by Sady Doyle
Okay. Second question: Have you seen her naked?
In my many years of covering gender issues, I have come to perhaps one firm and unshakable conclusion: We, as a society, will never run out of opinions on twenty-something girls’ genitalia.
Throughout the 2000s, Britney Spears’s vagina was covered by the media as if it were suspected of holding WMDs. It was blogged about, talked about, photographed, and discussed and debated on talk radio and TV: You really couldn’t get away from the damn thing. Especially not if you were Britney Spears. The vagina’s doings (and, peripherally, those of the woman who owned the vagina, whose sole and exclusive rights to disclose information about it had long since been stolen) were so widely assumed to be a matter of public interest that, when paparazzi caught Spears giving oral sex to her soon-to-be-husband Kevin Federline on a hotel balcony, outlets like Gawker and Salon linked to the resulting photos.
In Gawker’s case, those photos were captioned with pure contempt: “Can we please have one fucking day away from Britney, Kevin, and paparazzi photographs that absolutely cannot be allowed to pass without comment?” The writer, charmingly, went on to speculate that the blow job had been arranged by Federline “taping some Cheetos to [his] penis.”
So, to reiterate: Someone followed a woman to her hotel, then waited in a concealed location, watching her, until she began to have sex, then photographed the sex, then promptly sold the photos to a public outlet, causing the press to then rebroadcast those photos, while explaining they had no choice in the matter, and making sure to add a link to the appropriate porn site so that the full invasion of privacy could be accessed by their readers. And somehow, in this whole chain of stalking, bad decision-making, and borderline sexual assault, the person who wound up getting the harshest condemnation was the woman who’d done nothing but have sex with her boyfriend.
But then, our presumed right of access to young women’s bodies extends far beyond Britney. (We’ll get back to her later.) In fact, she may not even be the most famous example.
In 2004, Britney Spears was one of the two most-Googled people on Earth. The other was Paris Hilton. Hilton’s sex tape, one of the first links posted by Gawker’s porn satellite Fleshbot, made her infamous; it also received a 2005 AVN award for “Best Selling Title of the Year.” This happened despite the fact that Hilton described the sex as, essentially, rape—she alleged that Rick Salomon “forced her to have sex when she was nearly unconscious”; Salomon sued her for defamation—and did not approve of the tape’s release. Her supposed promiscuity became so ingrained in her public image that South Park dedicated an episode to her: The fictional Hilton opened a store called Stupid Spoiled Whore, attempted to convert the little girls of South Park to her own “whore” lifestyle, and was portrayed, in the immortal words of Wikipedia, as “continuously cough[ing] up semen.”
“It annoys me that so many people assume something about me because I had a boyfriend who betrayed me,” she said, in a GQ interview with Piers Morgan. She also described the tape’s release as a trauma: “I just went into shock and just went inside and couldn’t come out for days. I was so depressed I didn’t even want to come back to America.”
“Are you good in bed?” was Morgan’s follow-up question. “I guess it’s a rhetorical question because I watched the video this morning for research purposes and the answer is clearly affirmative.”
It goes on. Spears, Hilton, Lindsay Lohan, and a seventeen-year-old Miley Cyrus were all caught up in the wave of enthusiasm for “upskirts,” a strange practice in which grown men with cameras crouched at waist level near celebrity car doors in the hope of documenting whether the women therein wore underpants. Some, it turned out, did not. Again, the results were covered by the national media and/or posted on Gawker (sample comment: “What is with these twenty-something girls and their flappy labia?”) and again, despite the non-consensual nature of the exposure, the women were the ones to be shamed for it.
Which is not to say that consent has no bearing on how we treat young women’s nudity. It has a very real impact. Even if you live in an environment where people are constantly trying to expose your body against your will, and even if those people consistently call you disgusting for being successfully assaulted, you can still make your reputation far worse by getting naked voluntarily.
