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Thursday, May 01, 2008

Vile purveyors of vulgar smut and filth



This April 30, 2008 Wall Street Journal editorial deserves to be quoted in full:
Readers with little girls at home don't have to be told who Miley Cyrus is. Their daughters want to be Miley Cyrus. The Disney Channel singer/actress is the star of "Hannah Montana," one of the most popular shows on TV. Her latest album is No. 3 on Billboard magazine's bestseller list. Reports estimate that she will bring in $1 billion in business to Disney this year.

She is also 15. Thus this week's uproar over a seminude photo by Annie Leibovitz for Vanity Fair magazine. The photo – showing Miley draped in a sheet, back bared, hair tousled, with a come-hither smile – upset countless parents who immediately grasped the photo's essential vulgarity.

Such ordinary wisdom apparently escaped every so-called grown-up involved in the photo shoot. The sophisticates at Vanity Fair defended the picture as a "beautiful and natural portrait." Absent sensible adults, Miley herself stepped forward to issue a statement saying that the now-embarrassing photo shoot was supposed to be "artistic."

Next to what crosses TV and computer screens every day, Miley's photo is relatively tame – save for the fact that Vanity Fair was trying to lower the bar on this stuff to the age of 15. Parents have enough difficulty teaching their daughters how not to expose their bodies in a vulgar way; this makes it harder. If there's good news here, it's that folks in Buffalo, Charlotte or Iowa City are still insisting on cultural norms alien to the elites of Manhattan or Hollywood.
"Essential vulgarity"? "This stuff"? (and, for that matter, "come-hither smile"?) Is there some standard I don't know about where art directors and iconic photographers are supposed to speculate about (or even concern themselves with) what may or may not "upset countless parents." And did this tame photo really "upset countless parents"? Whose even more countless kids were reading Vanity Fair? Looking at the VF website, we see that her (so-called grown-up) parents were present for the photo shoot, which appears to have taken place on a farm.

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posted at 4:27 PM

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