Gird your loins, dear reader. Last night, at the VMAs, a young, blonde white pop star did something raunchy.
If you haven’t seen it, or for some reason you can’t get enough of “Can’t Stop,” you can watch Miley Cyrus’s performance, which people “Can’t Stop” talking about (see what I did there?) at MTV.com.
Let us never forget where we were the night we saw Miley Cyrus inexplicably air guitar to a drum solo.
So, what I saw on the screen was a young white female pop star appropriating elements of black culture badly in order to break out of a painstakingly Disney-crafted image she’s never going to fully escape. But apparently, the media saw something entirely different.
HuffPo saw a husband and father sexually violated. (Never mind, of course, that the husband and father in question wrote a song about getting a woman high so she would lower her inhibitions to have sex with him, and dedicated not one, but two videos to nude/scantily clad models spelling out the size of his penis with mylar balloons).
People magazine doesn’t know what twerking is.
CBS news doesn’t know what a lap dance is.
And Fox News goes for the good old fashioned women-in-competition angle. But let’s keep in mind, Fox News is also running a story about Ricky Skaggs on their entertainment front page. Really, really think about that. It’s a miracle they even know what the VMAs are.
I took to twitter in the dead of night to air my grievances. It went like this (the tweets are chronologically reordered for non-twitterholics):
Then tweep @Its_Britney made my birthday, Christmas, and Festivus by sharing this. It truly must be seen to be believed.
It’s wrong to criticize Miley for acting sexually suggestive at an event that thrives off the hyper-sexuality of pop music. If you want to focus on the fact that Miley continues to appropriate black culture, use people of color as accessories, and doesn’t actually know how to twerk, then be my guest, those are legitimate gripes. I mean, Katy fucking Perry showed up with a grill last night. This is a thing. This is happening. But don’t tell me that it was somehow wrong of Miley Cyrus to get up on stage and grind with a guy who wrote an entire song about wanting to turn a “good girl” bad with his magical cock. Because I’m not buying that double standard for a second.