Diversity at Work

By Thomas Huang

RELATED

Blog posts: "Girl Gone Mild," by Mary Elizabeth Williams, The Takeaway. "The Miley Cyrus/Vanity Fair Saga," by Jamie Lee Curtis, The Huffington Post "Sexualizing Miley: Are Billy Ray and Tish Cyrus Letting Her Be the New Lolita?" by Bonnie Fuller, The Huffington Post News stories: "Who's Minding Miley?" Forbes.com, April 28, 2008 "Disney Taps Wants, Wallets of 'Tweens,' The Boston Globe, Nov. 6, 2006 "In the Concert Hall, It Smells Like Teen Spirit," The Washington Post, Aug. 6, 2006 "Marketing and Tweens," BusinessWeek, Oct. 12, 2005 "Disney Finds Place for Tweens," USA Today, Oct. 26, 2005 "Tweens: A Billion Dollar Market," CBS News, Dec. 15, 2004 "Disney's Tween Machine," Fortune Magazine, Sept. 29, 2003

For those of you who think the Miley Cyrus controversy is frivolous, let me be contrarian. Once you get beyond the celebrity titillation factor, it's a multi-faceted story that would benefit from thoughtful reporting and analysis.

To recap: Cyrus, an actress and singer, plays Hannah Montana on the Disney Channel. Her sitcom and concert tour have reportedly made the company more than $1 billion. Last year, Forbes ranked the 15-year-old among the Top 20 earners under 25. Young girls adore her -- especially "tweens" between the age of 8 and 12.

This week, Vanity Fair posted online photos of Cyrus taken by Annie Leibovitz. In one, Cyrus is wrapped in a sheet, with her back and shoulders bare. Quel shock! 

Outraged parents swarmed blogs. Disney accused the magazine of manipulating the teen. Cyrus at first called the photo "artistic," then apologized to her fans: "I feel so embarrassed." Vanity Fair responded by saying that Miley's parents or handlers had been with her during the entire photo shoot, and that they had looked at the digital images ahead of time.

This all transpired before the magazine was even out on newsstands. (It was available in New York and Los Angeles on Wednesday, and will be available on most newsstands next week.)

My first reaction was: Much ado about nothing. Tell me more about the Iraq war, the Jeremiah Wright flap, the home mortgage crisis. But when I thought more about it, I realized there are several dimensions to the Cyrus story -- all worth exploring through serious journalism.

Business: This is a story about big business, with a whiff of manufactured controversy. Tweens spend an estimated $30 billion of their own money and influence $126 billion in spending by their parents, according to one youth marketing firm.

And Disney has perfected the art of marketing to this age group. It has created a factory of young, clean-cut stars and, as The Washington Post's William Booth noted, promotes them via "the company's television channels, podcasts, Web sites, movies, theme parks, DVDs, record labels, radio stations, products and concerts."

Problem is, these young stars have a limited shelf life with Disney, aging out a la Logan's Run (sorry, most tweens wouldn't understand that reference). So you can begin to see how an "edgy" photo shoot would make business sense for Cyrus and her family.

Mary Elizabeth Williams, a critic who blogs for Public Radio International''s new program, "The Takeaway," argues that Cyrus "won't remain frozen in adolescent amber. She's growing up, and if she wants to take her fans into adulthood with her -- and have the career longevity her charisma and talent could bring -- she has to grow into a more mature persona."

Taking this one step further: With the amount of money Disney has at stake here, do you really believe the company was unaware of the photo shoot? If it was aware of the shoot, was it clueless about Leibovitz's provocative approach? At least through quiet acquiescence, could this not be a calculated move on Disney's part, as well?

Gender and sexuality: This is a story about the confining stereotypes that girls grow up with in our culture -- for Cyrus, it's played out on a public stage. For guidance, I talked with Kelly McBride, Poynter's ethics group leader, who has led workshops on the coverage of sex and sexuality.

McBride asked, "How, as a girl, do you explore your sexuality in the limelight" if you become famous before you've established the sexual side of your personality?

In today's culture, "it's hard for girls to figure out what kind of girl they want to be," McBride said. "There are such narrow stereotypes. There's the 'pure Christian,' the 'bookish feminist,' the 'slut,' the 'trophy girl.' The boundaries are so harsh in these categories, and they defy reality.

"For girls who are watching this happen [to Cyrus], this doesn't inform them, it doesn't help them," she said. "They are living through the same thing. They are trying to figure out who they are -- and every piece of clothing they wear, every choice they make, is seen through the sexual lens.

"By posing with a sheet, Miley is a 'bad girl.' She's broken her stereotype" of being a "good girl." But in the real world, "most 15-year-old girls are exploring who they are. The problem is that Miley doesn't have people who are shielding her, she has people exploiting her."

Popular culture: The Cyrus controversy strikes me as part of a recurring, formulaic narrative that we in the media either help create or at least reinforce when it presents itself in pop culture. We've seen young, female celebrities like Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohan go through similar dramatic arcs -- the innocence, the controversy, the apology, the publicity, the punditry and the money-making for everyone involved in the story.

In a column about Spears' decline, Poynter's Roy Peter Clark pointed this out about such celebrities: "By 16, she has become completely sexualized by the culture. Every move, every gesture, every mistake in judgment comes under the most intense scrutiny. And we wonder, even as we let the spectacle wash over us, what went wrong."

Disney, Vanity Fair, Annie Leibovitz, Miley Cyrus and her country-singer father Billy Ray Cyrus, Cyrus' handlers, the media, the bloggers -- we all seem to know what our roles are in this, and we play these roles well.

But even though she's making tons of money, Cyrus is the one potential victim in all of this. One can only hope she does not meet the same kind of unhappiness her predecessors have.