I have a confession. This is just between you and me, okay?
I’m secretly obsessed with “Wrecking Ball” by Miley Cyrus.
My first experience with the song was when one of my co-workers was yelling about it in the office and our collective morbid curiosity compelled us to watch the train wreck that is the music video. I probably don’t need to tell you what’s in it at this point, but for those of you living under a rock with no Internet, cable or friends for the past month or so, we’ll leave it at Miley. Swinging. Naked.
On a wrecking ball.
I won’t lie – my knee-jerk reaction was, “What am I even looking at?” It’s not a good video, by any means. I could create a concept for a better music video by playing Mad Libs and filling in every blank with the word “poop.” The video doesn’t live up to the power and lyricism of the song. Sure, it sparks conversation, but less about the music and more about the Freudian implications of licking a sledgehammer.
Those weren’t the complaints I heard from most other people on the Internet, though. Many of the comments were calling her a slut, skank, ho and basically every other thesaurus entry for “prostitute.”
A good friend of mine is a women and gender studies major, and he often brings up a concept called slut shaming. The basis of slut shaming is that if a woman embraces her own body and sexuality, that automatically makes her not “pure” or “moral” enough and makes her eligible to be publically disgraced, harassed or even assaulted or raped.
For nearly everyone, there comes a point when the birds and the bees become a central aspect of the life. Depending on personal values and culture, it may be a deeply hidden part, but it’s still there. It’s a universal feature of the human experience. Miley isn’t a little girl anymore – she’s almost 21. Why is it that because she starred on a Disney show, she should be denied the opportunity to explore this facet of herself?
I would understand if she was being forced into the racy act by executives, but I sense that it’s more of a case of a young woman awkwardly trying to figure out her own sexuality in front of the entire nation. We don’t know what she’s been through except what we’ve seen through tabloids and celebrity blogs. Do we have a place to pass judgment on a person we haven’t even met?
I don’t like her image very much to be honest, and I think she will be a lot more of a respectable artist once she stops trying to prove to everyone that she’s not Hannah Montana anymore. I don’t think the video is classy or sensual or appealing, but I’m not going to yell about how much of a “slut” she’s become. Bullying someone solely for their sexuality is behavior that should have died and stayed dead in middle school.
In short, aesthetically, the video for “Wrecking Ball” is dreadful. Miley taking off her pants is irrelevant.
