Café Philos: an internet café

I usually find it a waste of my time to debate people, and I assume it’s a waste of their time too.  So, I rarely get into debates.  However, last night I got into one and, predictably, it turned out to be a waste of time.

Worse, it saddened me.

I discovered the person with whom I was debating has become quite the debater since she and I last had the pleasure of each other.  Some time ago, it was different.  She was once a research scientist with a doctorate in psychology.  When she tired of that, she took a masters in theology.  As you might expect from such a learned person, she was once rich with fertile insights.  She had the power and the magic to see an old thing in a new light, or to make sudden sense of stuff you might otherwise be wrestling with for years.

Well, now it seems she’s turned her interests to debate, and last night was like saying goodbye.  I guess she’s no longer into sharing ideas, because instead of sharing hers, she merely jumped on one of my opinions and “refuted” it by spinning it with the dexterity of a White House Press Secretary, a Creationist, or a bimbo talk show host.  It’s as if she’s decided conversation is all about scoring points — even when the points are obtained through intellectually dishonest means and can therefore matter only to her.

What I mean here by “debate” is the sort of stuff that too often passes in our society for reasoned debate nowadays.  Spin.  Trickery.  Intellectual dishonesty.  Fallacious logic.  The sort of nonsense that Bill O’Reilly or Rush Limbaugh pass off as “reasoned debate” to people who unfortunately don’t know much better.  She wasn’t as bad as them last night, but it seemed clear to me she’s become their soul mate.

I’m of the opinion that people who are honest about their knowledge and experiences can honestly disagree to their mutual benefit.  Let’s take the simplest possible example of that happening.  Suppose I tell you the sky is sometimes blue.  And suppose you then tell me the sky is sometimes white.  And a third person informs both us the sky is sometimes dark.  There we have three honest, but differing, opinions and yet each has contributed a truth to the conversation.

I’ll give a real example now.  The other day on this blog, Dana offered her opinion that people are much more physically attracted to youth than to age.  Now, I was somewhat clumsy in how I phrased my response to her.  The point I tried to make, however, was I agreed people are more physically attracted to youth than to age, but that when we get older we might find ourselves more attracted to such things as someone’s sexual confidence than we are to someone’s looks.

In other words, Dana and I were able to share our honest points of view without getting into a weaselly  pissing contest over who was right and who was wrong.  I don’t know whether Dana got anything out of that exchange, but in some small way it enriched my view of the issue.

Yet, it seems to me a debate seldom enriches — even in a small way.  To illustrate the point, let me take an petty example from last night’s debate, which was over — I shudder to say it — the Leibovitz photo of Miley Cyrus (if there is anything more worthless than debating someone, it must be debating someone over a celebrity).  In response to something said by the person with whom I was debating, I made the following statement:

What harm has come to her from this? People are used all the time and it is found perfectly acceptable so long as they are consenting and no harm comes to them through it. So what harm has come to Miley from this?

To which she responded:

Wow, so much for you previously stated admiration of Kant.

In other words, instead of actually addressing my point, she merely spun my point as being philosophically inconsistent because, about a year ago (She’s got a good memory!), I expressed a fondness for Kant’s categorical imperative but now seem to her to have abandoned that fondness.  So, I suppose score one for her!  Or, whatever.  But her argument is of no more value to me than an old tree stump.  It merely wasted my time to read it, and I felt used.

A debate is so greatly different from a good conversation.  I believe that when people are honest with each other while sharing their points of view, everyone can benefit, whether they agree with each other or not.  But sharing ideas does not seem to be the point and purpose of debate these days.  Instead, I would argue debate these days is too often about tricking — manipulating — people.

Of what value is that to anyone?

It snowed in Colorado Springs the other day. When I looked out the window that morning, I saw heavy, wet flakes falling on the apple blossoms.  But this morning, the weather is very different.

Today, it has hardly dawned at all.  The sky is heavy with rain and clouds, and for the first time in months, I hear thunder.

I wish only that I had a porch.  All this excitement is going on these days in the Springs, and yet I don’t have a place with a bit of roof over me from which to sit and watch it.

The only thing better than a porch, you know, is a friend and a porch.  And the only thing better than that is a friend, a porch, and something seasonal to drink.

My upstairs neighbor has woken and is now coaxing his beautiful dog out the back door.  She is reluctant because of the rain.  Of course, if I had a porch, I could sit on it petting his dog and pretending to commiserate with her about the exciting weather.

The best poems are written on porches.  Everyone knows that.  Even if you don’t actually write out a poem while sitting on your porch, the time you spend there is never wasted.  That’s because a porch is where you can make many of your best observations and reflections for a poem.

Sometimes, a person or thing is so beautiful some of its beauty will stick in your mind for years. Several years ago, I sat on a porch by a lake and spent nearly the whole of a day watching the windblown rain and lake water.  In the end, I felt some of that beauty had soaked into me, and that night I dreamed only of nature.

Yesterday, someone typed into a search engine the question, “Why do men look at teen nudity?”, and up popped this blog. I saw their question on my stats page and dismissed it: “Isn’t the answer obvious?”, I thought, “Men look at nude teens because youth is beautiful. Why would anyone need to ask?”

Three or four hours later I was back looking at the stats page again. Yet, this time the answer didn’t seem as obvious. So I googled the question to find out what others were saying. But the search only brought up one blog — this one. The remaining hits were porn sites, and not too helpful.

I then tried recalling studies done on why men look at teen nudity, but I couldn’t recall any. So, for some time now I’ve been sitting here wildly speculating. The answer once seemed obvious to me, but the more I look into it, the more I wonder.

At present, I suspect there are evolutionary reasons men look at teen nudity. For instance, I’ve read the prime reproductive years for women are their early 20s, and older teens aren’t too far from that. It seems reasonable to suppose that men who are especially attracted to women who are in their prime reproductive years will be more successful at reproducing than men who are not especially attracted to women who are in those years. So, natural selection would favor men who are especially attracted to women who are in their prime reproductive years. That would not only explain why men look at teen nudity, but why they look at teens (period/full stop).

Put a bit differently, men are attracted to youth — and find youth beautiful — because youth more or less corresponds with the prime reproductive years for women. Not a novel idea. I’ve heard it before. But at least the next time someone googles, “Why do men look at teen nudity”, they will now have something to start from.  Of course, it’s a pretty rough and incomplete start.

So, what other reasons are there?

It’s my moral duty to caution you right up front that I’m fixin’ to explain a poem. Of course, if I do it right, then I will have made the poem, its song and magic, easy accessible to you, thus increasing your enjoyment of the poem — and perhaps of life itself — and consequently earning your undying gratitude which, no doubt, you will express by naming your first born after me. That’s if I do it right.

Fat chance I’ll do it right.

On the other hand, if I do it wrong, the result will be akin to destroying a beautiful flower by dissecting it with the cold steel of scalpel and tweezers. That is, if I do it wrong, you might end up with a new understanding of the poem, but the poem will forever ring dead to you.

I am determined to give it a try despite the risk. The fact is, nowadays, there is arguably more need for good critiques of poems than for poems. That’s because very few of us any longer have the time to tease out the meaning and beauty of poetry on our own. A good critique can save us hours of work — hours we don’t have — but there aren’t that many good critiques out there. So, I’m going to take a shot at writing a good critique.

Since this is my first effort at critiquing a poem, and it is very likely to produce a mess, I think I should critique one of my own poems rather than risk butchering someone else’s. After this, there will be plenty of opportunity to wretchedly critique other people’s poems. But please, please wish me luck this first time around!

Let’s get started, then. Anyone who has read Joseph Campbell’s studies of mythology might come to the realization that every culture or society embodies in its myths a view of human nature. A view that answers the questions people in that culture or society have about what it means to be human, what our place in the world is, why we are here, and so on.

Yet, we ourselves live in an age that has no settled, predominate view of human nature. Instead, we have many views of human nature — some traditional, many new — which often conflict with each other. Indeed, you can trace the deepest divisions in contemporary politics back to fundamentally conflicting views of human nature.

Should men and women be political, economic, and social equals? It all depends on your view of human nature. Should abortion be legal? Again, it depends on your view of human nature. Is consumerism good for us? Depends on what you think our nature is. World wide, societies and cultures are being politically divided along lines that correspond to how people fundamentally view human nature.

