The slut-shaming of Miley Cirus
/sigh. I wanted to move away from Blurred Lines, as it seems to have taken over my blog the last couple weeks, but shit keeps coming up.
I get most of my news from social media and podcasts. And I gotta say, I’m pretty proud of my friends-list! Barely a peep about the Miley Cirus thing, except to comment on how stupid the media is. I finally learned about it from NPR, which is a black mark on NPR. :/
Much is made of American rape-culture, and a large part of that is slut-shaming. Taking any positive expression of sexuality by a woman and attacking her for it, tearing apart her reputation and destroying her social net. Rape culture depends on fear of slut-shaming both to control women and to scare them into staying quiet about sexual assaults. The entirety of this Miley Cyrus "scandal" is nothing more than one giant slut-shaming extravaganza by all the privileged white men who can't abide the young women they feel they own showing any sexual agency. It's a blight on our culture, and the news media are gleefully wallowing in it like pigs in shit because it drives up their web-traffic. NPR could have thoughtfully reported this as “millions of people in our society are still slut-shaming assholes”. Instead they jumped on the sexist bandwagon. With an online poll to boot! So all the ass-brained pricks can reassure themselves of how right they are to be getting high on self-righteous indignation. Once again The Onion shows itself to be the American news source with the most integrity.
I sent an adapted version of the above to the NPR Ombudsman. It's not much, but at least it's not nothing.