Last week, Irish singer Sinead O'Connor penned an open letter to Miley Cyrus, advising her not to let the music industry "pimp" her for profit and attention. While O'Connor's letter may have been written with the best of intentions, the philosophy behind her advice to Cyrus is troubling. The idea that women must police their bodies, expressions and behaviors so as not to present temptation to men is deeply oppressive and rooted in a patriarchal paradigm that views women as objects and men as slaves to their basest desires. The parallel belief that men cannot help but objectify women who fail to conduct themselves with the utmost decorum sets a disappointingly low bar for appropriate male behavior.
When O'Connor tells Cyrus to "kindly fire any who hasn't expressed alarm, because they don't care about you," the implicit statement is that Cyrus, a 20 year-old woman, lacks the judgment to make her own decisions about her life and personal image. Such assumptions are disempowering to women, particularly at a time when ambitious, driven women are testing the upper limits of women's power as CEOs, political leaders and primary breadwinners. While Cyrus' ambition to "shock," as stated in her Rolling Stone interview this month, may not be quite so lofty, her personal agency to pursue her goals should be above reproach.
Assuming that Cyrus is a puppet for her managers and an outlet for men's sexual desires is reductive. The more that female observers the very population that should feel empowered by female artists' success and assertion of radical expression denounce Cyrus, the more they privilege the male gaze. Encouraging women to act in reaction to hypothetical responses by men is an oppressive act; O'Connor's declaration that Cyrus' performances degrade her talent and "innocent heart" patronizes and limits women who have grown up entirely in the aftermath of the sexual liberation and public female sexuality of third wave feminism. To women of the millennial generation, embracing one's sexuality is a freeing mode of expression rather than a limiting one. O'Connor's public rebuke of such acts speaks more to generational disconnect than it does to any universal truth about the appropriateness or lack thereof of Cyrus' actions.
Labeling Cyrus a "precious young lady" who "ought to be protected [as such] by anyone in [her] employ" infantilizes a legal adult with the full capacity to comprehend her actions. When Cyrus declares her desire to produce music that people are still listening to after her own glory days are over and speaks about "set[ting] a new standard for pop music" by listening to her alum "20,000 times to make sure it's perfect," she expresses a work ethic and sense of mission that is beyond a mere child. Seen as a piece of her art, Cyrus' MTV Video Music Awards performance and public antics are not only intelligible, but also commendable for the shrewdness with which they capture the public's attention.
For men, O'Connor's various labels "spunk-spewing dirtbag[s] on the internet," "less than animals" and "greedy record company executive[s] [looking for money] to buy [his] mistress diamonds with" are similarly reductive and offensive. To be sure, there are some men who do see women the way O'Connor describes. Such men, however, are in the minority, and for O'Connor to smear a full half of the planet's population with such broad assumptions creates a false opposition between powerful, independent women and the men who love and appreciate them.
More importantly, accepting that men are slaves to their basest desires gives the entire gender a free pass on the underlying cultural attitudes that feed a litany of issues. The persistence of the gender gap in wages between men and women, the continued victimization of women in brutal sexually-based crimes and the constant devaluation of female children in parts of the world can all be attributed to the unquestioned prioritization of masculine privilege over the female body. At its most basic level, male ogling of any female body that passes by is an assertion of male desire over female rights and the continued acceptance of such attitudes, even by well-respected women like O'Connor, only serves to ensure that they will persist. It is reasonable to ask that men appreciate feminine bodies without reducing them to biological parts for their pleasure.
