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An Underage Double Standard?

frau sally benz

This morning, it seems I couldn’t turn anywhere without hearing about this ZOMG MILEY CYRUS LAP DANCE VIDEO!!!!!111!!!1!

So I watched it and, for one, it’s not actually a lap dance. It’s Miley Cyrus, at 16, grinding on Adam Shankman at some party. Adam is a gay, 40-something, judge of SYTYCD, producer dude. He makes all those Step Up movies (I haven’t watched any of them, so that’s all I know).

I was… confused? I guess mostly because I expected Miley giving or getting a lap dance with a teen and instead got this. I was certainly grossed out, but I didn’t think much of it.

Until a couple of minutes later when I saw this headline: “LT’s Defense: No Sex, Just Masturbation.” For those who don’t have to keep up with the news for a living, Lawrence Taylor (LT) is some football player who allegedly sexually assaulted a 16-year-old. At first, he and his wife were denying it, and now apparently he has clarified that they engaged in some sort of “masturbatory act,” whatever that means.

It got me thinking about the reactions I’ve seen to both of these stories. Most of the responses I’ve seen to the Miley thing are along the lines of “ew, but whatever, he’s gay and it’s not like that!” Most of the responses I’ve seen to the allegations against LT – other than “SHE’S LYING!,” of course – are “put him away! pervert! why was he anywhere near that girl?”

While I understand that Adam Shankman did not rape Miley Cyrus, shouldn’t this make people more uncomfortable? I ask this of myself as well, because I was also unfazed. I get that Adam Shankman is gay, and apparently he thinks of her as a little sister (which, ew, I do not grind on my relatives)… but he’s still a 44-year-old man grinding with a 16-year-old girl.

Do you think there’s a difference? Should there be one? Sorry, that’s not what I’m asking. What I’m asking is if people should have a stronger reaction to the Miley thing despite the fact that there’s no alleged sexual assault in play.

36 thoughts on An Underage Double Standard?

  1. Wait, what? Are you asking if there’s a difference between an older guy allegedly sexually assaulting a 16 year old and a 16 year old consensually dancing with an older guy? You need someone to tell you why one of these things is not like the other?

  2. No, I understand the difference between the actual alleged sexual assault and a non-sexual assault. What I’m asking is if people should have a stronger reaction to the 16-year-old grinding with an older man?

  3. You are correct, there was no lap dance, just some bump-and-grind. But have you been and seen what 16yr old girls who aren’t movie stars do at parties with older boys? Same thing. Should we care that its a 44yr old openly gay man, or care that that she’s a “role model”?

    No. As a matter of fact, why should we care? It wasn’t done in public, so it wasn’t meant for public consumption. Would we as a nation be upset if we found secretly taped videos of our parents going at it in the backyard being posted on Youtube?

    It was posted because someone wanted to profit from it. What you see is a 16yr old girl who hasn’t ever really been a regular girl since she started on television. She’s associated with adults for nearly a third of her life, so her standards are going to be different. Why judge her by our standards? Was anyone hurt, lamed or otherwise taken advantage of? The answer is no.

    So why should anyone care?

  4. I think that people should NOT have a stronger reaction to the 16-year-old grinding with an older man. The reasons are many. I guess my #1 reaction is “kinda icky – but also nice that she can dance without doing it with some guy who might try to take advantage of her.” Grinding is such a common form of dancing, despite it being really sexual, that I can’t help but think that if she wasn’t grinding with this guy, Miley’d be grinding with somebody else – I know that I was when I was 16. And better that it be someone who is (1) gay and (2) cares about her as a person than somebody who might take it as a sexual come-on.

    (This, of course, assumes that it’s true that the guy she’s with is totally awesome and not skeevy – but I see no reason not to assume that in this case, since it seems like nobody’s heard otherwise.)

  5. Oh phew, sorry. I wasn’t clear. You’re saying you’re irritated that the public and media is all up in arms over Miley versus the ex-football player. Thank Someone, haha.

    I imagine part of it is that gossip blogs habitually report on people like Miley and not washed out football players. I think for most people, the Taylor thing is a rape akin to all other rapes in that for *most* people, he’s not someone of note. Morally, of course the Taylor assault is a much, much bigger issue indicative of the ridiculous rape trend in the US, but for me, this assault isn’t more important than mine or than Xs or Ys or Zs all of which have failed to get justice except that since it has not yet gone to trial, it MIGHT yield a conviction – but more likely, we’ll see this turn into a trial where the perpetrator yielded an admittance of what society views as a lesser violation in exchange for some kind of bargain.

    Miley’s grinding is important because it’s OMG MILEY. Miley had sexuality and she was only 16!

  6. Grinding is a DANCE MOVE, kinda like the twist or the roger rabbit or those things tango dancers do. