Hannah Montana’s Bare, Unprotected Back: Miley Cyrus’s <i>Vanity Fair</i> Outing

ere we go again: another kid we have made into a centerfold and tell ourselves is merely “cute” (as if there were a “merely” there). She follows our undercover instructions, tarts herself up for public consumption, and now takes the heat for doing as she’s told. This time it’s Miley Cyrus, subject of some photos, the most recent by the canny (and smarmy) Annie Leibovitz in June 2008’s Vanity Fair. The photo in question shows a heavily madeup Cyrus, then fifteen, hair messy, eyes droopy, clutching a sheet to her chest as she faces us from the side, flashing (gasp) bare shoulders and full back. The possibility exists— you care, right?—that she is topless, maybe bottomless, maybe even shoeless—who can know for sure? Some feel (and many have said) that she looks as if she had just had sex or something equally unthinkable for a fifteen year old (which explains why we think it). Others say, c’mon, get over it, she’s only doing what kids enjoy doing, get a life, leave her alone. I side with the second group, I guess, though I can’t but wonder why so much attention is being paid. Hey, I went on one site inviting comments—I am a responsible scholar and figured I should inform myself—and blithely set the printer to running. I found myself, 347 pages later, with a couple of thousand gems like this: