3 things that we know after Miley Cyrus' VMA performance

Miley Cyrus’ performance at the MTV Video Music Awards 2013 has set the Internet on fire. If you don’t believe us, then consider this: she manged to outdo Lady Gaga. Sorry Mother Monster, but little Miley dancing to her new song We can’t Stop followed by the Blurred Lines duet with Robin Thicke got 306,100  tweets per minute.   As Twitter pointed out   @MileyCyrus  topped the list of the  most-mentioned stars of the night.

After her performance, every single media outlet in America was discussing Cyrus’ performance and the audience’s reactions to it.  From BuzzFeed  to Huffington Post  to CNN , no one could afford to give Miley’s performance a miss. By the way, it should be pointed out that the viral image of Will Smith’s family shocked reaction was not to Miley Cyrus but to Lady Gaga’s performance. Slate has an excellent piece on that here.

The  New York Times  reports that The Parents Television Council, which has Cyrus’ dad and former country singer Billy Ray Cyrus on the board, has complained about about the show, saying it crossed a line and “that network should have warned parents against letting 14-year-olds — eighth graders, typically — view it without supervision”

So what did we learn from Miley’s Cyrus’ rather raunchy performance, during which she also stripped down to skin-coloured underwear? Here’s our take on top 3 things:

Twerking:  I’ll be honest. I had not encountered this word and had to look it up when I saw it being discussed so thoroughly in the all articles that dealt with Cyrus. In fact CNN did an entire story on the history of twerking. Here’s how the Wikipedia describes twerking: “a dance move that involves a person shaking the hips in an up-and-down bouncing motion, causing the dancer to shake, wobble and jiggle.” To ’twerk’ means to “dance in a sexually suggestive fashion by twisting the hips_._”  

Cyrus’ attempt at twerking has caused moral outrage and angered many black feminists who argue that she has just appropriated black culture without any context. Miley’s side dancers were all African-American women with big butts, all of them used as mere props (they were wore weird teddy bear costumes) and at one point Cyrus even slaps one of them on the ass.

Jezebel has a well-argued piece on the racial implications of her performance where the author Ninjacate writes:

Now, a favourite derail of this discussion is that culture doesn’t belong to anyone, and it’s here for us to share and no one OWNS twerking. But those discussions always happen outside the context of cultural imperialism, and the colonial history that minorities face… It’s not that we can’t share. It’s that until such time as black people are not ridiculed and debased for the styles and music and lifestyle that they create, live and breathe, hands off.

In short, Cyrus twerking was a massive fail because she appears to be another white, privileged girl in her desire to appear to get some street cred.

Hannah Montana is dead: This is for those of you who were still expecting her to make a comeback. At least in her last album Can’t be Tamed,  she did still have Hannah’s hair. But that’s gone now, cropped short. The sweet, innocent, tween pop-star is over and she’s a hyper-sexual women now, which is the image that Cyrus is going for with her new video and the VMA performance.

Again as the Jezebel piece points out, Cyrus is re-making herself in the image of Rihanna. Curiously, it appears We can’t stop was originally meant for Rihanna and not Cyrus, according to what  producer Mike Will told MTV.

It could also be that Cyrus is on her way to becoming the new Britney Spears. She’s got sexuality and she isn’t afraid to show it. Only time will tell.

Miley’s a slut but Robin Thicke doing it is a-okay:  After her performance, during which she nearly masturbated with a giant foam finger, twerked on Robin Thicke while her tongue refused to settle in her mouth, Cyrus was dissed as a slut. Brooke Shields, who had acted as Hannah Montana’s on-screen mom in the show, said on NBC’s Today Show ,

“I was Hannah Montana’s mother!” she told host Willie Geist. “Where did I go wrong? I just want to know who’s advising her, and why (the VMA routine) is necessary. … (Our children) can’t watch that. … I feel like it’s a bit desperate.”

The slut-shaming was bound to happen, given that Miley Cyrus was a sweet Disney kid, but it is hypocritical given Robin Thicke was also on the stage with her and this is a man who has video with semi-nude models just walking around as props.

As Jezebel’s Katie Dries points out:

Cyrus’s performance was shocking, but for reasons not being discussed. It was jarring because, as opposed to the random, half-nude models we’re used to seeing prance around Robin Thicke, we were watching a 20-year-old woman — a household name, someone we “know” — play the object in Thicke’s sexy sex dream.

Clearly Thicke isn’t subject to the same standards of morality that are expected from Miley Cyrus and that’s just plain wrong. This is not to say that Miley’s performance was great — it was actually quite awkward and seemed weird at times, like she was trying too hard to be sexy — but it seems when there’s a woman to shame, male artists can smoothly get away with using women as sexy objects.

In short, Miley Cyrus has got the feminists to pull out their ideological guns, whether it’s against slut-shaming or, as black feminists have rightly pointed out, because she used black music and women to fuel her career. Personally, I’m getting ready for more memes, tweets and reactions to her VMA performance.

PS: Twerking is now going to be a part of Oxford Dictionary, reports Associated Press.