Miley? Meh.

I didn't watch the Video Music Awards on MTV last Sunday; it's just not my thing. So I wouldn't have known anything at all about Miley Cyrus and her "coming of age performance" if my Facebook feed hadn't blown up with comments about it all Sunday night and Monday morning.

So, thinking that she must have done something truly groundbreaking, I finally watched her performance on YouTube to see what all the furor was about.

And I saw her nude-hued bikini, her foam finger-dildo, her ass grinding against Robin Thicke's crotch, her off-key rendition of "Blurred Lines," her tongue dangling from her mouth... And when it was over, all I could think was, "is that all?"

                                                                            gawker.com

   

It wasn't scandalous. It wasn't sexy. It was clumsy and contrived and unoriginal. You remember the quiet, introverted girl in high school who one day showed up in trashy clothes and trampy make-up in an attempt to shock people into noticing her? And everybody thought, "poor girl, she's trying too hard?" That was Miley on Sunday night.

So I'm left with a difficult time understanding what, exactly, all the controversy is about: why I should be outraged, or why ought I "pray for Miley," as one of my horrified Facebook friends exhorted all of us to do. The VMAs generally have a history of raunchy, exhibitionist performances, dating all the way back to Madonna and her wedding gown in 1984. The "chaste Disney child star gets on stage and expresses her post-adolescent sexuality" thing was already done by Britney Spears, thirteen years ago. There's nothing new or unique here; the only thing Miley's performance will be known for, years from now, is how awkward and shopworn it was. Her antics really don't deserve the attention they've received.

That being said, I now realize that I just wrote an entire blog post about Miley Cyrus. So maybe she, along with her agents and her publicists, knew exactly what she was doing on Sunday night.