An Open Letter to the Open-Minded

By Maria Padhila

Dear Everybody: Open Letters are trending — don’t be left out!

How it started: Pop artist Miley Cyrus has been making videos and doing live performances that involve a lot of simulated sex acts and very hot behavior (to me). I’m sorry; I’m honest. I find her really hot. I don’t find her ethical, but she is very sexy.

Poly Paradise at Burning Man. Photo by Eric.

Her performance at the Video Music Awards involved some transgressions such as pretending to stroke her pretend cock, pretending to stroke others with one of those big foam “We’re No. 1!” fingers, and coming pretty close in reality to perform analingus on a woman. That’s pretty far out there, even for cable!

I think her performances at the VMA and in her “We Can’t Stop” videos are racist. They appropriate elements of the sexuality of women and men of color that are theirs alone to work with. (Some commenters have said, ‘hey, white artists always steal shit, what’s the problem?’ I can only retch.) Here’s just one thing I mean: all of her backup performers were black and there was endless focus on their asses, and I think some of them had fake big butts on. That shit is racist. Really. What do I have to say here.

But the biggest discussion came around the sexuality issues. In another Cyrus video, “Wrecking Ball” (in which she rides on a giant swinging ball and licks the chain, and licks a sledgehammer, etc., etc.), she runs a lot of close-ups of her own agonized face with a single tear. Whoa, she looks a lot like Sinead O’Connor in that “Nothing Compares 2 U” video, which you remember if you’re an old lady like me!

Sinead O’Connor is gorgeous. And her voice — nothing compares. And she’s ethical. But her recent views are way off base.

She wrote An Open Letter to Miley Cyrus sharing her views on the performance. Since then, she’s written two more as well as other communications. Here’s where you can follow it all if you like.

… in the spirit of motherliness and with love. I am extremely concerned for you that those around you have led you to believe, or encouraged you in your own belief, that it is in any way ‘cool’ to be naked and licking sledgehammers in your videos. It is in fact the case that you will obscure your talent by allowing yourself to be pimped, whether it’s the music business or yourself doing the pimping. Nothing but harm will come in the long run, from allowing yourself to be exploited, and it is absolutely NOT in ANY way an empowerment of yourself or any other young women, for you to send across the message that you are to be valued (even by you) more for your sexual appeal than your obvious talent …

None of the men ogling you give a shit about you either, do not be fooled. Many’s the woman mistook lust for love. If they want you sexually that doesn’t mean they give a fuck about you. … You ought be protected as a precious young lady by anyone in your employ and anyone around you, including you. This is a dangerous world. We don’t encourage our daughters to walk around naked in it because it makes them prey for animals and less than animals, a distressing majority of whom work in the music industry and its associated media. … Your body is for you and your boyfriend. It isn’t for every spunk-spewing dirtbag on the net, or every greedy record company executive to buy his mistresses diamonds with.

The 1950s called. They want their preaching back. OK, that doesn’t even make sense, but neither do O’Connor’s dire warnings. Back in the day, the pimp metaphor might have been true. Today, Cyrus and Spears and the rest get a nice percentage. What I found objectionable was the sex-negative, chiding and even somewhat shaming tone of the O’Connor letter.

So did artist Amanda Palmer. She wrote An Open Letter to Sinead O’Connor.

As much as we may not want to see it this way — because, from a far distant she looks like just another airbrushed hottie from a lite beer commercial — we gotta give Miley (and every female) space to try on her artist’s uniform. It’s like a game of cosmic dress-up, but the stakes are high. If we’re allowed to play it, we’re empowered. If we’re not, we’re still in a cage. …

I want to live in a world where Miley (or any female musician) can twerk wildly at 20, wear a full-cover floral hippie mumu at 37, show up at 47 in see-through latex, and pose semi-naked, like Keith [Richards] & co, on the cover of Rolling Stone at 57 and be APPLAUDED for being so comfortable with her body. …

This is a push for more freedom, and in order to make it there, we have to jump massive hurdles and set assumptions. I’ve been following you and the very candid writings on your site about sex and your own sexuality … . and I can’t imagine you disagree with me on this point: women need more freedom to say what they want (double entendre there), express what they want (same) and be respected for their bravery, not reprimanded for endangering themselves.

And now we get to the root of the issue. Because what’s happening here is a disagreement over sex-positive feminism. It’s pushback on the anti-slut shaming movement, and extends back to the long, intelligent and enlightening discussion of issues such as sex work and whether porn is violence. Sex positivism can be as inclusive and as respectful of different forms of expression, boundaries and ideas as the person who’s practicing and expressing it chooses to be. And it’s right that it’s undergoing some discussion and critique.

