Cinderella Ate My Daughter

by Peggy Orenstein

  But the winner for most spectacular slide from squeaky to skanky has got to be Britney Spears. It is hard to believe now, but the singer’s original audience was as young as—maybe younger than—Miley Cyrus’s. Six-year-olds adored the singer the way they would a favorite babysitter, the one who lets you brush her hair. Britney was a relatively mature seventeen when she shimmied onto the scene in 1998, and her success was arguably the template for all the contradictory, mixed, or bait-and-switch messages that have since defined mainstream girls’ culture: flaunt your sexuality but don’t feel it, use it for power but not for pleasure. From the start, Britney tried to have it both ways, selling sex and candy. In her breakthrough video, “ . . . Baby One More Time” (the ellipses a stand-in for the words “Hit Me”), she wore a short Catholic schoolgirl’s skirt, knee socks, and a white blouse tied to reveal her midriff and unbuttoned to show a black bra. A year later, she confessed, “Oops! . . . I did it again!” while writhing on her back under the video camera’s leering eye. It is tempting to say that Britney in her prime was just another iteration of Madonna, challenging expectations, messing with assumptions, self-consciously exploiting herself before the culture could do it for her: commenting on rather than participating in girls’ sexualization. She encouraged that connection by infamously tongue-wrestling the older performer onstage—Britney dressed as a bride, Madonna as a groom—while performing “Like a Virgin,” at the 2003 MTV Video Awards. But in the end, the comparison fails. I have to admit that I am not a huge Madonna fan. Although I’m happy to hit the dance floor for “Lucky Star,” I was never convinced that she was so revolutionary, that she ever really “empowered” anyone but herself. A lot of women who spent their teen years wearing their bras on the outside of their shirts may disagree, but whether you got into her groove or not, Madonna never denied what she was doing—quite the opposite. From the start, with her BOY TOY belt and dangling crucifix, it was she who called the shots: she was self-created, explicit both about her intent and about the contradictions of women’s sexuality that she explored. She was also an actual adult—age twenty-five when her first album was released—and she was not aggressively courting second-graders as fans. When she skipped through Venice singing “Like a Virgin,” it was darned clear she was not one.

  Britney, on the other hand, publicly insisted on her chastity (at least for a while). She was not only a loud-and-proud virgin, urging other girls to follow her example, but acted willfully clueless about the disconnect between her words and deeds. So although in 1999, while still seventeen, she appeared on the cover of Rolling Stone in short shorts and a black push-up bra, clutching a stuffed Teletubby, inside the magazine she declared in all earnestness, “I don’t want to be part of someone’s Lolita thing. It kind of freaks me out.” People are so pervy, she would sigh, it wasn’t her fault if they got the wrong idea. Later, in an Esquire interview illustrated by a photo in which she posed naked save for microscopic undies and several artfully placed strands of pearls, she commented, “Look, if you want me to be some kind of sex thing, that’s not me.” She did it again! How can she be blamed—she just can’t help herself ! She has no idea what she’s doing! She may radiate sex, but how, at her tender age, could she be responsible for that? It was her stubborn disingenuousness—her winking detachment from her actions and impact—that eroticized Britney’s (not so) innocence and, unintentionally or not, that of the millions of elementary school–aged girls who slavishly followed her. When they bared their midriffs—or performed sexually charged dance moves or wore “sassy” costumes—they were not in on the joke.

  Eventually, though, Britney got older and needed to evolve; when she dropped the act and became consciously rather than “accidentally” sexy, the public turned on her, and the knowing naïf was branded a slut. How were fans supposed to understand that? Suddenly Britney’s fairy tale was transformed into a cautionary tale: woe to girls who step over the ever-shifting invisible line between virgin and whore (or as one group of middle school ex-fans referred to Britney, “slore,” an elision of “slut” and “whore”). Over the course of five years, the singer married and divorced, shacked up with a guy whose previous girlfriend was eight months pregnant with his child, bounced through rehab, shaved her head, stopped wearing panties in public (what is with that?), had two sons, lost them in a custody battle, and finally was hauled from her house on a gurney and diagnosed with bipolar disorder. Given the schizoid comments she had been spewing since high school, was that such a shock? I’m not saying that every girl who teeters on the tightrope between child and woman risks ending up institutionalized, but, again like Cinderella in her time, Britney embodies the predicament of ordinary girls writ large. They, too, struggle with the expectation to look sexy but not feel sexual, to provoke desire in others without experiencing it themselves. Our daughters may not be faced with the decision of whether to strip for Maxim, but they will have to figure out how to become sexual beings without being objectified or stigmatized. That is not easy when self-respect has become a marketing gimmick, a way for female pop stars to bide their time before serving up their sexuality as a product for public consumption.

