THE PSEUDO-SACRIFICIAL "SLUTTING" OF HANNAH MONTANA

[JackRiddler]

oh well, allow me to proclaim: it's over and done with. over and done with...

Michael Douglas, Catherine Zeta-Jones File For Divorce!!!

Damn you RI: "You may only use fonts up to size 200."

[justdrew]

Mike Douglas AND Alan Thicke in the "news" - Richard Belzer on Alex Jones, a new Doc about Morton Downey Jr. ... it's OFFICIALLY the 80s again!

[stillrobertpaulsen]

put some whine on it

A loaf of bread, a jug of whine and RI. That's life, now and zen.

[justdrew]

Zen bone's connected to the hip bone. twerk the werd of the lawd

[stillrobertpaulsen]

"To live without hang-ups." Without hang-ups, this thread would not exist. Which is probably true, this thread does not really "exist", there are no sluts, and there is no shame. Here's Tom with the weather!

[mulebone]

I am all for turning off the TV, in fact before I moved in with my now wife, I didn’t even own a TV and was proud of that. But you make certain sacrifices in life…

But I don’t think it is that simple when you have an impressionable child with friends at school who can show her this stuff on their mobile devices, or at a sleepover, etc. My daughter is 3 months old right now, who knows what kind of stuff we will be talking about in 12 years and how it will be shared.

I wasn't talking about the children. I was talking about the legion of adults who assisted Miley's viral marketing campaign by not being bright enough to recognize a marketing campaign when they saw one. It really isn't much different than the legion of Obama's supporters who mistook a Pepsi style marketing campaign for a president.

All of this played out like no one has ever heard these 2 phrases:

1. There's no such thing as bad publicity.
2. There's a sucker born every minute.

It seems to me that this tasteless crap exists because, decades ago, liberal America whined long & hard about television censorship. Now censorship has completely evaporated & there are few limits on the sleaziness that the media will sink to in order to assist celebrities as they endeavor to keep their "brand" alive.

If anyone seriously cared about the children we'd all still be watching the fucking Dick Van Dyke show now wouldn't we?

You're right, kids are impressionable, but until they reach puberty, they're impressions are formed by watching & listening to ma & pa. If ma & pa choose to stick the little woogums in front of a TV set for most of its waking life instead of talking to the kid then they probably won't like how junior/juniorette turns out.

In the immortal words of Gomez Addams: "I don't see the sense in having kids & then trying to get rid of them."

[divideandconquer]

It's just mind-boggling to see so many ostensibly intelligent people here tripping over each other's dicks to prove how un-shocked they were - because they're just too cool and have seen it all and by God they're no fucking prudes - by Miley Cyrus' performance at the VMAs, when that is NOT the point I was making at all.

Was I personally shocked by Cyrus' performance? Listen, I worked in the porn industry for fuck's sake. For ten years. I was NOT personally shocked by Cyrus' performance.

I WAS nonplussed by this performance in the context of this being Hannah Montana up on that stage doing those things. NOT Madonna, with her previous track record and zero history as a child and tween superstar. I WAS shocked because I think she has SOME fucking responsibility for alll the 5 to 14 year olds who still put her on a pedestal and look up to her as a role model and hero.

Is that really so fucking archaic of me?!

YOPJ

I totally agree with everything you posted in this thread! And the reason people like Miley make speeches at Occupy events is to keep all of these cool intelligent people tripping over themselves trying to prove how cool and intelligent they really are...to keep them blinded to the escalating debasement of humanity while they promote our moral decay as “progressive” or as “freedom," vilifying any voices that speak out against it. .

As 82_28 said:

"...but there is a bigger picture here. It is the debauched sexualization of humans in a way "they" want us to view it because they want us all to believe we are trash but with lights and lasers. Yeah, billions will be made, children will be hurt and we'll all be better off by discarding the importance of how evil this all is.

Because we will find this acceptable.

[parel]

When Your (Brown) Body is a (White) Wonderland

This may meander.

Miley Cyrus made news this week with a carnival-like stage performance at the MTV Video Music Awards that included life-size teddy bears, flesh-colored underwear, and plenty of quivering brown buttocks. Almost immediately after the performance many black women challenged Cyrus’ appropriation of black dance (“twerking”). Many white feminists defended Cyrus’ right to be a sexual woman without being slut-shamed. Yet many others wondered why Cyrus’ sad attempt at twerking was news when the U.S. is planning military action in Syria.

