I found this article via 3quarksdaily. It is a commentary on the Miley Cyrus photograph, taken by Annie Liebotvitz, and I think provides relevant and critical analysis by a feminist icon.
“We Like Our Venuses Young” by Germaine Greer (excerpt)
“. . . . We train female children to be manipulative and to exploit their sex. From the time she is tiny, a girl in our society is taught to flirt. She is usually dressed like a mini-whore in pink and tinsel, short skirt, matching knickers, baby-doll pyjamas, long hair falling over her face. She learns to court attention and, when successful, to hide her face. If she’s lucky enough to get to be a big sister she might get over this sleazy conditioning, but very few daughters these days get to grow out of being “daddy’s girl”. When the time comes she is likely to reject approaching womanhood, desperate to keep her thighs skinny, and nearly as desperate to acquire hard, high breasts. The idea of growing into her own body is charmless, frightening. One thing we know about the Leibovitz photograph is that Cyrus saw nothing amiss in clutching a satin sheet to her apparently naked bosom, and looking at the camera over her shoulder. Girls are taught to look at the world in that sidelong fashion from the time they come to consciousness.
For her photograph of the teenage celebrity, Leibovitz chose a palette strongly redolent of the dirty postcards of yesteryear, sepia embittered with black, a suggestion of eye-blue and lip-red, as if retouched by hand, with never – thank our stars – a hint of pink. The light is centred on the child’s sallow, unformed cheek. Her eyes are shadowed and puffy, her lips slightly set, as if she is waiting out the slow shutter-click of an obsolete camera. Nobody has run a comb through her disordered mass of dark hair, which seems greasy and damp, as if with sweat. As one of her now ex-fans shrieked in his blog, “She looked like she is freshly f**ked in these photos!” The subject of Leibovitz’s photo could be a child prostitute from Casablanca, vintage 1900, the camera in the hands of a sex tourist who is about to toss a few coins to the doorkeeper. It is Disney, after all, that is merchandising this child, and the suggestion of pimping will cling to it. Leibovitz may be cynical, is obviously cynical. She is also, as usual, justified.
Now Disney accuses Vanity Fair of drumming up controversy and deliberately manipulating a 15-year-old in order to sell magazines, as if its own motives were not identical. The photo shoot for Vanity Fair was probably carried out weeks ago but the brouhaha has been timed for the very day the magazine appeared on the newsstands. Disney could have refused to make its star available for a shoot with Vanity Fair, or, if what it wanted was to protect its brand image, it could have demanded the right to vet the pictures. Cyrus was not undefended in the clutches of Leibovitz; her parents and minders were present and apparently saw nothing amiss in the offending photograph, which, in its original state, probably looked less like a dirty postcard than it does on the pages of Vanity Fair.
Before Leibovitz, Cyrus was regularly photographed on red carpets dressed as a 35-year-old in sequins and chiffon with heavy makeup, hair extensions, fuck-me shoes, and occasionally a segment of baby breast escaping at an ill-cut armhole. Otherwise she dresses as a schoolgirl in long socks, very short skirts and the same hanks of rather gluey-looking hair. These publicity shots are far cheaper and far nastier in implication than the Leibovitz image, which has class. Meanwhile, in a series of candid snapshots apparently of Cyrus that have found their way on to the internet, Cyrus the professional virgin is apparently happy to show herself nipples akimbo in jersey underwear, pulling down a vest to display a green bra, and disporting a bare belly on a bed with a boyfriend. All tacky, all in circulation, and all displaying the usual knowingness. . .”
Read the entire article at the guardian, here.
