Trainwreck: The Women We Love to Hate, Mock, and Fear . . . And Why Read Online Free

(sample comment:“What is with these twenty-something girls and their flappy labia?”) and again, despite the non-consensual nature of the exposure, the women were the ones to be shamed for it.
    Which is not to say that consent has no bearing on how we treat young women’s nudity. It has a very real impact. Even if you live in an environment where people are constantly trying to expose your body against your will, and even if those people consistently call you disgusting for being successfully assaulted, you can still make your reputation far worse by getting naked voluntarily.
    The accusation most frequently aimed at Hilton to justify our treatment of her—and, later, at her former assistant, Kim Kardashian—was that she had intentionally leaked the sex tape. Similarly, women caught in the “upskirt” phenomena were typically accused of seeking attention. To this day, Rihanna can trigger op-eds on the downfall of Western civilization just by showing a nipple. But let’s go from the macro-level to the micro, for a moment, and consider the strange fate of Miley Cyrus—tasked, through the holy offices of the Disney Channel, with representing the eternal purity of Heterosexual American Girlhood. There were quite a few major problems inherent in saddling Cyrus with this job, which we’ll get to later, but one of the first is that Cyrus did not show any tremendous fondness for “purity”—at least, not to the extent that “purity” can be measured by wearing clothes when in public.
    Cyrus is no stranger to sexual-assault-by-press-corps, most of which took place when she was underage. (In addition to the 2012 “upskirt,” in 2008, hacker Josh Holly—going,as fate would have it, by the name “TrainReq”—stole and posted Cyrus’s wet-T-shirt selfies. The photos were taken when she was fourteen.) Yet this is a mere footnote in the vast history of Miley Cyrus Sexual Outrage, nearly all of which was generated by intentionally showing up in less clothing than people expected.
    There were rumblings early on, when she posed for a back-exposing Annie Liebowitz shoot in Vanity Fair at the age of fifteen. (“For Miley Cyrus to be a ‘good girl’ is now a business decision for her,” her boss, the president of entertainment for the Disney Channel, pronounced ominously. “Parents have invested in her a godliness. If she violates that trust, she won’t get it back.”) In those days, people tended to claim that their revulsion stemmed from the fact that Cyrus was too young to be sexualized, and, indeed, it’s demonstrably not a good idea for adults to encourage minors to take their tops off in photos. Yet that very concern caused people to see everything Cyrus did as sexual: When she held onto a pole on a moving platform during one dance, there were op-eds about her “pole dancing.” If she danced in a leotard, wore a short skirt, had a visible bra underneath her shirt, or touched her torso during a concert, she made headlines.
    “It’s wrong for Miley to have agreed to play the child and teen character, Hannah Montana , for another year if she intended to behave like a stripper on stage,” blogger Bonnie Fuller wrote at Hollywood Life in 2010 (headline: MILEY CYRUS IS AN OVERSEXED TRAINWRECK WAITING TO HAPPEN! ), adding: “She’s behaving like the devil.”
    And so, the very fact that adults wanted to “protect” teens from being seen in a sexual light somehow turned an actual teenager into a stripper, the devil, and the walking embodiment of predatory lust. In 2013, when a twenty-year-old Cyrus twerked against Robin Thicke at that VMAs performance—a mildly risqué move that wouldn’t have been very far out of place in Dirty Dancing —America reacted as if they’d watched Cyrus personally steal Thicke’s marriage certificate and set it on fire. When Thicke and his wife did in fact separate, TMZ posted a blaring all-caps headline explicitly blaming Cyrus for the divorce: SPLIT TRIGGERED BY ANTICS WITH