The accusation most frequently aimed at Hilton to justify our treatment of her—and, later, at her former assistant, Kim Kardashian—was that she had intentionally leaked the sex tape. Similarly, women caught in the “upskirt” phenomena were typically accused of seeking attention. To this day, Rihanna can trigger op-eds on the downfall of Western civilization just by showing a nipple. But let’s go from the macro-level to the micro, for a moment, and consider the strange fate of Miley Cyrus—tasked, through the holy offices of the Disney Channel, with representing the eternal purity of Heterosexual American Girlhood. There were quite a few major problems inherent in saddling Cyrus with this job, which we’ll get to later, but one of the first is that Cyrus did not show any tremendous fondness for “purity”—at least, not to the extent that “purity” can be measured by wearing clothes when in public.
Cyrus is no stranger to sexual-assault-by-press-corps, most of which took place when she was underage. (In addition to the 2012 “upskirt,” in 2008, hacker Josh Holly—going, as fate would have it, by the name “TrainReq”—stole and posted Cyrus’s wet-T-shirt selfies. The photos were taken when she was fourteen.) Yet this is a mere footnote in the vast history of Miley Cyrus Sexual Outrage, nearly all of which was generated by intentionally showing up in less clothing than people expected.
There were rumblings early on, when she posed for a back-exposing Annie Liebowitz shoot in Vanity Fair at the age of fifteen. (“For Miley Cyrus to be a ‘good girl’ is now a business decision for her,” her boss, the president of entertainment for the Disney Channel, pronounced ominously. “Parents have invested in her a godliness. If she violates that trust, she won’t get it back.”) In those days, people tended to claim that their revulsion stemmed from the fact that Cyrus was too young to be sexualized, and, indeed, it’s demonstrably not a good idea for adults to encourage minors to take their tops off in photos. Yet that very concern caused people to see everything Cyrus did as sexual: When she held onto a pole on a moving platform during one dance, there were op-eds about her “pole dancing.” If she danced in a leotard, wore a short skirt, had a visible bra underneath her shirt, or touched her torso during a concert, she made headlines.
“It’s wrong for Miley to have agreed to play the child and teen character, Hannah Montana, for another year if she intended to behave like a stripper on stage,” blogger Bonnie Fuller wrote at Hollywood Life in 2010 (headline: MILEY CYRUS IS AN OVERSEXED TRAINWRECK WAITING TO HAPPEN!), adding: “She’s behaving like the devil.”
And so, the very fact that adults wanted to “protect” teens from being seen in a sexual light somehow turned an actual teenager into a stripper, the devil, and the walking embodiment of predatory lust. In 2013, when a twenty-year-old Cyrus twerked against Robin Thicke at that VMAs performance—a mildly risqué move that wouldn’t have been very far out of place in Dirty Dancing—America reacted as if they’d watched Cyrus personally steal Thicke’s marriage certificate and set it on fire. When Thicke and his wife did in fact separate, TMZ posted a blaring all-caps headline explicitly blaming Cyrus for the divorce: SPLIT TRIGGERED BY ANTICS WITH MILEY.
There was no affair, no offstage news to report; the “antics” were just the dance, and the fact that Thicke hadn’t recoiled and pushed Cyrus bodily away from him into the crowd. Again, Cyrus was solely to blame, for acts which had somehow escalated from scandalous to criminal: In The New York Times, Jon Caramanica referred to her “molesting of Robin Thicke,” and in Thicke’s Vanity Fair interview after the event, interviewer Lisa Robinson opened with “Miley Cyrus practically molested you last night at the VMAs.”
