My main problem with this is that I don't think this girl's pretty. At all.

This is the long and short of it.

"We're all too happy to see her clad in a girly frock and schoolgirl socks -- however, black thigh-high boots, and a black pushup bra? Horrors, that's a child! But in both cases she's an eroticized 16-year-old celebrity"

This confuses me. Yeah, in the Britney video with the Catholic school skirt hiked up to her privates, SHE was sexualized. But normally, why is a "girly frock" sexualizing? My niece loves Hannah Montana, and on that show the girl is hardly put into a position of being a sex symbol. And if "girly frocks" are sexualizing, pray tell how she could dress and NOT be sexualized? I can't think of a third alternative.

You can't blame it all on the right wing, not by a long shot, though obviously the "left" and right on this issue feed off each other.

Not necessarily sexism, lots of people DO think that BOTH 16 year old boys and girls should be asexual. The difference is that they can more successfully intimidate girls, and maybe their parents.

The conservatives, as one writer pointed out, follow a twisted set of mixed messages. But what of the mixed messages coming from feminists here?

She is 16 yrs old. Many here would defend (as I do) sex education, providing contraceptives, and some even defend the right of a girl this age to have an abortion without notifying the parents. Yet she wears some boots and its a sign of the exploitation of women?

So we're saying she is old enough to know about sex, have it, old enough to handle contraceptives and old enough to CHOOSE abortion/Birth. Yet now she isn't old enough, mature enough, or capable of choosing to look sexy? Its some how exploitation?

Jeez, no wonder our kids are so f'ed up. If it isn't the rightwing hypocrasy its the left wings...

You're probably the best writer here.

Her comment on the hooker boots photo was "its really cool that she is on a table and ladder at the same time." When I asked her specifically about the clothing and boots, she said they were cool. She was more interested in the climbing on the furniture aspect. The other photos also elicited the same sort of non-response. My 9 year old is a huge Miley/Hannah fan, and she didn't find anything unusual about the pictures. I do not as a habit expose my child to fashion magazines or a lot of television. She is old enough to know that Hannah Montana is a character on a TV show. I think adults are making too much of a big deal about this.

but I don't find either of these photos erotic. And I enjoy looking at erotic photos of women. She looks kinda silly, like a little girl walking about in her mother's way-too-large high heels. Frankly, I'd rather see the mother.

My main problem with this is that I don't think this girl's pretty. At all.

from Tracy Clark-Flory, of all people. (Newbies: somewhere in Ms. Clark-Flory's journalistic archive, you can find her reminiscences of her own teenage sexual exploits, like how she lost her virginity, and a rough accounting of her sexual conquests. Etc.)

Firsthand recollection: some of the girls in my high school in 1971 wore hot pants to school, braless in knit tops. Wow. Talk about a heterosexual recruitment tactic.

The culture has, in fact, changed so much over the past 40 years that teenage girls would not feel safe in wearing those outfits to their high schools today, as a rule.

Just like hardly anyone hitchhikes any more.

But I really don't find the fashion choices of the 1970s to be the catalytic factor in making this country a much more brutish and scary place for young people, 30 years on; or for the ascendancy of pimpin' 'ho' culture that began kicking in full force in around the early 1990s, in terms of role modeling for young people...for everybody, actually.

In the decades following my high school years in the early 1970s, we've since been through other fashion phenomena that have been sold to young people: the ripped-fishnet years; bustiers; black eye makeup; mural tattooing; the junkie anorectic look, stripper thongs...and now, black leather thigh high boots, a look that I personally find pretentious- and erotically neutral, at best. (btw, Miley Cyrus does not have the legs to pull off the look. Maybe when she grows up some more, and eats a few more sandwiches.)

I'm not a particular fan of any of those looks, actually. (Anyhow, for me, it's more about who's under the clothes. Sorry. Maybe it's a guy thing.) And as a sexual signifier, I find ripped fishnet stockings to be a lot more ominous and exploitative of women than a tank top t-shirt worn without a bra. But it ain't the clothes worn by teenagers and young women that are driving the Prurience Index in this society, and the sexualization of children.

(Makeup and sexualized clothing on pre-teen, pre-adolescent children is a trend I find very pernicious. But Miley Cyrus is not 9 years old. She's obviously reached the age of nubility. Admittedly, at age 15 she's still jailbait- in this country. But no adult male could be thrown in jail for having a sexual relationship with her in any of the nations of the world having a lower age of consent. Like Canada, for example.)

Another factor that's problematic when associated with teenage sexuality is the rise of IMAGE IMAGE IMAGE all the time, as driven by the breakthroughs in visual technology and ease of software distribution that led to television, film, and the computer screen being a much more seductive communications medium, more more amenable to enabling psychological exploitation through manipulation of the 70% of neural perception receptors devoted to visual stimuli in the general run of human brains.

But most of that is simply Modernity, which is and always has been a mixed bag. You don't like the TV shows or music videos, don't watch them. If you don't like the fashion trends in society, don't wear them or approve them.

Embedded societal features like the Zero Tolerance War On Drugs, on the other hand...now that's a serious culture warper. As it grinds on, year in and year out, with it's record of accomplishment and achievement, like graduating more jail and prison veterans every year on to the streets...how much more needs to be said about that?