Miley Mania, Steinem Style

                                      

According to Huffington Post (ever the arbiter of all things considered intelligent and urbane, or at least easily digested in a five-second e-mail check), when Gloria Steinem speaks a mere seven or eight sentences on a topic, we, the passive, mind-numbingly stupid public must consider said subject hereafter closed.

Screw that.

Gloria Steinem does not think for me or for any woman or man I know.  

We think for ourselves.  And yes, while we do in some good measure owe our ability to publicly proclaim our thoughts to her diligent and focused efforts a number of years ago, women (and men) have been thinking for centuries.  And just because one former Playboy bunny (a still very sexy 79-year old--a feat which in and of itself deserves an ovation) has dedicated her life to feminist causes does not entitle her to become the final and, apparently only, arbiter for us all.

The subject at hand is, fittingly, Miley Cyrus' very accomplished use of her childlike body, her tongue, her lipstick, and her tiny little buttocks to gain worldwide attention, thereby establishing her place atop the Olympian mountain of our collectively wee brains' pop culture knowledge.

Kudos to Miley, I suppose, if worldwide pop culture attention is one's aim.

But I disagree with Ms. Steinem's assessment that Miley's performance (and Robin Thicke's) and a legion of other performers, writers and filmmakers currently working are not setting women (and men) back.

They are.  All of us.  And the harm being done is gender-blind.  Gender-blind, Ms. Steinem.  For where one suffers, we all suffer.  

Sex is good.  The desire for sex was given to earthly creatures for the very practical purpose of procreation.  Fortunately for human beings a little extra gray matter and what some of us call a four-letter word--the soul--can endow the act with significant emotional and spiritual resonance.

What Miley, Thicke, and thousands of others like them (trace it back as far as you would like--Madonna, Hugh Hefner, blah, blah, blah) have done is remove that very intricate, exquisitely delicate, almost unspeakable element that makes us human.

They have bestialized us all.

And if that isn't setting us all back to when we first clawed our way up out of the mud, I don't know what does.

This life isn't a game.  Sex isn't a game.  

The decisions we make about how we live, both publicly and privately, are not mere flicks of the wrist over the chessboard of our days.  For Steinem to equate what Miley and thousands like her do to "playing the game" is to belittle all our lives.  And, oddly enough, to belittle her own efforts because, last time I checked, there are lots of other games in town for women, in large part due to her own work!

I hope this debate isn't over, because if it is, we all have lost.  Rutting in a field with whatever rump passes by is, in my mind, a waste of so much--a waste of what makes us human, a waste of what makes it possible for us to even contemplate, much less create, art, a waste of the poetic, lyric, quintessential loveliness of so many human souls I know and admire.

So thanks, Ms. Steinem, for the hard work all those years ago.  But if it's all right with you, I will decide for myself whether and how to play "the game".  And when I am disappointed in my fellow citizens about the way they choose to play it, and the rules they choose to follow or to flout, I will exercise my human and singularly private right to be so.

And to the nameless, faceless hand that posted this HuffPost piece:  you have a brain.  Use it.