Review – “Can’t Be Tamed” – Part 1

Where to begin?  In many ways, Miley Cyrus’s “Can’t Be Tamed” covers what, by the standards of our lightning-fast age, is very old ground.  A young pop diva clad in next to nothing bumping and grinding with a dance troupe while singing ambiguously sexual lyrics… the newest thing I saw was the special effects quality, which has mercifully improved from the days of “Oops, I Did It Again”.  Otherwise, change the words (including the pop star’s name), add a slight shift in theme, and this could be 2000.  Cyrus, after an abbreviated youth, is even being groomed to look like <Britney, Christina, Madonna, Go-on-a>.

So what’s new?  “Can’t Be Tamed” has received extraordinary media attention primarily, I think, because of Cyrus’s age, which is not yet the magical eighteen.  Prior to viewing the production, I had been misled by the blogosphere into thinking that there was some question as to whether the video is or is not age-appropriate.  If by “not age-appropriate” it is meant that the production is a bunch of suits marketing a seventeen-year-old girl’s body, then yes, it’s not age-appropriate.  As I watched the video, I couldn’t help wondering whether our culture has truly, finally, achieved decadence.

So what are the moral implications, vis-à-vis society, of this video?  (I have no idea what I’ll conclude.)

The proposition, by the opponents of a video like this, is that the sexual trafficking of a seventeen-year-old girl is wrong.  I think there are two lines of thought that commonly contribute to this proposition.  One (the “puritanical” proposition) is that sex, in all or most of its varieties, is inherently sordid, and that such trafficking as this video ought to be prohibited for the moral good of all concerned – producers, viewers, and diva.  The other (the “not-yet” proposition) is that, withholding judgment on the ultimate morality of sex, seventeen-year-olds do not possess the maturity, emotional stability, worldliness, or any of innumerable other qualities that are implicitly assumed to advance with age.

Let’s begin with the not-yet proposition, and defend it from some cheap attacks.  First, many will argue, the “not-yet” proposition is problematic because why should we say that eighteen-year-olds, but not seventeen-year-olds, have whatever qualities are necessary to make sexual decisions?  (An instance of the argument by degrees.)  And why assume that the advancement of these qualities is uniform?  Could not there be some who ought to be permitted to make such decisions earlier, and some later?  And what’s more, is there even broad societal consensus on what these qualities are?  Couldn’t we just call this an antiquated and unexamined tradition that Miley Cyrus, for one, can safely discard?

Let us propose that there is – yes, there is – a broad consensus on what some of these qualities might be, and a reason that they occur magically and exactly at eighteen for all men.  This is the notion of economic self-sufficiency.  There are many magical changes that occur at the age of eighteen, by virtue of laws having to do with wages, parental relations, taxes, criminal behavior, military service, etc. that treat eighteen-year-olds as adults but seventeen-year-olds as children.  Many – most – of these changes have nothing to do with sexual maturity, and we confess all of them to be arbitrary, but any discussion of sexual mores cannot escape these other laws as a backdrop.

But all we have really done here is punted the problem.  We have proven that there is an exact, defined difference between seventeen- and eighteen-year-olds that is not trivial (i.e. merely a tautology of their age), but we have based that proof on the existence of other arbitrary societal conventions that themselves are vulnerable to the argument by degrees.  So is there anything really magical about turning eighteen, that an enterprising crusader for sexual freedom, like Miley Cyrus, could not overturn?  I think even our most enterprising crusader would concede that infants are incapable of economic self-sufficiency, while the vast majority of forty-year-olds are self-sufficient.  To prevent the cruel economic usage of infants, which we almost universally condemn as violating the taboo against the exploitation of helpless humanity, we must have laws that decide who is self-sufficient and who is not.  Such laws cannot act on a case-by-case basis, because this would be prohibitively expensive.  They could act on a class-by-class basis, and classify individuals between zero and forty into multiple classes, some economically self-sufficient and some not.  This would appear to be the optimal solution, but it would probably be difficult to form a societal consensus on what the qualifications to enter into the self-sufficient class should be.  What’s more, in even today egalitarian society, such a practice would probably increase social stratification, which we deem repugnant.  (It is ironic that we should rely so much on our biases in a discussion of the sexual trafficking of children.).  In the absence of case-by-case treatment or class-by-class treatment, we are left with age-determinate universal treatment, or some system not relying on top-down determination of self-sufficiency.  The latter system would be sufficiently radical that we shall set its proponents aside as outside the sphere of our present discussion, for desiring to reform far more than sexual liberty.