  Miley Cyrus grinned down from giant banners flanking the entrance to the Oracle Arena in Oakland, California. MILEY CYRUS: ONLY AT WALMART! they announced. Beneath them, fans lined up five-deep hoping to catch a glimpse of their idol live as she strode from her tour bus in the parking lot to her backstage dressing room. It was the fall of 2009, and this was the second stop on Miley’s forty-five-city Wonder World Tour, her first since her spate of miniscandals. The crowd—mostly in the six- to nine-year-old range with a smattering of ten- to twelve-year-olds and a few stray teens—seemed unfazed by her media spankings. They waved homemade cardboard signs with Miley’s or Hannah’s picture pasted on them, surrounded by hand-drawn flowers, puff-painted hearts, or feathers. MILEY, YOU ROCK THE HOUSE! one read. HANNAH MONTANA SONGS ARE THE BEST! claimed another.

  A year ago, my own daughter had come here for a “Disney on Ice” show, invited by a friend who was celebrating her birthday. The party guests had dressed as Cinderella, Belle, Ariel (though Daisy, perhaps due to months of maternal propaganda, chose Pocahontas, the only child to do so in a crowd of thousands). The mob of girls here tonight, including the ones just a year or two older than the ice show crowd, were also dressed up as Disney Princesses, though the nature of the costumes had changed: they wore miniskirts bare-legged with high-heeled boots, topped off by pink-and-black buffalo-checked fedoras; zebra-print shirts with sparkling bodices that would have highlighted their cleavages had they had any. Several little girls swung by in white furry boots and low-rise black pleather “jeggings” (a combo of jeans and leggings). A stretch Hummer pulled up to disgorge a group of what I am guessing were second-graders in black minis with chains slung low across the hips and pink fingerless gloves.

  I doubt that the six-year-old with the crimped hair and fuchsia mini would describe what she was wearing as sexy. To her it was just fun, attention-getting; she is the real-life, genuine version of the Britney Spears Rolling Stone cover. Disney’s Andy Mooney had told me that Princess (and so, presumably, by extension, Hannah & Co.) was “aspirational”; I was not so sure I would want my daughter aspiring to this. Pink-and-pretty had been marketed to parents of preschoolers as evidence of their innocence, a harmless, even natural, way to identify as a girl. Now, for their older sisters, the pitch was changing: looking hot or at least hot-esque—at concerts, on Halloween, after school, in your dance routines—was the way to express femininity, to “be true, be you.” Two slightly older girls walked by, gum cracking, hips swaying, eyelids darkened with thick liner. They wore identical skintight microminis, black camisoles, and boots, again with bare legs. One had flung a pink neon feather boa around her neck, the other a chartreuse one. They seemed about twelve, so I figured they were old enough for the look. Then I recalled the beauty pageant I had attended, how quickly I had become accustomed to five-year-olds with spray tans, teased h
air, and lipstick, and I reconsidered: when, exactly, had a twelve-year-old Stripperella ceased to shock?

  When Miley finally appeared, the crowd crushed forward, screaming at a frequency attainable only by young girls and Wagnerian sopranos. Next to me, a little girl in a Hello Kitty T-shirt and pink cowboy boots jumped up and down, nearly out of control. “I can’t see, I can’t see!” she hollered. Miley, dressed in her preshow outfit of black cargo pants with a tank top and oversized shades, crinkled her nose endearingly and waved at the crowd. Her smile seemed genuine as she stopped to pose for photos and sign a few hurried autographs. Even after she was well out of sight the fans continued to shriek, just for the joy of it. A ten-year-old with a SECRET STAR shirt and multicolored barrettes stared in disbelief at the picture of Miley she’d snapped on her cell phone. “I’m sending this to everyone on my contact list right now!!” she announced. It was, admittedly, sort of heartening to see girls swoon for a female star rather than for the latest Backstreet/Hanson/Jonas pretty boy.