It wasn’t the worst thing she was accused of. Not one, but two article
s published in 2013 blamed Cyrus for actual, non-metaphorical rape cases. Richard Cohen of The Washington Post wrote that “[Cyrus] is a cheap act, no doubt about it, but for me her performance was an opportunity to discuss one of the summer’s most arresting pieces of journalism—a long New Yorker account of what became known as the Steubenville Rape.” While this is a remarkably flexible definition of the word “opportunity,” Cohen’s conclusion bears noting: Cyrus’s existence, apparently, “encourages a teenage culture that has set the women’s movement back on its heels.” Soon enough, Joanne Bamberger at USA Today chimed in: “I was ready to dismiss the ‘let’s condemn Miley’ parade, until I read a story about a Montana man convicted of the statutory rape of a fourteen-year-old student in 2008 … it doesn’t seem to be a huge leap to suggest that with young girls increasingly sexualized in the media, teen victims of sexual assault may be judged more harshly because too many see a child as being ‘in control.’ ”
Cyrus’s response to all this has been, if anything, to lean into the trainwreck. For every theft of naked photos, she gets aggressively more naked; for every complaint about her bad behavior, she gets more ill-behaved. It’s hard to remember, in all the noise, but the Miley Cyrus of her “adult” records—the star who flashes her bare breasts at awards shows, poses for full-frontal nude photos in magazines, and talks continuously not only about the fact that she uses recreational drugs, but about which drugs she’s using—is not so much an attempt to “provoke” our outrage, but the only logical response to the outrage that has always surrounded her. We told this child, throughout her teenage years, that her naked body, her drug use, and her outrageous behavior were the only interesting things about her, and that we would steal that information if it wasn’t promptly forthcoming. Now, Miley is both literally and figuratively stripped down, naked and yelling about getting high on live TV (“Yeah, I smoke pot” is an actual Miley Cyrus lyric), with nothing left to hide and nothing more for us to steal. And our response has been to tell her to cover up, and to reminisce about what a sweet little girl she used to be before it all went wrong.
A victim turns into a perpetrator; a naked body that people were willing to commit theft to see becomes unsightly and shameful the moment it’s exposed consensually. Sexually pure or sexual predator, uncorrupted virgin or corrupting whore, godly or Godzilla: These are the options. Thus are trainwrecks made.
All of this matters, for reasons beyond the enduring grossness of gossip blogs. Public sexuality is the first, and maybe the primary, mark of a trainwreck, whether her sexuality is forcibly exposed or consensually shared. This is not an accident: It’s a very public working-out of a long-held myth about heterosexual sex.
Men (well, straight men—but in this version of the myth, all men are straight—sorry, fellas) supposedly react to women’s sexuality the way my dog reacts whenever I eat a slice of pepperoni pizza: total, unhinged, uncontrollable urge to seize and devour. They want it, they need it, and they can’t be held accountable for what they do to get it, whether that’s staring and begging, or stealing it when your back is turned. (And for “stealing,” read: leaking nudes, groping, or rape.) Yet most people believe that society would not benefit if the world were to devolve into one long, public orgy. Men want sex—all the time, and with everyone—but they can’t be allowed to have all the sex they want. So, with half the world barely able to restrain themselves from whipping it out on the subway platform, someone has to keep us all from wrecking our marriages and dry-humping each other in the streets. And this group (surprise) is women.
As continually as men pursue sex, women are asked to refuse it. We’re the responsible parties, who hold the pizza above the dog’s head, where he can’t get to it. If we are good women (or “good girls,” to quote the infantilizing terminology of many occasionally Robin-Thicke-centric pop songs) we utilize sexuality only strategically, and only in the service of tricking men into getting married and fathering children. We are also paranoid and crafty enough to prevent anyone from “stealing” it when we refuse. We’re responsible, not for taking care of our own bodies and lives, but for keeping society intact.
Once you’ve made women’s sexuality a load-bearing structure for the social order, the obligations only proliferate. Soon, she finds herself not only responsible for tricking men into fatherhood, but for keeping the right team in charge as regards heterosexuality (consider how Lindsay Lohan’s downward reputation spiral was hastened by the fact that she dated a woman), race (how many jokes have you heard about Kim Kardashian dating black men?), class (a big complaint about Britney and K-Fed was not just that they had sex, but that they looked like “white trash” together), and anything else you can think up.
The responsibility also hits women differently depending on where they stand in the social hierarchy. Surveying the grand tradition of Trainwreck Journalism, it’s hard not to conclude that it’s vastly overpopulated with young, pretty, blond white women. It’s not that society places some especially low value on white blondes; quite the opposite. All of the aforementioned ideals about sexual purity were constructed with white women in mind. Therefore, we treat their sexuality as an exception to the rule, a personal failing. Black women, on the other hand, have already been stereotyped as hypersexual and “impure,” and from them the same behavior draws not personal condemnation, but generalized racism; not shock or horror, but contempt. It doesn’t spare these women any unkindness, and it’s no more rational than the alternative—Taylor Swift and Beyoncé can both wear leotards and talk about their feminism at concerts, but only Beyoncé will have the leotard cited as a reason she can’t be feminist—but it changes the angle from which we bring the hammer down.