I immediately thought of a summer I spent at UNC Chapel Hill. My partner at the time fancied himself a revolutionary born too late for all the good protests. At a Franklin Street pub one night we were the only black couple at a happy hour. It is one of those college places where concoctions of the bar’s finest bottom shelf liquor is served in huge fishbowls for pennies on the alcohol proof dollar. I saw a few white couples imbibing and beginning some version of bodily grooving to the DJ. I told my partner that one of them would be offering me free liquor and trying to feel my breasts within the hour.

He balked, thinking I was joking.

I then explained to him my long, storied, documented history of being accosted by drunk white men and women in atmospheres just like these. Women asking to feel my breasts in the ladies’ restroom. Men asking me for a threesome as his drunk girlfriend or wife looks on smiling. Frat boys offering me cash to “motorboat” my cleavage. Country boys in cowboy hats attempting to impress his buddies by grinding on my ass to an Outkast music set. It’s almost legend among my friends who have witnessed it countless times.

My partner could not believe it until not 30 minutes later, with half the fishbowl gone, the white woman bumps and grinds up to our table and laughing tells me that her boyfriend would love to see us dance. “C’mon girl! I know you can daaaaannnce,” she said. To sweeten the pot they bought our table our own fishbowl.

My partner was stunned. That summer we visited lots of similar happy hours. By the third time this scene played out my partner had taken to standing guard while I danced, stonily staring down every white couple that looked my way. We were kicked out of a few bars when he challenged some white guy to a fight about it. I hate such scenes but I gave my partner a break. He was a man and not used to this. He didn’t have the vocabulary borne of black breasts that sprouted before bodies have cleared statutory rape guidelines. He didn’t know the words so he did all he knew how to do to tell me he was sorry this was my experience in life: he tried to kick every white guy’s ass in Chapel Hill.

I am not beautiful. I phenotypically exist in a space where I am not usually offensive looking enough to have it be an issue for my mobility but neither am I a threat to anyone’s beauty market. There is no reason for me to assume this pattern of behavior is a compliment. What I saw in Cyrus’ performance was not just a clueless, culturally insensitive attempt to assert her sexuality or a simple act of cultural appropriation at the expense of black bodies. Instead I saw what kinds of black bodies were on that stage with Cyrus.

Cyrus’ dancers look more like me than they do Rihanna or Beyonce or Halle Berry. The difference is instructive.

Fat non-normative black female bodies are kith and kin with historical caricatures of black women as work sites, production units, subjects of victimless sexual crimes, and embodied deviance. As I said in my analysis of hip-hop and country music cross-overs, playing the desirability of black female bodies as a “wink-wink” joke is a way of lifting up our deviant sexuality without lifting up black women as equally desirable to white women. Cyrus did not just have black women gyrating behind her. She had particularly rotund black women. She gleefully slaps the ass of one dancer like she intends to eat it on a cracker. She is playing a type of black female body as a joke to challenge her audience’s perceptions of herself while leaving their perceptions of black women’s bodies firmly intact. It’s a dance between performing sexual freedom and maintaining a hierarchy of female bodies from which white women benefit materially.

The performance works as spectacle precisely because the background dancers embody a specific kind of black female body. That spectacle unfolds against a long history of how capitalism is a gendered enterprise and subsequently how gendered beauty norms are resisted and embraced to protect the dominant beauty ideal of a certain type of white female beauty.

Being desirable is a commodity. Capital and capitalism are gendered systems. The very form that money takes — paper and not goods — is rooted in a historical enterprise of controlling the development of an economic sphere where women might amass wealth. As wealth is a means of power in a capitalistic society, controlling this means of acceptable monies was a way of controlling the accumulation, distribution and ownership of capital.

For black women, that form of money was embodied by the very nature of how we came to be in America.

Our bodies were literally production units. As living cost centers we not only produced labor as in work but we produced actual labor through labor, i.e. we birthed more cost centers. The legendary “one drop” rule of determining blackness was legally codified not just out of ideological purity of white supremacy but to control the inheritance of property. The sexual predilections of our nation’s great men threatened to transfer the wealth of white male rapists to the children born of their crimes through black female bodies.

Today much has changed and much has not. The strict legal restriction of inheritable black deviance has been disrupted but there still exists a racialized, material value of sexual relationships. The family unit is considered the basic unit for society not just because some god decreed it but because the inheritance of accumulated privilege maintains our social order.

Thus, who we marry at the individual level may be about love but at the group level it is also about wealth and power and privilege.

Black feminists have critiqued the material advantage that accrues to white women as a function of their elevated status as the normative cultural beauty ideal. As far as privileges go it is certainly a complicated one but that does not negate its utility. Being suitably marriageable privileges white women’s relation to white male wealth and power.

