I got lost on google today and came across the all-grown-up-at-eighteen Miley Cyrus. I don't personally follow celebrity gossip so, just in case you also happen to have better ways in which to spend your life, know that the former Disney Channel "Hannah Montana" star has been causing controversy by going through the usual young superstar somewhat rebellious I'm-an-18-year-old-girl-let-me-dress-like-a-stripper-on-stage phase.
And parents are freaking out, mostly because of her newly sexualized image.
And the attention, whether good or bad, is still on Miley.
I'm not writing this because I have anything against Miley Cyrus. I'm not calling her a slut. In a lot of ways, she probably is very similar to the average 18 year old girl. I don't know her personally and, when we're honest with ourselves, we have to acknowledge that she's no worse than anyone else.
I'm not just saying that; I really, really mean it.
And I'm here to say that the "Miley problem" or the "Britney Spears syndrome" does not begin when 16, 17, 18 year old mega celebrity girls start to create uber-sexual personas. It started way earlier, and it started with many of the people who now routinely criticize their current personas.
It started with the Moms, the Dads, and the "good people" who wanted their little girls to have a celebrity role model and who allowed their little girls to idolize, obsess over, and in some cases worship their little teen idols.
We absolutely shower celebrities with attention in our culture, and, the problem (I think, I don't personally know any celebrities) with doing that for any person, but especially a young, teenage person, is that they begin to believe that all of this attention is either valid, or, if not valid, then at least necessary for their happiness.
Why wouldn't they? After all, isn't that what people, including their little, ten year old fans, want to hear? That people love them because they're awesome and beautiful?
We are creating a culture of attention addicts in general, and the most extreme form of this attention addiction can be seen in the way that we create the modern celebrity.
Now, back to Miley.
It's easy to criticize her, but, I think that when we are most honest with ourselves we'll start to see that, while, yes, she is wrong to be prancing around making super-sexy videos and the like, that we completely enabled her to do so. And the people who showered her with so much attention and made her into something that she wasn't enabled her to hold such influence over their little girls.
Her new persona was the inevitable result of growing up with the wrong sort of attention in a culture where sexiness is next to godliness, and it became a virtual requirement for her, and various other Disney affiliated young women, at the age of 16, 17, 18, to begin to create an uber-sexual image in order to retain their place as cultural goddesses.
And then the moms who still have ten year olds get mad because Miley (whose face might just be on a massive poster on their daughter's wall) isn't who they need and isn't doing what they need her to do if they are going to raise respectable young women.
This isn't a celebrities-are-victims-of-society-and-have-no-guilt argument. Obviously, Miley and Britney and various others all made choices, but we're liars to deny that they had help in making them.
I have an alternate idea: Maybe we should just stop making idols out of people. It hurts them and it hurts us.
Thoughts??
~Lindsay