And, where white women are slapped down for daring to be sexual, women of color are slapped down for daring to be anything else: Over the course of her career, Nicki Minaj has spoken about abortion rights, the need for female musicians to write their own work, the difficulty of being an assertive woman in a business setting, and the obstacles black women face in being recognized as creative forces. She is the best-selling female rapper of all time, and her success has done a tremendous amount to awaken critical and commercial interest in female voices within a genre that was largely seen (fairly or unfairly) as a man’s game before she showed up. Nicki Minaj has done everything in her power to frame herself as a thoughtful black feminist voice, up to and including staging public readings of Maya Angelou poems. And yet, approximately 89 percent of Nicki Minaj’s press coverage, outside the feminist blogosphere, tends to focus on: her butt.
The Nicki Minaj Butt Conversation—whether she has had plastic surgery to enhance her butt, whether there is a sufficient amount of clothing apportioned to her butt, what her butt means for society, and/or for our own personal butts—has been louder and longer than common sense would seem to allow. “Nicki Minaj Butt” has its own searchable tag on the Huffington Post (sample headline: J. LO’S BUTT TAKES A BACKSEAT). Elsewhere, entertainment news and gossip sites are strewn with highbrow, intellectually stimulating headlines like NICKI MINAJ’S BUTT EXPOSED IN SHEER JUMPSUIT DURING DUBLIN CONCERT, and EVEN NICKI MINAJ ISN’T SURE IF HER BUTT IS PHOTOSHOPPED OR NOT, and NICKI MINAJ BUTT IMPLANT RUMORS ARE TRUE!, and finally, depressingly, NICKI MINAJ FIRES BACK AT HATERS WHO SAY HER BUTT IS THE REASON SHE’S FAMOUS.
Nicki Minaj’s butt is perfectly fine, of course. She seems to have a healthy relationship with it; she’s rapped about it from time to time. But given the abundance of other accomplishments and qualities we could be talking about, it’s starting to feel as if Nicki Minaj could solve the mysteries of cold fusion and still be seen largely as (in the words of one popular YouTube parody) “a stripper who also knows how to rap.”
Similarly, heterosexuality—the grand structure underpinning all these freak-outs—is the “norm.” It’s assumed, until it isn’t. But when a woman is presumed to be heterosexual, it normally takes exposed skin to trigger public freak-outs, invasions of privacy, and media handwringing. When a woman i
s rumored to be queer—a rumor that tends to arise whenever the press has trouble placing a famous woman with an equally famous man—all it takes is for her to go outside in the company of another woman. Whitney Houston’s close relationship with her childhood friend, Robyn Crawford, was so widely examined and whispered about that, partly in order to defeat the rumors, Houston rushed into a marriage with Bobby Brown. Which, of course, did wonders for her happiness and reputation.
And, as our understanding of gender and sexuality gets deeper and more complicated, we seem to keep finding new reasons to shout at people. It was only in 2015, after a good eight or nine years of being shamed for being insufficiently feminine and/or a “bad example” of girlhood, that Miley Cyrus made it clear that she is not a girl. She identifies, roughly, as “gender fluid,” somewhere between and beyond the male-female binary. She’s also not straight; “I don’t relate to being boy or girl, and I don’t have to have my partner relate to boy or girl,” she’s said. One hopes that the world will be kind. But, considering the innumerable crude jokes and accusations of Ruining Feminism Forever that transgender celebrities like Caitlyn Jenner and Laverne Cox have had to endure, it’s not hard to predict that the next wave of Miley Cyrus Sexual Outrage is just beginning.
The reason for this is what it always has been: A woman who’s “out of control” sexually isn’t just a person making decisions, most of which will never affect you. She’s a defector from the ongoing sexual warfare; her influence stands to tear the whole system down.
•
Anatomy of a Trainwreck
MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT
She was a concubine. An adultress. A prostitute. She sold herself to “half the town.” She was a “usurping bitch,” with “much amiss in the head,” an “unsexed,” genderless “maniac” with “no sense of guilt,” “whom no decorum checked.” Her work, if allowed to spread, would pervert young women’s minds and destroy their innocence; it was a “scripture, archly framed, for propagating whores.”
