A tasteless joke sure can rile some people up. I was just trying to get to the root of the whole thing in a rather crude way. As others have pointed out, she's not exactly a child.

A fair percentage of the models that grace the covers of today's fashion rags are in her age range. Why single her out? I think the reason is because people actually know her age. The truth is a lot of the covergirls that grace adult fashion mags are as young as 14. They were just made to look older which gives men a chance for a guilt free drool. Yet when they 'slut up' little Miley, who people are accustomed to seeing as wholesome--like their own daughters,they freak out.

It's all a part of the great American double standard.

Every sexually mature woman should be sexualized! That is one of the basic drives and functions of being a human being. It is incumbent upon her to look as hot as possible for a good portion of the time.

The story is that there is no story.

16-year old women are sexually mature. A good percentage of 16-year old girls (38% in 1995) are not virgins.

The unnatural behavior here is not Miley Cyrus wanting to present herself as a sexually mature woman, but rather the horde of supposedly mature adults who insist that a 16-year old girl behave in a way that completely denies her sexuality.

And of course, this kind of judgment is never raised with a 16-year old boy, is it? The disparity in gender expectations is itself a sign of the latent sexism in the country.

there is ZERO story here.

so she's hot. At least she looks like she has some class, unlike most feminists, who can't help but only look skanky.

as for the entertainment industry 'programming' people, as soon as you, I and everyone else stops GAWKING, they will stop producing it.

you feminists are so hypocritical you do not even know. the girl benefits from this enormously. Other girls want to be her, or look like her. Older women still wish they could be her.

it is not about dirty pictures, it is about women's jealousy and about control of the 'market'. In other words, it is about how to screw MEN over some more.

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?

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

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.