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

MILEY .
    There was no affair, no offstage news to report; the “antics” were just the dance, and the fact that Thicke hadn’t recoiled and pushed Cyrus bodily away from him into the crowd. Again, Cyrus was solely to blame, for acts which had somehow escalated from scandalous to criminal: In The New York Times , Jon Caramanica referred to her“molesting of Robin Thicke,” and in Thicke’s Vanity Fair interview after the event, interviewer Lisa Robinson opened with“Miley Cyrus practically molested you last night at the VMAs.”
    It wasn’t the worst thing she was accused of. Not one, but two articles published in 2013 blamed Cyrus for actual, non-metaphorical rape cases. Richard Cohen of The Washington Post wrote that“[Cyrus] is a cheap act, no doubt about it, but for me her performance was an opportunity to discuss one of the summer’s most arresting pieces of journalism—a long New Yorker account of what became known as the Steubenville Rape.” While this is a remarkably flexible definition of the word “opportunity,” Cohen’s conclusion bears noting: Cyrus’s existence, apparently, “encourages a teenage culture that has set the women’s movement back on its heels.” Soon enough, Joanne Bamberger at USA Today chimed in:“I was ready to dismiss the ‘let’s condemn Miley’ parade, until I read a story about a Montana man convicted of the statutory rape of a fourteen-year-old student in 2008 … it doesn’t seem to be a huge leap to suggest that with young girls increasingly sexualized in the media, teen victims of sexual assault may be judged more harshly because too many see a child as being ‘in control.’ ”
    Cyrus’s response to all this has been, if anything, to lean into the trainwreck. For every theft of naked photos, she gets aggressively more naked; for every complaint about her bad behavior, she gets more ill-behaved. It’s hard to remember, in all the noise, but the Miley Cyrus of her “adult” records—the star who flashes her bare breasts at awards shows, poses for full-frontal nude photos in magazines, and talks continuously not only about the fact that she uses recreational drugs, but about which drugs she’s using—is not so much an attempt to “provoke” our outrage, but the only logical response to theoutrage that has always surrounded her. We told this child, throughout her teenage years, that her naked body, her drug use, and her outrageous behavior were the only interesting things about her, and that we would steal that information if it wasn’t promptly forthcoming. Now, Miley is both literally and figuratively stripped down, naked and yelling about getting high on live TV (“Yeah, I smoke pot” is an actual Miley Cyrus lyric), with nothing left to hide and nothing more for us to steal. And our response has been to tell her to cover up, and to reminisce about what a sweet little girl she used to be before it all went wrong.
    A victim turns into a perpetrator; a naked body that people were willing to commit theft to see becomes unsightly and shameful the moment it’s exposed consensually. Sexually pure or sexual predator, uncorrupted virgin or corrupting whore, godly or Godzilla: These are the options. Thus are trainwrecks made.
    All of this matters, for reasons beyond the enduring grossness of gossip blogs. Public sexuality is the first, and maybe the primary, mark of a trainwreck, whether her sexuality is forcibly exposed or consensually shared. This is not an accident: It’s a very public working-out of a long-held myth about heterosexual sex.
    Men (well, straight men—but in this version of the myth, all men are straight—sorry, fellas) supposedly reactto women’s sexuality the way my dog reacts whenever I eat a slice of pepperoni pizza: total, unhinged, uncontrollable urge to seize and devour. They want it, they need it, and they can’t be held accountable for what they do to get it, whether that’s staring and begging, or stealing it when your back