Brokeback or bareback?

From an article posted Friday in Slate, I learn that two names that were googled this year with a frequency matching Sarah Palin and John McCain were Heath Ledger and Miley Cyrus. Ledger I can understand, and I hope he gets a posthumous Oscar for his performance in The Dark Knight, which was simply amazing; as to the other search object, I'd certainly rather gaze on a pretty young woman, even chastely, than on McCain any day—but Miley Cyrus? Who is she and why should anyone outside her friends and family be interested in her? Two years ago, her name was an item that I included on a list of practice questions for my office trivia team; now, tickets to her performances are scalped.

Her notoriety this year came from the Annie Leibovitz photos in Vanity Fair, and if viewers of the pictures took exception to Leibovitz tastelessly posing Cyrus with her boneheaded father in ways that looked like boyfriend and girlfriend, I agree. It seems there are times when no one has less common sense than artists, as Peter Lynch showed, for instance, when he filmed the humiliating near-rape scene between Willem Dafoe and Laura Dern in Wild at Heart and called it "An episode of female empowerment" (I won't say "Hand me a barf bag" because that motif was another element all too evident in the film). But what got everyone searching for Miley was a single shot that revealed no more than my then-14-year-old daughter did when she donned her new Speedo and went swimming a few years ago: a bare back. Of course society must reject the prurient exploitation of minors, but the last time I checked, shoulder blades were not secondary sexual characteristics, nor their display pornographic.

It's ironic—in April, touring a restored mansion in the annual "pilgrimage" of ante-bellum homes in nearby Holly Springs, Mississippi, I was startled to see several photographs, in one room, of what I assume was the owner's 12-year-old granddaughter in various states of undress, though the photos were very tastefully posed and could not be taken as pornographic. For that matter, on another historic homes tour a year or two ago, passing through some private family rooms, I came across a nude oil portrait of a young woman, and a moment later, found myself face to face with the original (dressed, of course), trying to contain her amusement at the startled glances of the guests. Cyrus's photo is pretty tame compared to those instances, and it seems the feverish interest is based on "concern" over what might have happened had she not adequately draped herself; frankly, it's all beginning to sound to me like John Ashcroft veiling the statues in the lobby of the Justice Department. Let little 15-year-old Destiny Hope do her television show and worry about dating and leave the rest of us to recollect ourselves and consider when our fixation on a young woman's bare back reflects things about our own thoughts that we'd just as soon not reveal.

© Michael Huggins, 2008. All rights reserved.