Really, was Miley Cyrus going to do anything else on Sunday night? After a summer of positive-twerking reinforcement (even from Jay Z), she had to twerk. And twerk she did.
But the VMAs are about sensationalism. If you don’t have everyone talking about you the next day, you’ve lost. Cyrus had to do more than just twerk. So at the Video Music Awards in New York City last night, she emerged out of a large teddy bear wearing a furry bodysuit, gyrating around the stage to her hit song, We Cant Stop, before stripping down to nude bra and panties, gesticulating with a foam finger and performing a Blurred Lines duet with Robin Thicke. And yesterday, all the talk and slut-shaming fell on the 20-year-old Cyrus. Even from the married 36-year-old Thicke’s mother.
As a child star, Cyrus had an American Dream personality imposed on her by her parents, and now she’s imposing a polar opposite persona on us. If we find last night’s performance shockingly aggro, maybe that’s the result of a childhood in the Disney machine.
The overtly sexual VMA performance evoked reactions for embarrassment, shock and overall disdain. Generally we don’t have a problem with overt sexuality (see: everything, everywhere). But mostly, our comfort with it is confined by its existence through the male lens. For example, the Blurred Lines video: Perfect Victoria’s Secret model-like women with Victoria’s Secret breasts prancing around fully clothed Thicke, Pharrell and T.I. submissive, completely nude, doing what men want them to be doing.
“Just let me liberate you,” Thicke sings in that song of the summer. And this is why Cyrus raunching about to Blurred Lines was so perfect. It calls the song on its bluff. If those nude, silent women in the video are examples of domestication then here is one version, at least, of liberation. In this onstage version, Cyrus was Thicke’s equal, she spat lines back at him, licked him and dry-humped him. In this version, that man was definitely not her maker.
It was a glimpse of what Blurred Lines – ultimately, another tiresomely sexist song and video – could have been. And it was Thicke – fully clothed, almost looking embarrassed – who seemed pathetic, not Cyrus. Grow a pair, Robin Thicke. Participate. Put your money where your mouth is instead of hiding behind your sunglasses and white-male privilege.
The knee-jerk reaction is that she’s too young and too stupid (she is a girl, after all) to have thought of all the nuance a song like Blurred Lines could mean for her and that she’s an attention-seeker, a poser. That this twerking is just a phase. That she’s turned into a different person. Or maybe she’s the same Cyrus who was shot provocatively for a Vanity Fair cover when she was 15, then carefully denounced it. She was savvy then and is now, a woman in control of her own strings, now with the confidence being a 20-year-old superstar brings, with a summer’s worth of encouragement from other music superstars (Snoop Lion, Big Sean, French Montana, Jay Z).
What Miley did onstage has been done in a million MTV videos before. Maybe not by a former Disney star, but that’s not her problem. She couldn’t care less if she made you uncomfortable, or if her ass isn’t big enough to twerk. Laugh all you want, she’ll probably have the last one.