  Inside, real-time text messages sent by the audience scrolled by on screens surrounding the stage. “WE LOVE YOU MILEY!” “I LOVE YOU!” “MY 5-YEAR-OLD’S FIRST CONCERT. SHE LOVES YOU!” When the lights finally dimmed, the crowd hollered again, frantically waving light sticks. Smoke-machine fog rolled across the stage, clearing to reveal what appeared to be a giant chrysalis, surrounded by whirling dancers. A figure stepped out, head covered by a drab shawl. Suddenly flames exploded, lasers bounced across the stage, the figure threw off the shawl, and . . . it was Miley, her brown hair flowing, her cargo pants and tank top replaced by black leather hot pants and a low-cut leather vest. She burst into a song titled “Breakout.” “It feels so good to let go-o-o!” she sang.

  This was a very different girl from the one who, some two years earlier, on the eve of her fifteenth birthday, had confided to Oprah Winfrey that “I look way young, and that’s the way it’s more comfortable to me”; the one who had said that she chooses clothing that “will get a thumbs-up from girls and their parents”; the one whom, only a year before, Barbara Walters had introduced as “any parent’s antidote to the common crop of teen train wrecks.” Back then, Miley had earnestly told Walters why she was different from Britney, Jamie Lynn (Britney’s sister, the star of Nickelodeon’s Zoey 101, who became pregnant out of wedlock at age sixteen), Lindsay, and the Olsen twins: “Some people don’t have a family to fall back on and faith.” She, by implication, was a girl whom parents could trust not to treat clean values as a stepping-stone to something else—she was sincere.

  The Vanity Fair photos hit the Web less than three months later.

  Even those who were inclined to cut Miley some slack, to chalk that incident up to a momentary lapse in judgment, began to wonder in the summer of 2009, when she debuted her new single, “Party in the U.S.A.,” on the Teen Choice Awards (whose audience is made up largely of preteen girls). She strutted out of a trailer in booty shorts and a sparkly tank slit up the sides to expose her bra. As she sang, she stepped offstage, onto an ice cream cart topped with a pole, the kind that would typically be used as an umbrella stand; then, hanging on with one hand, she dropped into a squat, her knees splayed, her back arched. The move was, to say the least, at odds with the image of the family-friendly pop star she portrayed on TV.

  Once again, controversy broke out: What kind of sticky-sweet treat was this flavor of the moment selling? Miley claimed the crouch was insignificant, not to mention personally approved by her father. Bloggers called the umbrella stand “a stripper pole with training wheels” and accused Billy Ray of pimping his sixteen-year-old child rather than doing his paternal duty by protecting her. Around that time, Miley was also photographed in Elle magazine lying on a table wearing a short skirt and thigh-high black boots. In both cases, she once again apologized to her fans, though she was beginning to come off as the child-star version of Richard Nixon. More and more, the “mistakes” were seen as part of the plan. It was Miley’s turn to cast off the role model mantle, along with the worshipful audience who had believed it was real.

  By the time I saw Miley in concert, she had agreed, after some tense negotiation, to stay at the Disney Channel for a final season of Hannah Montana. But the Mouse House was already moving her out. There is always a new girl in the wings, someone who promises never to disappoint by shucking her principles along with her clothes. For the moment, both Selena Gomez and Demi Lovato—show business veterans who met on the set of Barney and Friends in 2002—were being promoted as the Anti-Mileys (Bridgit Mendler, the star of the show Good Luck Charlie, is another contender). Selena, who also appeared on Hannah Montana, had since 2007 played a girl with magical powers on the Disney Channel’s Sabrina knockoff, Wizards of Waverly Place. Demi’s more recent “zit-com,” Sonny with a Chance, is a more overt Hannah Montana rip-off: she plays a small-town girl who lands a role on a TV show and has to adjust to her newfound stardom. As of this writing, Selena seems to be breaking bigger: her first solo album, Kiss & Tell, debuted at number nine on the charts. In addition to a Wizards made-for-TV movie, she co-starred in the 2010 release Ramona and Beezus, and her likeness has been plastered on some 30 million packages of Sara Lee baked goods.

