Miley: Tomorrow's Britney today!

wow, this post is totally inappropriate and bizarre

Finally, another Brother Theodore fan besides my best friend and me. He and I also much prefer the "goofy" 80s NBC Letterman of blue blazer, khakis and Adidas, guerrilla video stunts, downtown/experimental guest roster and Grouchoesque upender of stuffed shirts to the CBS/Ed Sullivan Theater elder statesman of Italianate pinstripes, tasseled loafers, and all-round suckup to the overhyped flavors of the week cranked out the Molochan maw of the entertainment-industrial complex.

The first was a kissing cousin to Night Flight and cut real wood in his day.

The latter is a Viacom vampire, as decadent as a Jerry Lewis telethon and half as edgy.

I think I prefer Mark Shea's take on this, Rod, under the somewhat unwieldy acronym SMACTDVAISYACTDC. (I think. I may have left out a letter.)

Anyway, the point is that whether we're talking about grim polygamists in full-length dresses or star-quality girls surrounded by shady exploitative sycophants, our sick culture hates the thought that somewhere, out there, some teenage girl hasn't yet embraced the full liberation of early and frequent sex (and promiscuity's a plus, which is why the polygamists get frowned at, since only their men get to be promiscuous). This isn't something to be gleeful about--just sad.

Right, Daniel, 'cause it's just so much more wholesome for Mom to hand her 14 year old daughter a condom and then drive the girl to the abortion clinic a year later to pay for her grandchild to be aborted.

'cause it's just so much more wholesome for Mom to hand her 14 year old daughter a condom and then drive the girl to the abortion clinic a year later to pay for her grandchild to be aborted.

Oh dear.

I don't think a 14-year-old girl is any less coerced by the pressure not to be a prude and to service any male from a higher social clique than she is in order to "move up" in the fierce school hierarchies than she is by believing some prophet commands her to marry a man old enough to be her grandfather.

Really???? Wow.

Now, let us be serious for a moment. Has anyone, ever, accused Miley Cyrus of having any intelligence with which to make a rational career choice? And what is it with these idiot names they keep coming up with?

...I don't think unmarried people should have sex, ...

I don't think some married people should have sex.

I'm forced to conclude that somewhere in the shadows, Rod has a set of Dark Masters who have assigned him a slut-shaming quota. Until he has slapped down the proper number of teenage girls, he's not allowed to come in off the street at night. It's sad all around.

Right, Erin, because there's really no difference between middle-aged polygamists who force themselves on 14 year old girls under the guise of religion and 16-17 year old boys and girls choosing to have sex with one another. (If you look at the average age of loss of virginity, it's around that age, not 14.) I'm not saying the latter is a great thing that should be encouraged to take place as much as possible, but the equivalence here is absurd, and the latter one isn't a "horror". Let's leave that word for things that are really horrible and stand outside the realm of normal American life.

"31 out of 53 FLDS teen girls are pregnant or have a child, would this be the opposite extreme of the common (Miley) culture, or should this be the norm? If not, why not?"

Now there's an interesting question.

Remember that my position is that teen girls too young for legal marriage shouldn't be having sex regardless of whether they claim to be "married." The laws making it illegal to marry below a certain age are in place for a reason, and that reason is that our society up to now has believed that both girls and boys below a certain age lack the level of maturity and responsibility to enter into what was originally a very difficult to break legal contract between two parties of the opposite sex.

Tied into that whole notion of maturity/responsibility is the rapidly deteriorating notion that marriage has at least *some* connection to child bearing and the raising of children. The connection between marriage and sex, and between sex and pregnancy, are part of the reason our legal constructs dealing with marriage exist the way they do. It may have been a legal fiction for the law to pretend that sex would commence with marriage and that children born after that period ought legally to be presumed to be the husband's children, and therefore his legal responsibility, but it was a fiction that is pretty prevalent throughout the laws dealing with marriage and children.

For instance, some states still mandate that the legal husband must be listed on a birth certificate as the father of the child, even if he and his wife are estranged. The burden of proof that he is not the father of the child is on him, should he choose to challenge the birth certificate's record.

The point is that when the law says a person is too young to be married legally, there's an element of that which refers to the responsibilities involved in raising a child, should the marriage take a rather usual and expected course. Only by seeing sex as primarily for recreation, and procreation as mainly an unintended and regrettable consequence, can we say that a person is too young for marriage, but plenty old enough to be sexually active--which is just what our society does say to children.

The message to girls is clear, if convoluted: go ahead and have sex, we know you can't possibly practice any self-control. Engage in meaningless physical encounters with boys who won't even remember your name well enough to sign your yearbook in a few years; it's what everybody does at your age. But whatever you do, don't get pregnant! And if you do conceive, by some tragic failure of your birth control method of choice, we'll help you get an abortion, because you can handle all sorts of sexual activity at 14, and all the emotional pressure that comes with being used--but there's no way you're old enough to be a mother.

So the fact of the matter is that one big difference between the polygamy culture and our prevailing culture is not that 14-year-olds were sexually active; it is that they were pretending to take the responsibilities that come with sexual activity, including children, seriously. Our society expects 14-year-olds to have sex. We just don't want them to act like it means anything.

And no, I don't approve of the polygamists. I believe that marriage is a holy union between one man and one woman, and polygamy violates that. Also, as I said above, I think people too young to be legally married shouldn't pretend to be married. But I had a lot of respect for a woman I knew who married at 14 (legally, and with her parents' permission, in a rural part of the country where this wasn't all that unusual). She was the mother of one of my classmates, and was a well-balanced, happy, kind woman, even if she was quite a bit younger than most of the rest of our moms were. It's interesting to reflect that most people today would be horrified at the thought of a girl that young choosing to marry, but absolutely fine with the notion that girls that young are having random sexual encounters with boys as old as juniors or seniors in high school.