The cultural dominance of a few acceptable brown female beauty ideals is a threat to that privilege. Cyrus acts out her faux bisexual performance for the white male gaze against a backdrop of dark, fat black female bodies and not slightly more normative cafe au lait slim bodies because the juxtaposition of her sexuality with theirs is meant to highlight Cyrus, not challenge her supremacy. Consider it the racialized pop culture version of a bride insisting that all of her bridesmaids be hideously clothed as to enhance the bride’s supremacy on her wedding day.

Only, rather than an ugly dress, fat black female bodies are wedded to their flesh. We cannot take it off when we desire the spotlight for ourselves or when we’d rather not be in the spotlight at all.

This political economy of specific types of black female bodies as a white amusement park was ignored by many, mostly because to critique it we have to critique ourselves.

When I moved to Atlanta I was made aware of a peculiar pastime of the city’s white frat boy elite. They apparently enjoy getting drunk and visiting one of the city’s many legendary black strip clubs rather than the white strip clubs. The fun part of this ritual seems to be rooted in the peculiarity of black female bodies, their athleticism and how hard they are willing to work for less money as opposed to the more normative white strippers who expect higher wages in exchange for just looking pretty naked. There are similar racialized patterns in porn actresses’ pay and, I suspect, all manner of sex workers. The black strip clubs are a bargain good time because the value of black sexuality is discounted relative to the acceptability of black women as legitimate partners.

There is no risk of falling in love with a stripper when you’re a white guy at the black strip club. Just as country music artists strip “badonkadonk” from black beauty ideals to make it palatable for to their white audiences, these frat boys visit the black body wonderland as an oddity to protect the supremacy of white women as the embodiment of more and better capital.

My mentor likes to joke that interracial marriage is only a solution to racial wealth gaps if all white men suddenly were to marry up with poor black women. It’s funny because it is so ridiculous to even imagine. Sex is one thing. Marrying confers status and wealth. Slaveholders knew that. Our law reflects their knowing this. The de rigueur delineation of this difference may have faded but cultural ideology remains.

Cyrus’ choice of the kind of black bodies to foreground her white female sexuality was remarkable for how consistent it is with these historical patterns. We could consider that a coincidence just as we could consider my innumerable experiences with white men and women after a few drinks an anomaly. But, I believe there is something common to the bodies that are made invisible that Cyrus might be the most visible to our cultural denigration of bodies like mine as inferior, non-threatening spaces where white women can play at being “dirty” without risking her sexual appeal.

I am no real threat to white women’s desirability. Thus, white women have no problem cheering their husbands and boyfriends as they touch me on the dance floor. I am never seriously a contender for acceptable partner and mate for the white men who ask if their buddy can put his face in my cleavage. I am the thrill of a roller coaster with safety bars: all adrenaline but never any risk of falling to the ground.

I am not surprised that so many overlooked this particular performance of brown bodies as white amusement parks in Cyrus’ performance. The whole point is that those round black female bodies are hyper-visible en masse but individually invisible to white men who were, I suspect, Cyrus’ intended audience.

No, it’s not Syria but it is still worth commenting upon when in the pop culture circus the white woman is the ringleader and the women who look like you are the dancing elephants.

[coffin_dodger]

So now, coffin_dodger, we get to learn the fascinating fact that, like "Useless Eater" (or whatever the duffer's called), you are also highly intimidated by the idea of an adult woman possibly looking to you as though she is mimicking the horrific act of masturbation (sick!!!) while also (mimicking) "fondling the backside of a giant negro woman." In case you missed it that means, as "Useless Eater" puts it, a Negress!

So much worse than Annette Funicello and her exploding penis!!!

How about you don't watch this crap in the first place?

How about you let me get on with wasting my time looking into subjects that interest me?

Also, why are you branding me amongst our peers as "highly intimidated by the idea of an adult woman possibly looking to you as though she is mimicking the horrific act of masturbation (sick!!!)" - you cannot possibly have an idea of my views re masturbation from my comments on this thread or anywhere else on this site.

Projecting your anger and disillusionment fostered by your society's failings onto fellow posters that don't 100% fit your worldview may make you feel less impotent and help you cope, but it ain't clever in my book.

[Sounder]

How about you let me get on with wasting my time looking into subjects that interest me?

Also, why are you branding me amongst our peers as "highly intimidated by the idea of an adult woman possibly looking to you as though she is mimicking the horrific act of masturbation (sick!!!)" - you cannot possibly have an idea of my views re masturbation from my comments on this thread or anywhere else on this site.