One of the latest of these discussions to get some traction is “Sites of Violence: Why Our Notions of ‘Sex Positive’ Feminism are in Need of an Overhaul” by Kelly Rose Pflug-Back, which was posted on the Planet Waves Facebook page Friday as well.

She describes a horrific experience of sexual abuse and the consequences of having this go uncared-for and never having justice. She goes on to say she experiences current sex-positivism, particularly as it’s expressed through the Cliteracy Project art interactive piece, as being “a movement geared toward middle-class, mostly white, liberal, cis-women for whom liberation may indeed be a simple matter of achieving greater sexual satisfaction, ending the culture of slut-shaming, and re-appropriating femme aesthetics.”

As a middle-class, white, liberal, femme-lover, I can only ask, well, what’s wrong with that?

She explains:

For people who face more obstacles in the path towards reclaiming and realizing their sexuality, this sort of uncompromisingly positive and monolithic view of sex can come off as anywhere from frivolous to brutally alienating. During the long period of my life in which I felt that I was completely incapable of having any kind of healthy manifestation of a sex life, I often felt wracked by the guilt of not being a ‘good’ feminist.

If we wish to construct a feminism that is truly ‘sex positive,’ it must address the myriad forms of oppression that violate women’s lives and bodies on a global scale. ‘Freedom in society can be measured by distribution of orgasms,’ reads another slogan of Wallace’s Cliteracy project — a statement that seems almost painfully ludicrous when we consider the millions of women worldwide whose freedoms, sexual and otherwise, are devastated on a daily basis by state violence, environmental degradation, poverty, racism, and the wide variety of other hardships women must tackle in the contemporary world, in addition to a lack of sexual gratification. Women’s sexual empowerment is not an issue which can be separated from broader struggles for gender justice, and in order to support its realization, we must fight collectively for serious social and political change with the same passion and uncompromising desire we bring to our bedrooms.

My reply is that it’s not a zero-sum, either-or game. I can work as a stripper and protest human trafficking. I can call out racism and basically spread the word about what’s essentially biology education (the clitoris and contractions are also important in childbirth — ask any woman who’s been able to masturbate during labor if this made a positive difference!). I can bring home the bacon and fry it up in the pan (as one old school feminist song has it). I mean, fuck it — we’re stuck at all levels pretty much “doing it all” anyway. But it’s easier to do if we can have each other’s support.

Anyway, Cliff Pervocracy (“gender is ‘oh shit, you have to pick one?’ and any personal pronouns are okay to use”) has a blog post that says it so much better:

My sex-positivity does not exist in opposition to non-sex-positive feminism. It exists in opposition to fucked-up social sexual norms. It exists in opposition to the people who attack any sexuality outside strict norms, the people who demand women and girls be sexy but humiliate them for being sexual, the people who treat discussions of sexual safety and consent like obscenity, the society that constructs sexual desire as something dark and dirty and secret and awful. That is sex-negativity. That is the real reason sex-positivity matters. …

Some people are asexual. Some people are sexual but not all that into it. Some people are monogamous, heterosexual, and not into kink. Some people have physical or psychological issues that interfere with them having sex. Trying to ‘free’ any of these people from their ‘repression’ is ignorant, presumptuous, and the very opposite of promoting sexual freedom. …

Plus, there’s a lot of worthy feminist goals that just can’t be shoehorned into being about sex. I think promoting women’s sexual autonomy and respecting the diversity of female sexuality should be a part of feminism, but I’m under no illusions that this is going to fix hiring discrimination or domestic violence. There’s a lot of unsexy work to be done in feminism, and sex-positivity shouldn’t eclipse that.”

Again, this is exactly what we should be talking about — and I truly hope you’ll take some of your time to comment here, read the links and comment there, talk to your own peeps, whatever works for you. I’ll just leave you with two things to think about:

When I tell people that working as a stripper was far better than the other options I’d tried that were open to me — waitressing, hotel maid and working in a library (!) — I often get a condescending smile and a comment to the effect that I couldn’t possibly understand how exploited I was, or else some veiled contempt that I could be a blind cog in such an exploitive system.