My poem, Throw Your Rockets Far, is a tiny drop in the ocean of debate over human nature. In the poem, I see in Aaron, an eight year old child, how human nature is grounded in the past, in the history of human evolution:

Somewhere we hear the shorebird’s cry
From a beach in Africa we never left.
Somewhere we are shaman, warrior, gatherer,
Women and men intimate with our past.

“Somewhere we are shaman, warrior, gatherer” — but where exactly is that “somewhere”?

The place where we are even today a “shaman, warrior, gatherer” is not a location apart from us, but rather “somewhere” in our own heart and mind. The poem asserts we are still our ancestors; that we still approach the world as a shaman, warrior, or gatherer; which are some of the traditional roles of our evolutionary ancestry.

Moreover, the poem implies we are still, even today, more at home in those traditional roles than we might recognize:

Somewhere we walk in the yellow grass;
The sky huge, but our feet owning each step.

“Our feet owning each step”. When some 5500 years ago, we left our traditional hunting/gathering lifestyle to build and live in cities, did we also leave behind the experience of being completely at home in our environment, completely adapted to our world through ages of evolution? If the poem raises that question, then how does it answer it? Well, let’s read the poem as a whole now:

I shall not tell you Aaron at eight
Somewhere we walk in the yellow grass;
The sky huge, but our feet owning each step.
Somewhere we hear the shorebird’s cry
From a beach in Africa we never left.
Somewhere we are shaman, warrior, gatherer,
Women and men intimate with our past.

No, I shall not tell you Aaron at eight
What at eight you simply feel
On your lawn at dusk when you throw a bottle rocket
With a warrior’s grace — and hard at the moon.

The poem suggests that we can witness in children the spontaneous expression of our evolutionary past. Aaron does not need to think, “I am a warrior”, but he echoes a warrior’s grace in something as simple as throwing a bottle rocket. That’s to say, Aaron is at home and at ease with his ancestor’s role of warrior. And, if that is true, then the poem would suggest Aaron — and by extension, the rest of us — are at least in some ways still the remarkable hunting/gathering ape that evolved so long ago on the continent of Africa.

The poem thus constitutes one answer to the question, “What is human nature”.

Ok, folks, that’s my first ever critique of a poem. I intend from time to time on this blog to present you with other critiques — mostly of other people’s poems. Now, I would appreciate it if you could give me some helpful feedback on how well I’ve done with my first critique? Did I butcher the poem for you or help with your appreciating it? Was the critique worth your while?

The place was Yosemite, California, 1974, and Imogen Cunningham was lecturing a class on nude photography.  Judy Dater was in attendance.  Dater, who was already an accomplished photographer, saw her chance and snapped a picture of Imogen and her model, Twinka Thiebaud (pronounced Tee-bo).  The result was extraordinary — only poorly reproduced here.

Oddly, when I first saw the Imogen and Twinka photo, I was put off.

I didn’t know the history of the photo, and at first glance, I imagined the shot had been staged by some heavy spirited photographer in order to bludgeon the viewer with a trite, melodramatic message — something along the lines of “we all grow old.”

The above reproduction is a poor one — albeit the best I could find on the net — that fails to show how crisp the details are in other reproductions of Imogen and Twinka.  For instance, in other reproductions, the details are so sharp you can almost feel the bark Twinka is propped against.  The texture of her skin is still visible even in the shadows, and I recall that Imogen’s face and expression are minutely rendered.

However, it is still possible from the reproduction used here to see the breathtaking grace of Twinka’s pose.  It was for the sake of that pose — which I wanted to sketch — and because of the sharp, rich details, that I once bought a much nicer reproduction of the photo.  My reproduction seems to have gotten misplaced, but I used to study it often, and I gradually became convinced the Judy Dater’s photo is great art.

Given the photo was not staged, it sometimes surprises me how many themes I can read into it when I wish to do so.  This photo, more than most, inspires stories.   One of my favorite stories is that Twinka represents nature, while Imogen represents civilization.  Civilization seems a bit surprised to  have discovered nature — especially nature confident, graceful, and at ease with herself.

Stories aside, Imogen and Twinka could be a study in contrasting textures.  Twinka’s hair with the bark.  Imogen’s dress with Twinka’s skin.  And so on.