Projecting your anger and disillusionment fostered by your society's failings onto fellow posters that don't 100% fit your worldview may make you feel less impotent and help you cope, but it ain't clever in my book.

I agree dodger, I don't see where Jack thinks he is getting off the bus with his outraged and holier than thou rhetoric.

Although the passion is interesting to observe and somewhat telling in regard to triggers and unconscious drivers, it can become somewhat empty of content at times.

And thanks parel and mulebone.

[mulebone]

From Bill Donohue, president of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights:

"Last Sunday, at the MTV Video Music Awards, Miley Cyrus simulated masturbation with a giant foam finger, grabbed her crotch, rubbed herself against a man old enough to be her father, pretended the man was performing anal sex on her, and walked around in a nude latex bikini. Her mother loved it. So did her manager. Millions of young girls and guys loved it as well," Donohue wrote.

Comparing the reaction to Cyrus' show to the uproar over the Miss World pageant, Donohue concluded, "Who are the real feminists? Miley's fans? Or the Muslims? If debasing women is the yardstick, the Muslims win."

&

The man credited with inventing the foam finger -- like the one Miley Cyrus brought to the forefront of national attention at Sunday's MTV Video Music Awards -- is not her No. 1 fan.

Iowa native Steve Chmelar, who created the foam finger prototype in 1971 (which Geral Fauss would later go on to mass produce in 1978), said he didn't like his invention's newfound infamy.

"She took an honorable icon that is seen in sporting venues everywhere and degraded it," Chmelar told FoxSports. "Fortunately, the foam finger has been around long enough that it will survive this incident."

"For people who like that kind of entertainment, I'm sure that it met their needs," Chmelar said.

Wow! Double Wow!

Miley is doing happy girl cartwheels right about now. She spent a week on the tip of everyone's tongue, her products have spiked upwards in sales, Catholics hate her, black people are analyzing her dance moves for racial stereotypes & they even dusted off the foam finger guy & pulled him out of his corner of cultural obscurity to comment. Hell, I bet MTV executives are having champagne brunches because their huge chunk of 24/7 cultural irrelevance is relevant again.

Utterly amazing.

I actually watched the video for the 1st time last night. I've seen far more offensive things broadcast on a Sunday afternoon USA network Law & Order: SVU marathon. In fact, I'd be more worried if I found my daughters watching that than I would if I found them watching Miley's dance. Maybe I was wrong to assume that women touched themselves. Maybe I was wrong to assume that cracker white girls have a deep seated desire to be black.

Anyway you slice it though, much credit must be given to Miley for being astute enough to realize that, as a nation, we won't hesitate for a minute to minutely deconstruct the utterly pointless.

BTW, cheers Sounder. It's been a while pal.

[JackRiddler]

Wow! Double Wow!

Miley is doing happy girl cartwheels right about now. She spent a week on the tip of everyone's tongue, her products have spiked upwards in sales, Catholics hate her, black people are analyzing her dance moves for racial stereotypes & they even dusted off the foam finger guy & pulled him out of his corner of cultural obscurity to comment. Hell, I bet MTV executives are having champagne brunches because their huge chunk of 24/7 cultural irrelevance is relevant again.

Utterly amazing.

I actually watched the video for the 1st time last night. I've seen far more offensive things broadcast on a Sunday afternoon USA network Law & Order: SVU marathon. In fact, I'd be more worried if I found my daughters watching that than I would if I found them watching Miley's dance. Maybe I was wrong to assume that women touched themselves. Maybe I was wrong to assume that cracker white girls have a deep seated desire to be black.

Anyway you slice it though, much credit must be given to Miley for being astute enough to realize that, as a nation, we won't hesitate for a minute to minutely deconstruct the utterly pointless.

Made my day, thanks.

As for certain comments that have now discovered I'm the one projectin' - hilarious!

I agree dodger, I don't see where Jack thinks he is getting off the bus with his outraged and holier than thou rhetoric.

I like that. This is after an OP about how America's children are being turned into mind-controlled sexbots of the Illuminati because "Hannah Montana" staged a pop song number in which she pretended to play with her private parts and touched the buttocks of a "giant Negress."

In a way, it's true! I feel threatened by how some people react to mere vulgar but absolutely natural (if commercialized) sexuality as though it were an unspeakably greater debasement of the human being than the everyday modern life of vulgar consumerism* with its planet-burning and routine, for the most part conveniently distant violence. It reminds me of the sports crowds holding mini-Nuremberg rallies to celebrate games of combat cheering when their murderous warplane-abominations shatter their eardrums from overhead -- then organize a social media lynchmob because someone accidentally said fuck (wait: "Dropped the F-bomb!!!") on the same occasion in front of their precious children.

