Saw a strange post an old friend posted on Facebook today, she reposted Sinead O'Connor's letter to Miley Cyrus warning the latter to not "prostitute" herself for the sake of video producers. This woman has been a longtime family friend, but as I've gotten more MRA (Men's Respect Advocate) over time, I've come to find her views are...silly, childish...tend to encourage women not to take responsibility for their actions...

Curious, I watched the Miley Cyrus video for the first time. And tried to look at it from an MRA perspective. My first impression she seems to have some talent as a singer, the song was well-composed, the lyrics - in terms of assigning responsibility and describing power relationships in romantic situations - seem fairly even-handed. The story line seems to be that the singer is distressed at the outcome of her relationship, but does not assign 100% of the blame for the failure of the relationship to the male, which is a refreshing change.

The graphics of the video did seem to be unnecessarily sexual. Or explicit. However you want to describe it. They seemed gratuitous in that the song was nice enough to listen to that the sledgehammer licking and nudity were not necessary. So I'd have to agree with O'Connor that the video didn't need to be so 'sexed up'.

However, some of the things O'Connor said in her letter I find frankly puzzling and disturbing:

Nothing but harm will come in the long run, from allowing yourself to be exploited, and it is absolutely NOT in ANY way an empowerment of yourself or any other young women, for you to send across the message that you are to be valued (even by you) more for your sexual appeal than your obvious talent.

In my mind this raises questions about personal responsibility by an artist/performer...on the one hand, if Cyrus wants to make sexy videos, she should have the freedom to do so, shouldn't she? On the other hand, if she makes said videos, and members of the public dislike the explicit sexuality, well...they can always just turn the video off.

On the third hand, ( :-) ) there seems to be an aspect of denied responsibility for an artistic work because the performer is a female. That somehow, because the performer is a young female, less "blame" should be assigned to her if the music video is sexually explicit. It's the people around her, the producers (who are assumed to be male) that are responsible for it.

If Justin Bieber produced a sexually explicit music video, would people be as willing to assign blame to exclusively to his producers for it, or would they trash Bieber himself? I can't help but think it's the latter. In recent years Bieber has done a few questionable things, but that's because he's a teenager.

I also found this comment rather disturbing:

Yes, I’m suggesting you don’t care for yourself. That has to change. You ought be protected as a precious young lady by anyone in your employ and anyone around you, including you. This is a dangerous world. We don’t encourage our daughters to walk around naked in it because it makes them prey for animals and less than animals, a distressing majority of whom work in the music industry and it’s associated media.

*Whether we like it or not, us females in the industry are role models and as such we have to be extremely careful what messages we send to other women. The message you keep sending is that its somehow cool to be prostituted.. its so not cool Miley.. its dangerous. Women are to be valued for so much more than their sexuality. we aren’t merely objects of desire. I would be encouraging you to send healthier messages to your peers.. that they and you are worth more than what is currently going on in your career. Kindly fire any motherf**er who hasn’t expressed alarm, because they don’t care about you.’

Although I am somewhat sympathetic to this viewpoint...I can't help but feel there is something wrong here. A reluctance to see sex and sexuality as part of life. Something to be understood and engaged, and mastered on a personal and intellectual level as part of the process of growing up, not just on a physical level.

We don't "hide" puberty and menstruation from teenage girls. Yet with this video, and the Reteah Parsons case, it seems as though teenage female sexuality has somehow become the last sexual taboo in western society.

If a woman genuinely "likes cock", to put it bluntly, society still seems to get all bent out of shape about it. Especially if she is a teenager. Curious, I did a reddit search for "girls who like cock". In the majority of search results, the women who said they "liked cock" seemed embarrassed to admit to doing so. But why? Isn't it part of human sexuality? It seems like it's easier for a man to admit he "likes cock" than for a woman to.

Random thoughts, I'm still confused about the whole issue...