Twinka Theibaud, by the way, is the daughter of the California painter, Wayne Theibaud.  One of his most famous works is reproduced below:

As you know, Cunningham herself produced some exceptional nudes. She is most famous for her figure studies, but one of my favorites, which is reproduced below, is a nude portrait of Morris Graves in 1973.  I love the quality of light and the contrast between the tanned face and pale body.  To me, the photo seems to capture the reflectiveness of a man late in his life.  Graves, in this photo, is as beautiful as Twinka in the Dater photo.

Disclaimer:  If you have an ear for poetry, this announcement might cause you suffering and dismay.

I have put up a new cycle of my poems in the sidebar.  Here they are:

The Cicada

The Latest American Dream

The Puzzled Flowers of Monument Creek

Whispers to the River

The sound of Cicada has always seemed to me primeval — older even than the gods.

The Latest American Dream is a satire on the plans of the World Trade Organization to privatize all the world’s water resources.

The puzzled flowers of Monument Creek in this poem are the beautiful women that come to the Creek each year to watch a charity event.  The event involves launching into the Creek a thousand or so rubber duckies — the rubber ducky that floats past the finish line first wins it’s owner a prize.

Whispers to the River was written during a very challenging time in my life.  Many years later, I dedicated the poem to my friend Alyssa, who seemed to be going through her own period of challenge.

BILL MOYERS JOURNAL | Essay on Reverend Wright | PBS

Moyers is worth listening to here.

Preachers, don’t be caught on the wrong side of the choir!  Learn this crucial difference between politically correct and politically incorrect preaching — before it’s too late:

A Public Service Announcement brought to you by this blog and Blog For Democracy via Ex Cathedra.

I strongly suspect most of the people who read this blog — at least most of those who read it on a regular basis — are more stimulated by ideas than by, say, celebrity gossip.  I think most of my readers like to think, in much the same way they might like to do other things — such as play a sport, paint a canvas, or tinker with a bicycle.

In other words, they belong to that world wide minority of people who often think for the pleasure of thinking.

So far as I know, those of us who enjoy thinking, often think about things we don’t really need to think about.  Asking one of us why we are thinking about the fascinating Mosu people in China is a bit like asking an enthusiastic athlete why she plays sports.  The question is a bit absurd in the sense there doesn’t need to be a reason beyond she plays sports because she likes to play sports.

I have not yet mastered writing to the point that I can express the lightness of my spirit when I blog, but usually I blog in more or less the same spirit as someone playing volleyball for the fun of playing volleyball.   Yet, I could feel a difference this past week as I wrote one or two of the Miley Cyrus posts.  I was writing more out of indignation than for the enjoyment of thinking.

No matter.  I’ve recovered my good humor.  But the contrast has revealed to me just how much I value my usual approach to ideas.  That is, I think ideas should be taken seriously — I am serious when I think about the Mosu people, for instance — but I do not believe ideas should be taken grimly.

You can be serious, yet still playful.  However, it seems impossible to be grim, yet still playful.  You can be serious, yet still be in good spirits.  However, it seems impossible to be grim, yet still in good spirits.

I think ideas need to be danced with — and lightly.  To do that, we should avoid attachment to them.  That is, we should avoid identifying ourselves with our ideas — just as we avoid identifying ourselves with our material possessions.  If we can manage all that, we can still take ideas seriously, without taking them grimly.

I was careening around the net this evening looking for inspiration when I bumped across two blog posts in a row dealing with celibacy. That’s when I thought, “Surely this is the start of something: I predict the next blog post will be titled, ‘Celibacy and the Single Sage’”.

It wasn’t.

“No matter”, I thought, “I shall take it as a sign to write about celibacy, for I have a title!” So, here I am, writing about celibacy on the theory I have a great deal to say about celibacy because I have a great title.

Well, although I’m not exactly a sage, I am celibate — so at least I’ve got that going for me here. Moreover, by coincidence, a couple of people asked me last month why I was celibate — so I now have some experience discussing it. How could anything go wrong with such a great title and — all that experience on my side?

So, let’s begin. Perhaps, like the folks last month, you wonder why anyone would choose to be celibate?

Actually, I don’t know an answer to that. Dang. Next question, please!

OK. What I do know is that, when I tried to answer the folks who asked me why I was celibate, I made a good faith effort to answer the question. Yet, the result was only my stumbling through six or seven possible reasons I choose to become celibate. And none of those reasons seemed very correct to me.