Ah, this reminds me, I'm only unconsciously ripping off Milius and Brando:

"We train young men to drop fire on people, but their commanders won't allow them to write "fuck" on the side of their plane!"

The horror, the horror.

I totally agree with everything you posted in this thread! And the reason people like Miley make speeches at Occupy events is to keep all of these cool intelligent people tripping over themselves trying to prove how cool and intelligent they really are...to keep them blinded to the escalating debasement of humanity while they promote our moral decay as “progressive” or as “freedom," vilifying any voices that speak out against it.

First of all, Miley made a speech at an Occupy event? When?!

Second... oh never mind, that's already a keeper in the Annals of Anal Conniptions. No further comment needed.

---

* Exhibit A in this case being of course "Hannah Montana" itself, which still none of those yang-yanging here have acknowledged represents an actual long-term attempt at brainwashing of children and is therefore incomparably worse than Miley Cyrus's trivial strip act, which in itself is NOTHING. Instead, Cyrus's apparent crime is that she has now transformed the "wholesome" image of Hannah Montana into a sex fiend!

.

[DrVolin]

It is precisely because it is pointless that we minutely deconstruct it. Otherwise, we might actually spend energy on something that would generate change. This is an ancient human adaptation to living in complex power structures. On the upside, I would never have found out about the history of the foam finger.

[JackRiddler]

It is precisely because it is pointless that we minutely deconstruct it. Otherwise, we might actually spend energy on something that would generate change. This is an ancient human adaptation to living in complex power structures. On the upside, I would never have found out about the history of the foam finger.

There's truth in that. It applies more to fannish interests than to this case, however. In this case none of us here would be minutely deconstructing it if the corporate media and the mainstream population (who presumably have little conscious interest in change of the sort you mean) had not adopted this as their Moral Hysteria of the Week.

[mulebone]

I like that. This is after an OP about how America's children are being turned into mind-controlled sexbots of the Illuminati because "Hannah Montana" staged a pop song number in which she pretended to play with her private parts and touched the buttocks of a "giant Negress."

In a way, it's true! I feel threatened by how some people react to mere vulgar but absolutely natural (if commercialized) sexuality as though it were an unspeakably greater debasement of the human being than the everyday modern life of vulgar consumerism* with its planet-burning and routine, for the most part conveniently distant violence. It reminds me of the sports crowds holding mini-Nuremberg rallies to celebrate games of combat cheering when their murderous warplane-abominations shatter their eardrums from overhead -- then organize a social media lynchmob because someone accidentally said fuck (wait: "Dropped the F-bomb!!!") on the same occasion in front of their precious children.

Mr. Riddler, let me tell ya a tale.

Once upon a time, while dad was engaged in cleaning the bathroom(it's best not to ask why, all I'll say is that my youngest son was bathroom challenged & often found the bowl size to be totally inadequate, maybe he spun in a circle while he whizzed or maybe he hopped up & down like a bunny, I don't know) the kids were in the living room watching Mr. Rogers (or so I thought). As time passed & the mess diminished, I heard my youngest daughter ask, in her best Lindy Lou Who voice, "What's semen?"

While muttering "What the fuck?" to myself I walked into the living room to see if Fred Rogers had finally snapped & was asking the children to "Say semen, boys & girls," or maybe wildly stroking it while Mr. McFeely looked on in shock. Alas, instead they were watching Animal Planet. Two rams were humping away as the narrator droned on about the sexual habits of rams.

It was an awesome moment.

One thing I have learned though, is that a poker face is an essential tool for the aspiring parent. Because children will see many things as they grow toward apartmenthood but unless ma & pa shriek loudly & race to shield their little eyes, they won't really pay much attention. &, in a few minutes, the offending occurrence will fade from memory. So, rather than pique their interest by foaming at the mouth & falling over backwards I chose to leave the room & find a nice quiet spot where I could die of shame.

I guess I could understand people's outrage if Miley really was Hannah Montana & this was a case of Hannah Montana & her slutty slide into sex slavery, but Hannah is just a fictional character & Miley isn't sliding into sexual slavery. If their daughters find all of these shenanigans particularly appalling because their nightstand is festooned with Hannah Montana lip balm & perfume, maybe it's time to have the "TV vs. Reality" chat. Maybe add in the "Fantasy vs. Reality" chat while they're at it. If nothing else, it will save the tot from crashing through the garage roof & breaking a couple of ribs when she decides to leap out of a tree and "fly like Tinkerbell."