The other three options could not pay anyone enough (waiting tables can be very good work, but in the 1970s the lucrative waiting positions were owned by men). All but the library left me open to (unpaid) physical exploitation; in the strip club, they were not allowed to squeeze my ass, or the club could lose its liquor license, and you must believe they took that shit seriously. All the other options were undervalued (they knew they could get students to work in the library for next to nothing; it’s indentured servitude).

The strip club allowed more autonomy and understanding of working conditions — they wouldn’t even allow us to work barefoot because it could present a health hazard they could get docked for by the city — than did restaurants, which presented enormous numbers of physical hazards ranging from no place to change to overcrowding to dangerous temperatures and equipment, to no break time, to needing to go eight hours at a time on foot without eating — oh, don’t get me started on how workers can be exploited.

But my points here are: don’t assume anyone hasn’t done their homework, and getting at the root of how much most labor is exploited would be a better start than chiding strippers. I know brilliant IT professionals who are treated like sweatshop laborers and who are more enmeshed in a more damaging worldwide system than the local corner strip joint could ever be. I am really, really sick of child and adult caretakers getting paid and treated so terribly, and I have no idea what to do about it.

And the second thing: one of the first comments on Pflug-Back’s piece was from a man who had experienced sexual abuse. The lesson here is not that it’s a not a real problem unless men get to be victims, too. The lessons are that looking at historic trends doesn’t make experiences outside of those trends any less important or “real,” and that space has to be held for all gender identities on the spectrum.

It’s not a zero-sum game. If we can figure out how to work this thing, we all win. If we turn it into Victim Olympics, nobody does.

PS: Meanwhile, Cyrus went full-ignoramus on Twitter, mocking O’Connor for her struggles with mental illness. So very very not hot. Did I say “no losers?” Wrong. Cyrus qualifies as a total loser.

8 thoughts on “An Open Letter to the Open-Minded”

  1. I am hesitant to ascribe Miley Cyrus’ appropriation of black culture to the category of racism. A relatively easy answer would be “everybody is doing it” of course that never helps one gain any clarity. But I would like to for a moment consider it nonetheless. Pop music today is filled with examples of cultural appropriation of various types, whites appropriating Black culture, Asian, Spanish you name it, Blacks appropriating White culture… and the list goes on. Appropriation does not entail racism, and culture is not a property belonging solely to any specific group. If this was the case, our culture would have long become stagnant. Culture one may say thrives on appropriation, at least American Culture does. Art in America has never been very keen on remaining traditional, nor exclusively divided among ethnic groups, indeed artists of all sorts have scoured the world appropriating whatever they deemed interesting for themselves. Miley is a product of American culture, where just about any thing is up for grabs culturally. One may of course argue or question the integrity or the authenticity of the appropriation. Was it done as a result of true inspiration? Or is the artist truly immersed in a lifestyle or craft primarily consisting of a different ethnic group? I don’t think anyone would accuse a white rapper of racism. In Miley’s case, was the intention genuine? or simply for the purpose of derision, or popularity, acceptance, or perhaps a sales tactic? The answer is not clear without the particular facts. But was it racist? That is a very dangerous assumption and one that is often tossed around lightly, without considering other potential possibilities, and gathering sufficient evidence. Miley’s approach may have failed, but I do not think we can quite accuse her performance of racism IMHO.

  3. Yes, Madonna is a bit of a curiosity; with money, fame, power, and the ability to do almost anything I choose, I will go to Africa and buy children….

    But there is the wider issue of how ‘culture’, that is individual and collective self-expression, whilst dominated through corporate capitalism, institutionalised religion, and nationhood and nationalisms treats the feminine energy that is necessary for life to be sustained. The females [and males for that matter] who have this energy in abundance and who are able to express it, soulfully, haven’t done very well, Amy, Whitney, Janice, Nina, Sinead… and we can watch the patterns we recognise so well as they are chewed up and spat out (hey, as long as they’re making someone a dollar); but I think to say they are exercising freedom and empowerment is, quite frankly, disingenuous. There are other ways of being and other more successful women have and do show us ways forward, mainly by keeping themselves alive. Let’s see if Miley makes it to thirty without an abusive boyfriend/husband/partner, drug habit, or some other form of addiction or crisis while maintaining her status as ‘object’ par excellence…and then I may revise my views.

  4. I am still working on this, as the language around sex-positive feminism has a lot of double negatives, and gets hard to untangle after a while.

    Lizzy, good point. I look back on my early 20s when I was handed sexual freedom on a platter without knowledge of what to do with it. I made some mistakes, privately, not public, but I played the tapes for years. I look back and say, What freedom? I was free to get into trouble and only my own risk-aversion kept me from getting into more trouble (and having more fun.)