Because, y'know, calling some innocent girl a psycho-slut because you feel lust toward her is FUNNY. Talking about how you want to rip her teeth out is FUNNY. . . .

Let me explain something to you, Sig. Brother Theodore is (was) a comic act. There is NO SUCH PERSON as Liselotte Bindl. Liselotte Bindl does not exist. It was all a joke. Really. Come in off the ledge now, I'll give you a warm sedative.

And if you don't think I was criticizing her parents for cynically allowing this to happen, you can't read.

"You've got Scott on your side--he thinks it was funny." - sigaliris

"Finally, another Brother Theodore fan besides my best friend and me." - me

I leave it to the Juvenile Jury that sets the tone in these pointlessly personalised culture-war comment threads to decide whether I stand convicted of the former on the sole evidence of the latter. That my 8:51 comment, wholly unrelated to a clip I did not in fact watch, is impossible to conscript for such purposes, will be apparent to all save for those wholly ignorant of the rules of evidence which still, praise Heaven, obtain in the Anglo-Saxon legal system, if not in precincts in which overheated and narcissist moral preening heedless of the collateral smearing of the innocent passes for argument.

What I'd like to know is this: why aren't this girl's parents taking fire for the way they are allowing (or perhaps I should be using the word "encouraging") their daughter to be exploited commercially ? It's bad enough that they allowed these "artistic" (actual translation: soft-core pornography) shots to be taken at all, but to allow them to be used for commercial purposes strikes me as being very little different from pimping this girl out on the streets for $ 25 a trick.

I suspect that if it weren't for the fact that this girl's parents are "famous" themselves---and therefore protected from the child-protective laws that apply to commoners---that they'd be staring down the business end of a child-neglect action. She makes her parents a ton of money; therefore they can't be touched.

Your servant,

Lord Karth

>>>>
It's a startlingly similar pose, isn't it?
Posted by: Erin Manning | April 29, 2008 12:26 AM
>>>>

Well, in the sense that the two are sitting and wrapped, yes.

The characteristics of the pic that Erin pointed out, hunched posed, somewhat undefined features seem to go well with the motif of a young girl transitioning to adulthood. Contrast that with the Jolie photo which shows a vibrant, confident, mature woman.

>>>>
It's bad enough that they allowed these "artistic" (actual translation: soft-core pornography) shots to be taken at all, but to allow them to be used for commercial purposes strikes me as being very little different from pimping this girl out on the streets for $ 25 a trick.
Posted by: Lord Karth | April 29, 2008 5:08 AM
>>>>

You seem to be displaying an astounding lack of proportion.

Miley Cyrus is, what, fourteen?

Anyone want to place a bet that the next girl to follow this trend will be even younger?

Personally, I hope that the Cyruses nip this thing in the bud. Hollywood ruins lots of lives. David Lynch's 'Mulholland Dr.' is instructive in that regard.

The fact that these girls have no control over their reproduction, marriages, sex lives, or families in general is of no consequence for Erin.

Daniel, that is an absolutely unfair comment. Did you read all of Erin's posts, or just the lines that allowed you to reason such a statement?

...the young lady's first statement about the photo was:

"Annie took, like, a beautiful shot, and I thought it was really cool. That's what she wanted me to do, and you can't say no to Annie."

...unless you are the Queen.

God save the Queen!

Our society expects 14-year-olds to have sex. We just don't want them to act like it means anything.

Really? I am a mother of a 17 and 19 year old so have had considerable recent contact with teenagers and think this statement is totally out of whack with what the majority of society expects of 14 year olds.

I'm glad to see someone pointing out the "whole cloth" aspect to this stuff. I think those refusing to see your point are possibly doing so out of a desire to "stand up for women". We have thoroughly perverted what it means to come to the defense of women in this country, so that some men feel they must defend a woman's right to have tons of sex and lots of abortions. I think they are trying, underneath, to be gallant.

But I think these men could stand to have some women explain some things to them. As a fourteen year old, would I have liked to have lived within a heretical sect in which I was expected to become one of the wives of a much older man and begin to raise a family? No. As an adolescent girl, would I have liked to have lived within a cultural environment in which I was expected to perform oral sex on large numbers of male peers in order to avoid ostracism? No. Critics are right that there is a power factor, that the girls in the polygamist sect probably felt they had little choice but to conform, or never even considered it a possibility (even though they could technically have contacted law enforcement at any time). But they underestimate the power factor in peer relationships, particularly today. Many kids are entirely oriented towards their peers -- the peer group opinion is as important to them as a mom's opinion is to a four year old. Picture a four year old being kicked out of the family by her mother, imagine the terror of a toddler being set outside the door and told she can't ever come back. Many teens feel this terror when faced with the prospect of being kicked out of the peer group. They simply can't imagine a life outside the clique, any more than those girls in Texas could imagine sneaking away from the compound to the outside world. In theory, the girls in the outside world have total freedom to walk away from the sexual encounters, but in reality they have nowhere to go if they do.

The girls in Texas were and are in a horrible situation, no one is saying they aren't. I think what some of us believe, though, is that there are girls all over this country, and on the cover of Vanity Fair, who are also in horrific traps that no one acknowledges and no one helps them out of.

Nothing fosters bonding like a mutual refusal to be sedated, Scott. ; )