Have you ever done that? Have you ever begun answering someone only to realize you didn’t have any reasons for what you did — you were instead acting on your gut instinct? On your intuition?

It took me a while stumbling through the reasons I have often thought I had for becoming celibate, but eventually I recalled enough of the past to discern I was following my instincts — and not my head — at the time I choose to become celibate.

So, I cannot really answer the question of why I decided to become celibate. It was a gut decision. The reasons I’ve often fancied I had for my decision are really just afterthoughts. Near as I can figure it out, that’s far closer to the truth than the six or seven reasons I offered my friends in haste last month.

Those were challenging times — back when I decided to become celibate. That was the context.

I had only recently lost my business, my wife, my house, and much else. I had then gone on the road with no clear destination, looking for someplace to live. I’d come to Colorado Springs by quirk and circumstance. And though I didn’t know enough about mental health at that time to recognize it, I was afflicted with depression. It surprises me I didn’t shack up with someone.

I have known many people who went through something similar, and in most cases, they sought solace in sex and romance, religion, drugs, or alcohol. I went with my intuition and stayed away from those things.

That was 13 or 14 years ago. Except for a few one-night stands in the early years, I have been celibate ever since (Eventually, I even got therapy and treatment for the depression and became insufferably happy).

So I can’t really say I decided to become celibate for this or that reason, but only that I went with my gut, and that it has turned out to be one of the best decisions I’ve made for myself. These past few years, after getting the depression under control, have been the happiest of my life.   Celibacy:  It’s not just for sages anymore!

Now, I’m curious to hear what life decisions you’ve made by going with your gut instincts? How did those decisions work out for you?

Last May, I wrote a post that summarized some of the things I believe I’ve learned from my experiences with fatherless girls.

Today, that post caught the eye of Amanda, who wants to welcome her newly found step-daughter into her family. Amanda would like any advice you’d be willing to offer her on the best ways in which to go about that. She writes:

i have questions. my husband has just found contact w his daughter after 14 yrs of absence. we have young children. i just want her to feel like she belongs, welcomed , loved,& wanted. there are “hot spots” things that will cause a flood of emotion for her. how do we avoid these “hot spots” we dont know what all of them may be. her dad diddnt chose 2 be absent. i believe she knows that now, but it dosnt erase the feelings of being unwanted or “thrown away” for so many yrs. is there anyone with any key words of wisdom? any opinions or advise on this would be very valueable. thanks

Amanda strikes me as a very sensitive and caring person, and I’m sure she’d appreciate any insights or support you’d be willing to offer her. Please post your insights and support here. I’ve directed her to this thread. Thanks!

It’s my impression American culture has been more responsible than any other culture for the sexualization of children. Perhaps that’s true. If so, it’s an odd truth, almost counter-intuitive, because it seems such a large number of Americans pretend children have no sexuality at all. So, how is it that a society which notoriously sexualizes children could also be a society that to some large extent pretends children have no sexuality?

This morning, I’m wondering about all that in part because of the comments on the Miley Cyrus Affair that I’ve been reading in both the traditional and the new media. Many of those comments quite obviously assume no 15 year old girl has a legitimate sexuality, and that any 15 year old girl who indeed does have a sexuality — and dares to express it — is a tramp and a whore. On the face of it, that vehement denial of a girl’s sexuality does not fit with America’s sexualization of children. So, what is going on?

There seems to be a subtle distinction — maybe it’s not even that subtle — between, on the one hand, recognizing and affirming a child’s sexuality, and on the other hand, sexualizing a child. Some days, I think Americans by and large have it backwards: Instead of refusing to sexualize children while at the same time affirming their sexuality, we refuse to affirm their sexuality while at the same time sexualizing children.

Is that the Victorian in us?

To recognize and affirm a child’s sexuality means nothing more than to accept the child’s sexuality at his or her stage of development, and not try to turn the child’s sexuality into something it isn’t. After reading up on how we’ve been handling the Miley Cyrus Affair, I’m no longer so sure Americans are all that good at doing it.

Instead, it seems we often enough are hell bent on turning the child’s sexuality into something it isn’t. For instance, we infamously dress little girls in sexually suggestive outfits — as if little girls had the sexuality of adolescents in their late teens. Then we do an abrupt about face when the girls become pubic, and — as the Cyrus affair indicates — deny they have any age-appropriate sexuality, and must instead remain little girls in their sexual feelings. In neither case are we accepting the child’s sexuality at her stage of development.

