It’s probably just me. No, I’m sure it’s just me but I’ll ask the question anyway.:Is there something strange about Miley Cyrus jumping immediately from that Vanity Fair/Annie Leibovitz “scandal” — where she was portrayed as, well, a bit more sexy than our sexually repressed society can handle — to an appearance in the Body by Milk campaign, where she sports…white stuff all over her lips?
One could argue it’s just a natural transition to the next level of, um, participation in the oh-so-seedy activity of — OMG! — engaging in dirty sex acts. But, that would be gross so let’s just leave that stuff on the table.
One could also argue the immediate transition to scandalicious sexiness from the most wholesome of role models is simply just another step in the natural but meticulously planned trajectory of a Disney child star.
But the smartest argument anyone could make would be to leave the poor girl alone. A big deal has been made from nothing. She’s 15. Fifteen-year-olds think about sex. A lot. Many actually have sex! While that apparently horrifies a lot of people, exploring one’s sexuality is one of the most normal human behaviors of all. Nothing anyone can do or say will ever change that.
While we rate movies R for even the mildest hint of nudity or sexual conduct, a PG or PG-13 movie can blow the shit out on an entire city or country, killing millions in an instant, and no one bats an eye. God forbid a movie show prolonged shots of a person’s boobs or ass — or even the remote possibility of more than a kiss — before the classic cut to “the morning after.”
Oh no. Not in this country. Here, sex is bad. Violence is good. Sex is shunned and closeted. Violence is celebrated and rewarded. Like the ass-backwards relationship between obscenely low-paid educators and obscenely high-paid business tycoons, our relationship with sex and violence is twisted at best.
Oh sure, sex can kill you. Sex can result in unwanted emotional side effects. Sex can make babies who may not have a proper home ready for them when they enter this world. But because we’ve packaged up the topic of sex, stuffed it in a box and placed it in some dark, dusty corner of a warehouse, never to be spoken of again, the people that most need to learn about sex never do until, in many cases, it’s too late and they’ve suffered one of the aforementioned side effects.
How we got from a Miley Cirus milk mustache commercial to the celebration of violence over the closeting of sex and the ill effects of having uneducated sex is unimportant. Of great importance is the fact nothing is done well unless it is first learned. But when it comes to sex, no one wants to talk about it. It makes people queasy, nervous, awkward. Parents don’t want to talk to their kids about it. Kids don’t want to ask their parents about it. That’s partially due to the topic having been stigmatized year after year after year as some sort of taboo, off-topic subject never to be discussed without a giggle or a smirk or a squirm of embarrassment.
Right up there with love, the desire for sex is one of the most powerful human emotions. Like love, it can make people do stupid things. The full-on destigmatization of sex and proper sex education won’t remove all possibility of error, but it will at least contribute to the mental tools at one’s disposal when an important decision needs to be made.
Back in the day — the caveman’s day — sex was pretty much for the exclusive purpose of procreation. It’s still an integral component of procreation today, but along the way it became a form of recreation too. It was also inextricably linked to love. Sex. Love. The two are supposed to go together in an inseparable fashion.
Irrespective of how you categorize sex, one thing is clear: people are having it. They always have. They always will. There is no changing that. There is also no defined age range, old or young, when it comes to categorizing those that choose to have sex. If people are going to have sex…no matter what…at any age…no matter what anyone says…wouldn’t it be smart to eradicate its stigma and make the sex education taboo a thing of the past?