Once we have arrived at age-determinate universal treatment, we are left only to quibble about the particular age at which people achieve economic self-sufficiency.  We assume that there is nothing logically impossible about that age being eighteen.

But the next objection to sexual liberty at eighteen also applies to economic liberty.  This is the argument that some achieve the qualities requisite for economic self-sufficiency far earlier than others.  Our logical demonstration that there ought to be a universal age of economic self-sufficiency would appear to preclude this argument, but perhaps the unfairness of such a system to those whom it oppresses, who possess all the prerequisites for freedom without its perquisites, is a persuasive argument against it.

In response to this, we would propose that the age at which economic self-sufficiency occurs follows a distribution heavily centered around a relatively narrow range of values, and that there may be numerous outliers.  Our task as legislators would be to select an age as the age of maturity that will give the overwhelming majority of citizens protection from exploitation before they are, in fact, economically self-sufficient, while letting a very few suffer from such exploitation because they are, in fact, not equipped to make their own decisions.  Those who are oppressed by the system for years, just like the few who are released prematurely, are the costs of justice and prosperity for the rest.  (Shockingly, I have written no post on the opposing positions on this problem presented in Crito and The Shawshank Redemption, but the case of the unjustly-treated individuals is itself a philosophical problem that we shall, again, set aside.  I have treated it extremely briefly here.)

We have now shown that there is a magical switch that does occur at eighteen, and that, logically speaking, this could maybe be justified, though we have not done so.  But is this related to sexual freedom?  To answer this, we must examine the qualities that could be requisite for sexual maturity.

Intellectual exhaustion sets in.  More later.  Who knew there was so much to say about such ephemeral strumpetry as Miley Cyrus?

A Word on the Current Pop Situation

I have often argued that songs are the new poetry; with modern technology, we can carry a melody around with us as easily as the youths of yesteryear could carry couplets.  The old and sick at heart will inveigh against Taylor Swift’s love poetry, but the old men probably hated Sappho in exact proportion to the popularity of her poetry, too.

It is in this spirit that I must protest mightily against “Tik Tok”, the current number one single by Kesha.  Why is it not enough any more to have a good beat, some good lyrics, and a classy performance?  Why does the music industry have to be going the way of “high” fashion and modern painting, so obsessed with itself that it can find nothing else to comment on?

Stefani Germanotta started this with her deliberately puerile stage name, but at least she banged out a couple of good songs before turning to such self-obsessed trash as “Paparazzi”.  It’s a shame she’s still at the height of her arc… by the time Britney Spears got to crap like “Lucky”, she was already in the process of fading out to the boozed-up baby/lipo-machine that she became.

And so we come to Kesha, who, with “Tik Tok”, has managed to parody herself in her very debut to the musical world.  How can you parody yourself if you don’t even have an image to parody?  Sorry dunces like me, thinking the question a paradox, should study Kesha.  One of the keys appears to be to follow assiduously the saying of P. T. Barnum.  Despite including the “$” sign in her own stage name, and the not-so-subtle references to money sprinkled throughout her music video, the fact that Kesha’s single is just an ATM run seems lost on the critics.

I suppose it’s not just an ATM run, since she’s also having an awesome joke at our/their expense.  My guess is that the entire song is copied from bits and pieces of other stuff, with the interstitial space jammed with obscure references.  The vamping is Germanotta’s, with a little bit of electronica mixed in, the lyrics an acid-flashed version of the Stones, the beat… what, P. Diddy’s?  Probably, since Kesha’s main goal seems to make her unoriginality as obvious as possible.

It was a mistake to watch the music video, because the gimmicks are so mind-bogglingly lame.  A boy sucking on a popsicle.  Wow, you’ve completely turned that gender role on its head.  Did you go to Harvard or something?  I don’t know whether I’m listening to pop or reading philosophy!  Oh, look at that, a pimped-up bike… a guy with a drawn-on goatee… not only did you not have to pay for that garbage, but it’s such a hip commentary on the music world!  What does it mean?  Oh, if only I could wrap my head around it!

The really sad thing is that the song does, in fact, have a good beat, and Kesha treads rap ground that hasn’t been touched much since Nelly Furtado.  It’s painful like going into a five star restaurant wearing jeans.  You know as the waiter is pouring the wine that he’s laughing at you, but you also know that that wine is going to be way better than the swill you drink at home.