If all that is indeed true, then why are we doing it to our kids?

I’m a bit upset with myself this morning. I just reread yesterday’s post on Miley Cyrus and it’s not up to even my personally cherished, but admittedly lame standards.

I woke up around five in the morning yesterday and at once made the mistake of googling up the news on Cyrus. I should never read the press first thing in the morning. It only gets me riled up. The stories I read and the headlines of the stories I didn’t read all seemed to condemn Cyrus in one way or another, and that seemed very unfair to me.

I wrote yesterday’s post in a fit of righteous indignation, and in my indignation, I don’t think I offered you folks as reasoned a post as I might have otherwise. (Not that my standards for “reasoned posts” are very high, for I blissfully measure how high my standards for reasoning are in inches, rather than feet.) For instance: After asking what Miley’s crime was, I implied that her crime in the mind of the Traditional American Media was to have made a decision. Now, where did that come from?

I think it would have been a bit more accurate to say that in the eyes of much of the American media, her “crime”, in effect, is to have a sexuality. You might put that several different ways, but it seems to me that at least much of what I’ve been reading in the media boils down to shock and denial that a 15 year old girl can legitimately express her sexuality.

It’s true many people in the media (and the public) have insisted she is unqualified to decide for herself whether to pose for a mildly erotic photo, but that is a secondary issue — and not the heart of the matter to most people.

In my indignation, I was tossing out more ideas than I could properly corral.

Now, I’m not going to attempt here to correct all my mistakes in yesterday’s article. If I tried, I would probably miss a few. The one I have mentioned seems to me the most glaring, though. It’s not even up to my low standards. So, in the future, I’ll try to do a little better, if only for my own satisfaction.

Has anyone noticed it is all but impossible to scrounge up articles in the Traditional American Media (TAMMY) that actually support Miley Cyrus’s decision to pose in a mildly erotic way for Annie Leibovitz and Vanity Fair?

It appears I’m able this morning to google up over a thousand articles that each seem to assert Miley Cyrus made “a terrible mistake and horrifying moral decision” when she allowed Leibovitz to photograph her wrapped in white satin with her back revealed while giving the camera a post-coital look. Yet, does the nearly unanimous moral group-think of the TAMMY folks really mean Cyrus’s decision was a moral mistake?

Of course it doesn’t! When have the TAMMY people ever been morally right?

Indeed, it should be evident to most Americans their poor TAMMY is morally insane. After all, this is the very same Traditional American Media that only recently distorted, exaggerated — and even made up — facts and reasons to help President Bush and Company lead this country into a foolish, immoral war. And while the Miley Cyrus Affair doesn’t even come close in moral insanity to that outrage, it’s not as if the same folks capable of lying with neither shame nor regret in order to manipulate their viewers, listeners and readers into supporting a criminal war are likely to be suddenly morally right about much of anything — including right about Miley Cyrus.

The fact is, I feel for the kid. She’s a 15 year old caught in a storm. She’s been abused, condemned, and vilified. She’s been called a “tramp”, a “whore”, a “pervert”, a threat to young people, and blamed for nearly everything that’s gone wrong with our world short of global warming.

Her crime?

She made a decision. Lord save us! (A decision, by the way, that I would be proud of had any of my teenage friends made.) The immensely accomplished photographer, Annie Leibovitz, offered to capture Miley’s youthful sexuality and Miley — Oh, how this shocks TAMMY! — decided for herself that was a good idea. At the time the offer was made by Leibovitz, Miley’s parents were not present. Her grandmother was there, as was her teacher, but her dad had left the shoot. It seems Miley made the decision to pose herself.

Naturally, the Traditional American Media cannot believe that was somehow right of her — or even possible of her. Instead, the Traditional American Media wants to spin it that a 15 year old girl cannot — is actually incapable of — making such a decision for herself. According to so many of the TAMMY folks, she just had to be under the sway and control of Annie Leibovitz. The evil Annie Leibovitz.