    I’ll rephrase Amanda Palmer in my preferred language: Women expressing their sexuality, whether it is in private relationships or publicly in their art or activism, need the inner tools of empowerment, and a context of nourishment and support. I’ve always wondered about women who said posing for Playboy was “empowering” and “healing”. This happened a lot after 70s sex scandals. It was the opportunity available to them back then, I guess.

    Don’t we have to take an adult’s word that her actions and decisions come from her own sense of self-expression, empowerment, or at least exploring what these are for her. No matter where she’s coming from in her inner life, the outer effect is likely to be crazy-making: People jerking off, and throwing stones, often from the same hand.

    btw, Sinead wasn’t throwing stones. She was providing context, nourishment, and in a way saying, Sharpen your tools — and maybe, get a union card.

    Miley is an adult, and 20 was still very young. I wasn’t making great decisions at 20. Then according to Amanda Palmer, she doesn’t think Madonna is making great decisions at 50. ” (YOU’RE MADONNA! YOU COULD HAVE MADE AGING SEXY GODAMMIT AND YOU DIDN’T!!),”

    Love that line!

    Madonna blew it, so Maria, I guess it’s up to you and me to make aging sexy ;o)

  5. I think it’s Sinead O’ Connor that’s stimulated the conversation rather than Miley Cyrus. Sinead OC knows the industry like the back of her hand and has been its victim in the past. MC’s performances are another version of Britney Spears and Madonna making out. It looks like freedom but it’s anything but. The music industry is all about making big bucks – that’s the bottom line – a gorgeous woman making controversial sexy videos = big money.

  7. Maria! I find myself agreeing with all three women, Sinead, Amanda, and Kelly. What’s up with that?
    It can only mean that sex-positive feminism is a hot-bed of diversity. One perspective won’t begin to cover it, or to solve the problems of oppression, repression, and suppression world-wide.

    Yours is the 2nd article today on the shaming tone of Sinead O’Connor’s letter to Miley. I wondered why she wrote the letter, but then I see it was provoked initially by Miley’s own comments. The motherly, finger-wagging tone elicited a juvenile response from the Miley team, but I am glad Sinead spoke up. Miley is an adult and not for one second a victim. However, the conversation needs that cautionary voice, and Sinead has earned the right to speak out. She’s always spoken out, and paid for it.

    My first hit on Kelly’s post was where did strident, narrow perspective come from? She wins me over later, but I have a few things to rant about in response to her assessment of the Cliteracy project.

    She writes: “The Cliteracy project seems to propagate the idea that sexual empowerment in the 21st century means that women should enjoy getting off and that men should enjoy getting women off. While society has long been plagued by suppressed knowledge of the female sexual anatomy, a superficial and reductionist critique like Cliteracy results in men being able to think that they are being “good” feminists by mere virtue of enjoying giving oral sex to women.”

    There is nothing superficial about women of any station in life reclaiming their orgasm. Period. The more middle class “mostly-white” women in the U. S. have more and better orgasms the better for the sexual and political liberty of women world-wide. Yes there is a whole woman attached to the “iceberg” of the clitoris, and you can touch the whole woman when you touch her g-spot, or teach her to touch it. Kelly Rose writes: “Women’s sexual empowerment is not an issue which can be separated from broader struggles for gender justice.” and yet her article separates. A teenage friend of mine might say she’s making orgasmic empowerment a “first world problem”.

    It’s like this: sexual empowerment is not separate from gender justice. Take care to not separate it with language like “broader struggles”. I’m gonna let this rest. Ms Kelly has come from a place I have never experienced, and I respect and value what she brings to the table. (and I don’t even think that puts me at odds with Cliff Pervocracy)

    Saved the best for last. Amanda Palmer is class act all the way. She manages to be respectful and honoring of each person and point of view. I love the video of her Sinead/Miley mashup on her website. Her closing line sums it up: let’s give our young women the right weapons to fight with as they charge naked into battle, instead of ordering them to get back in the house and put some goddamn clothes on.

    The right weapons to fight with. I don’t care for battle metaphors, but I reckon this one works.

    I am not following Miley Cyrus’ career or her art. I only know what I read on Planetwaves. I’ll say this for her, she’s stimulated a lot of important conversation. It’s got to be good.

    PS. As a former union member, whose children were fed and clothes by local 608 carpenters and joiners, I love that video, and get that scab off the job site!

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