By now, you all know about Miley Cyrus’ VMA performance fiasco. Many people, bloggers, and new sites have sounded off on the performance and the burgeoning shock-tastic starlet herself, both praising and deriding her, but mostly the latter. The performance was definitely a lot to digest.
Miley Cyrus is a formerly a clean-cut Disney pop star and is now a young experimental 20 years old, and there she was, grindin’ her bits on stage in nothing but designer beige undies, gesticulating explicitly, a lot of times on top of Robin Thicke, who was performing along side her. For this, she has gotten a mixed bag of reactions. From being unceremoniously shamed and slammed for her sexuality and for pushing the envelope “too far”, unfairly ripped apart for everything from her choice in styling to her suggestive dancing, while no one says a damn thing about sleezy Summer Rape Anthem singer, Lead Tokenizing White Boy swag Jockin’ Marvin Gaye Suing, Head Misogynist Douchebag Provocateur Robin Thicke, to real legitimate criticisms with people calling her out for her misguided, gross, blatant and racist appropriation of Black culture and identity.
Everyone is either talking about how she’s coppin’ her look from Blackness in a masculine, patriarchal sense, or protecting her from the slut shaming she’s receiving by saying she’s “free to do what she wants” or that she’s “too good” for dancing so vulgarly and suggestive. All that kind of talk leaves Black women, a group of people uniquely affected by Miley’s new look and who have been infringed upon and co-opted blatantly throughout, out cold. Suddenly, Miley twerking becomes a Feminist or a Race cause, but not a Racialized Feminist cause.
The thought that white women need to be protected from the fabricated Boogeyman idea of an aggressive Black male sexuality, while sad, is not new [1]. The face of said taboo has merely transformed. Wherein before Black lives were often at risk for even rumors of a Black man daring to break social mandate [2] and “encroach” upon white women, white women are now encouraged to dance with and engage the taboo to their own ends and for their own vapid fulfillment. Now, in a new “post-racist, post-feminist” society, all’s fair in love and twerking-and white women are “expressing” themselves how they see fit, to Diplo-certified Trap ditties and sexual rap club hits, on Vine and on walls and stages of bars and at parties everywhere.
And yet the idea that white women can do what they want without carrying the burden of being negatively racialized for it, engage women of color’s culture how they please, and sexualize the sum of our parts, even if it dehumanizes us and helps enable our exploitation, then leave it when we get bored, is an old standard in our pop culture. From Madonna’s “Voguing” phase to Gwen Stefani’s bindi to Lady Gaga’s “Burqa”, Miley Cyrus is just another white woman in a long line of white women whose colonial entitlement to our bodies and our culture is just the norm. They’re not the ones who carry the burden of being seen as “exotic”.
I can agree that seeing someone who used to be a child pop star now expressing herself sexually can be jarring regardless of that-it’s like realizing a little kid you grew up with is now an adult and able to freely drink and party and have sex-literally-and that’s a bit scary to face. However, that’s mired in the fact that women have always historically struggled more with coming into their own because of the misogynist taboo on our sexualities. The idea that there is a “right” and a “slutty” way to express oneself and her sexuality, and that we don’t know what is best for us and that we’re in need of caretakers and of being handled is an established more of Western society.
At the same time, Black and Latina women are never young, at least not for long. I remember being eight and my mother tittering about my “thick” thighs and the fact that so many young white girls in our apartment complex would wear short shorts, and how I never was to do that. Later on in high school, it was a known fact that if you were a white girl, you could literally get away with wearing daisy dukes every day of the year, but Black and Latina girls could get suspended for anything above the knee. My mother and everyone else were merely doing what society does to so many of us-sexualizes our Black and Brown bodies and tells we are the sum of our inherently exotic, sexual, and enticing parts, even as young children years and years away from any sexuality. I didn’t shake this stigma until last Summer, when I bought my first pair of shorts. While I did still grow up with a level of paternalistic infantilization of my identity with my bodily autonomy undermined, ignored, and dismissed, I was also seen as less innocent, less pure, more volatile and an item of depreciating value when compared to white women, another tired misogyist norm of white supremacy [3].
Given that, it is quite a striking and loaded statement when someone says that Miley acting “ratchet” and “Ghetto” isn’t for her, because she’s meant to be a “Good girl”, and that Blackness is inherently leading her astray [4]. So what, are Black women are all “ghetto hoes” twerking on every surface known to man? Are Ghetto women who twerk on every surface known to man are not complex human beings with vulnerabilities and deserving of protection? My white friends walk through a “rough neighborhood” and they get police asking them if they’re lost, while I’ve never been asked such question because I belong there, I can take it. It is why the media pays more attention to crimes committed against white women than Black women-white women are seen as innocent, while Black women, especially poor and “ghetto” women, must have invited that abuse in some way or form [5]. We have historically been thought to be able to tolerate more pain [6], more suffering[7], and that manifests itself in our pop culture, too. So no one thinks of us as victims of a form of aggression in this. No one cares about the dancer’s ass who Miley slapped and played like Sarah Baartman. Does anyone even know that dancer’s name?
I agree with some criticisms that Miley’s display of sexuality isn’t on the whole natural or existent in a vacuum-a lot of it is objectification, a foreign sexualization of female bodies for patriarchal capitalist consumption under the guise of “empowerment”. I’m all about being critical of that in the sense that we attack and dismantle the patriarchal culture that creates these norms and men whose gaze perpetuates and encourages it, and not women behaving under them. But I’m not here for Black female sexuality and culture being dragged in the dirt and disrespected. The fact of the matter is that Miley still has a lot of freedom in the way she is styled and the decisions she makes, a bodily autonomy that needs to be respected, and, along with that, criticized. She still has a responsibility for how she expresses herself and what that means on a larger scale in terms of race and tokenization of Black and Latina women’s bodies, and how much she can, as a thin able-bodied white female pop star, get away with without any repercussions and implications that we can’t. She is culpable in this, and it is absolutely unfair and and wrong to center her and to make this merely about sexuality and slut-shaming or just about racism without talking about both and how this is about who it hurts, not the one doing the harming.
