We live in a weird world. Recently, Miley Cyrus criticized the role model status of Taylor Swift because Swift featured guns in one of her music videos:
“That’s supposed to be a good example?” Cyrus said in an interview with Marie Claire published Friday. “And I’m a bad role model because I’m running around with my t[******] out? I’m not sure how t[******] are worse than guns.”
Taylor Swift featured guns in staged combat for her video “Bad Blood,” a song which is apparently about a public “feud” with “frenemy” Katy Perry. These female pop stars, you know? When will they learn to get along?
But it’s quite rich for Miley Cyrus to talk about being a role model. If I had to choose one of these pop stars to be a role model for my daughters (thanks be to God, I don’t), I certainly wouldn’t choose Miley Cyrus. Because waving a prop gun around and waving your genitalia around are two quite substantially different things.
Miley Cyrus has made it quite clear that she desires to completely overturn the established norms of decent behavior. Taylor Swift on the other hand, just wants to bend decency enough to gain a market edge. Both of these things are deplorable, of course, but one of them is clearly worse.
And this just highlights the fact that a major cultural shift is occurring concerning what should be called obscene. Miley Cyrus thinks guns are obscene, but nudity is not. She’s not alone in that opinion. There’s actually quite a long list of these kinds of shifts occurring in our society. If you want to know what it feels like to be obscene in modern society, have a bunch of kids and take them with you to the store. You’ll get more dirty looks than if you lit up a cigarette in a hospital.
All that aside, Miley Cyrus needs to go home. Well, maybe not. Home is where all of this went wrong in the first place (Bless her achy, breaky heart). Okay. Well, Miley Cyrus needs to go somewhere. And while she’s leaving the stage, I would just politely ask, for the sake of my children, that she put some clothes on. If it’s not too much to ask.