Well, Balderdash. Not only has this kid been abused, condemned and vilified, she’s been infantilized. She’s been told her decisions aren’t worthy of respect by the same Traditional American Media that — instead of just reporting the facts pro and con a few years ago — assumed it had the moral authority to actively help the most unsuccessful Administration in American history manipulate a great nation into a vile war.

This morning my friend, Chanson, beautifully and eloquently pointed out the repugnant nature of infantilizing Miley Cyrus in a comment posted here:

I especially question the assumption that it’s always a situation where adults are exploiting young people’s innocence by forcing sexuality upon them, as though no one under eighteen (especially no girl!) would have a natural desire to express sexuality.

When I was fifteen (or even fourteen or thirteen) I would have loved to have been in a photo like that. Especially the subtly erotic aspect of it. And as an adult looking back (having studied my journals and my past, etc.), I think that would have been a perfectly appropriate expression of my own feelings and where I was at at the time.

Also this morning, Jerry, a person new to commenting here, forcefully wrote:

I’m glad I’m raising my children here in Europe where there is an acceptance of teens as being people and not “children” that need to be told what to do like in America. The issue of sex and the responsibilities that go along with it are here in the schools and at home and so the sexual issues and problems Americans are so worried about do not exist on the vast scale they do in America – problems created by the all knowing, all controlling fundamentalist “Christians”, and given credence by the self serving media.

People like Chanson and Jerry are capable of expressing more genuine moral insight in three paragraphs than the Traditional American Media is capable of expressing in what seems like a thousand articles.

Contrary to what the TAMMY people think, any 15 year old has the moral right not to be infanilized, and all sane adults have a moral duty to respect her as a person in her own right. Specifically, Miley Cyrus’s decision to pose in an erotic way should at least be respected — even by people who do not support it — and most importantly, she should by no means be abused, condemned, or vilified for having made that decision. Common decency demands at least that much of the morally sane among us.

Now, the title of this post is “Miley Cyrus Should Not Apologize for Her Sexuality”. Unfortunately, she has already done so. On Monday, she stated: “I took part in a photo shoot that was supposed to be ‘artistic’ and now, seeing the photographs and reading the story, I feel so embarrassed. I never intended for any of this to happen and I apologise to my fans who I care so deeply about.”

If she wants to apologize, then I myself cannot support that decision (but I am certainly not going to abuse, condemn, or vilify her for it). In the first place, Miley Cyrus is not morally required to apologize to her fans for her sexuality. If a 15 year old is morally required to apologize for her sexuality, then she is morally required to apologize for breathing. Both come naturally to 15 year olds, as well as most of the rest of us.

It’s possible she even has a moral obligation to not apologize. She is, as everyone likes to point out, a role model for young girls, mainly between the ages of six and fourteen. If that’s true, then one might ask whether her apology does more harm than good. For instance, by apologizing to those girls for her sexuality is she sending the message that her sexuality (and by extension their own sexuality someday) is something to be ashamed of? A sense of shame about one’s sexuality can lead to all sorts of unhealthy problems, and should not, therefore, be promoted by anyone.

If Miley desperately wants to apologize to someone, maybe she should issue a very mild apology to the executives and shareholders of the Disney Corporation. After all, they might experience a very mild, downward blip in their earnings because of her actions. On the other hand, if the executives and shareholders of the Disney Corporation abuse, condemn or vilify Miley simply because they might loose a tiny fraction of their potential earnings from her, then those executives and shareholders need to take a course or two in basic ethics. To the morally sane among us, money ain’t everything. And it would be immoral to reduce Miley, or any human, to no more than a balance sheet.

The last weakness in Miley’s apology is strictly a strategic, rather than a moral, one. When she apologized for her sexuality on Monday, she screwed up. She set the frame for the discussion by falsely implying she was wrong to express her sexuality. It seems the TAMMY people have at least in part taken their cue from that gaft and now refuse to discuss even as a possibility the notion that Miley is within her moral rights to pose for a mildly erotic photo.

For those and other reasons, I find I cannot agree with Miley Cyrus’s decision to apologize for her sexuality. Heck, I even think she made a good decision when she decided to pose for a mildly erotic photo by Annie Leibovitz. I hope that someday she’ll be able to look at that photo and smile at her 15 year old self.

See also on this blog:

Sexualizing Our Children

Miley Cyrus and America’s Love Affair with Sexual Nonsense