. Miley is hardly the aboriginal white pop accompanist to apply women of blush as advancement dancers, application the centuries-old average of atramentous women's apart changeable in adjustment to add an amative frisson to the stage. She just did it added grotesquely than most. It was a wretched, racist move – but milder variants action regularly, with hardly any beef at all. Sometimes it takes an acute adaptation to accomplish a accomplished awry anatomy visible.
Read Rob Sheffield's Take on 'The Argot That Licked the World'
After watching the VMA performance, I went aback and watched the two videos that the onstage mash-up was riffing on. In the video for "We Can't Stop," Miley spanks a pal, grinds her base on some girls' crotches, dances with furries, waggles her argot and twerks in a gym as atramentous women attending on admiringly. In added words, she does aggregate she did at the VMAs. There was some outcry, but somehow, by the camp standards of our culture, that video was OK: She was just accomplishing what babe singers acquire to do. In ablaze of that, her VMA epitomize starts to attending audibly parodic.
In the video for Thicke's hit "Blurred Lines," as we all know, topless women in barely-there panties animation their boobs about the accompanist as on-screen argument announces an declared accord amid Thicke's surname and his ding-dong. It has been suggested, tantalizingly, that Miley's achievement offered a appraisal of that video: "You like naked girls? Here you go!"
Most humans acquire to acquire that the tongue-twerk burlesque was addition case of a adolescent changeable accompanist aggravating to sex-shock her way into a developed career. Miley just did it wrong. Oops! The affair is, Miley bootless so spectacularly that it's about easier to acquire she busted it up on purpose than to acquire that she absolutely anticipation she was getting hot. "How could she anticipate that argot business was sexy?" humans ask. Maybe she didn't. Maybe she – or whoever directed that segment, or both – knew abounding able-bodied that it was so exaggerated, so over-the-top, that it would absolutely abort as a achievement of sexiness, and accomplish us see what's amiss with the way our ability requires changeable singers it can actualize and uses women of blush as accessories.
So everyone's up in accoutrements about Miley traveling overboard. Well, that's apology accomplishing what apology is declared to do: draft something up into its a lot of acute anatomy so it becomes absurd to ignore. Instead of talking about Miley, maybe it's time to allocution about the issues Miley's abrading in our face.
Sara Marcus is the columnist of 'Girls to the Front: The True Story of the Riot Grrrl Revolution.'
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