Remembering Fifteen
Column by Marlize van Romburgh -
May 14, 2008
30 ratings from readers
At fifteen years old, Miley Cyrus is at an age when words like "beauty" and "femininity" become more than mere abstractions. Perhaps the flap over her photos in Vanity Fair misses the real story, here.
A smudge of red lipstick, tussled hair, a rumpled sheet
covering all but a bare back. And that coy, come-hither gaze that seems to know
so much more than can possibly be known at 15.
That’s the image of teen star Miley Cyrus that’s been thrown
on every news talk show on every channel, the image that’s had mothers
apparently throwing their hands up in despair, fathers covering their little
daughters’ eyes, and talk-show pundits lamenting about the sexualization of a
child.
I found myself intrigued too. Me — the person who is
clueless about celebrity news, could care less about Hollywood starlets, and
has never watched thirty seconds of Hannah Montana in her life. Yes, even I was
intrigued.
Why? For the same reason we all are. Because with the snap
of her shutter, Annie Leibovitz captured a frame of our society’s view on sex,
beauty, and women in general.
Miley Cyrus in Vanity Fair
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Miley Cyrus looked beautiful. I’ll say it: she looked
natural, provocative, classic, and feminine.
It was a sexy picture, maybe even a little provocative, and
that’s okay.
When the controversy broke I thought back on myself at fifteen.
It is a young age, but not that young. It’s right at the borderline of
maturity, a year away from being sixteen and the independence of being able to
drive, and three away from moving out of the house completely.
It’s an age when you begin to consider the meanings of the
words beauty and femininity, and when you begin to emerge from childhood to see
yourself in that light.
I think that when fifteen-year-old girls can realize that being
sexy is being artsy, it is being mature, and it is being
mysterious, that shows precisely that they are growing up.
My greater concern in the Miley Cyrus saga is the smaller,
related story, and the one that’s been least addressed. It’s those other
pictures of her, the amateur shots of her that got leaked out on the internet
of her in her underwear pulling up her shirt, laying on some guy’s lap with her
stomach exposed, and another pulling down her shirt to show her bra.
That’s where my concern comes in — when a fifteen-year-old who’s
apparently a role model to thousands takes pictures of herself that are so
casually trashy.
The Vanity Fair pictures are certainly provocative.
But Vanity Fair is known for being a provocative magazine, and it’s
certainly not read by the average Hannah Montana fan.
The leaked internet photos of Miley, however, speak to a
different issue. Besides being trashy — and they would be at fifteen, twenty-five, or any age
— they also speak to a different issue where being sexy isn’t being taken
seriously enough in our society any more.
Annie Leibovitz at least portrayed those elements of
womanhood, femininity and sexuality in a wholesome, tasteful sense, even if her
subject was perhaps a little too young to make that kind of bold statement.
But what Miley Cyrus did on her own when she snapped cutesy
little shots of herself in her undies was far, far worse; there she perpetuated
the casual, immature image of female sexuality that can be found on hundreds of
MySpace pages, Facebook profiles, and amateur blogs the internet over.
It’s for that — and not a dab of red lipstick and ruffled
hair — that I scold her.
Marlize van Romburgh is a journalism and economics senior at Cal Poly, San Luis
Obispo, where she's also a senior reporter for the award-winning university
newspaper. Her personal blog is at ClearerPerspective.com.