  Wizards is, all things considered, a pretty entertaining show. Gomez has the best comic timing of any Disney girl to date: at the very least, her repertoire of reactions extends beyond eye-bugging. The character she plays is strong, smart, and, aside from the hocus-pocus, surprisingly real: she does not seem to be all about being pretty, nor does she always make the right choices. It goes without saying that Gomez herself comes off as down to earth and adorable. That is her job. A Wall Street Journal profile gushed that her every-teen dressing room was decorated “with a bright floral rug, a shag blanket thrown across a sofa and a few scattered bookshelves.” A quick Google search of news items generated right around the time of her album’s release portrays her as a UNICEF ambassador to Ghana, a dog lover, and someone who “gives back to her community” (bestowing a thousand dollars’ worth of supplies on her elementary school alma mater courtesy of OfficeMax). Although she is actually a year older than Miley, she looks younger, and she assured the Journal reporter that she is “in no rush to be twenty-five.” Sound familiar?

  Historical memory for pop culture tends to be short, especially where children’s idols are concerned. The parents of today’s six-year-olds have only a hazy recall of Hilary Duff’s or Britney Spears’s or even Lindsay Lohan’s stints as “good-girl” icons. So it is easy to convince them that this girl is unlike those others, that this time it honestly will be different. I want to believe it myself—I like Selena. But I wonder: her virginity has already been made a selling point—like Miley before her, she wears a “true love waits” ring, meaning she has vowed to remain “pure” until marriage, presumably to a Justin Bieber clone on a white horse. I suspect that you cannot commodify a girl’s virginity without, eventually, commodifying what comes after. Regardless, how realistic—how desirable—is that Disney version of girls’ sexuality, either for Selena or for her fans?

  Let me be clear here: I object—strenuously—to the sexualization of girls but not necessarily to girls having sex. I expect and want my daughter to have a healthy, joyous erotic life before marriage. Long, long, long before marriage. I do, however, want her to understand why she’s doing it: not for someone else’s enjoyment, not to keep a boyfriend from leaving, not because everyone else is. I want her to do it for herself. I want her to explore and understand her body’s responses, her own pleasure, her own desire. I want her to be able to express her needs in relationship, to say no when she needs to, to value reciprocity, and to experience true intimacy. The virgin/whore cycle of the pop princesses, like so much of the girlie-girl culture, pushes in the opposite direction, encouraging girls to view self-objectification as a feminine rite of passage.

  The debate over whether Miley’s (or Britney’s or Vanessa’s or someday, mark my words, Selena’s) photo spreads are “too seductive” o
r “too suggestive” for her age is beside the point. Of course they are. They have to be. What other choice do these girls have? What choices are they given? I would like to see the Hannah Montana episode in which Miley Stewart confronts the real truth about what it means to be a girl growing up in the privilege and the confines of the spotlight’s glare. What would that look like? A lot, I would bet, like Miley Cyrus’s actual microscopically dissected life. Ultimately, it was not the Vanity Fair shoot or the stripper stunt or the hooker heels that crossed the line: it was the fetishizing of Miley’s wholesomeness, the inevitable trajectory from accidentally to accidentally-on-purpose to simply on-purpose sexy. Why isn’t it until that final leap, when a girl actively acknowledges and participates in what is happening, that parents of young fans cry foul?

  Back at the Oracle Arena, Miley paced the runway; flipped her mane; got jiggy with the boys in the band; lay down on her back, legs tucked under, jamming on an air guitar. She donned a harness and went airborne while performing her hit “Fly on the Wall.” She soared again on a candy apple red Harley during a cover of Joan Jett’s classic “I Love Rock and Roll.” During the entire ninety-minute set, however, she sang only two Hannah Montana songs (one of which was conspicuously steamed up), and through multiple costume changes she never went near a blond wig. This was emphatically a Miley show, but many of the grade school fans there that night, not to mention their moms, had failed to get that memo—and they were not happy about it. The little girl sitting next to me, who, judging by her missing teeth, was about seven, watched the spectacle, her ponytail bobbing with the rhythm of each song. But eventually she seemed to grow impatient, possibly overwhelmed by the thumping bass.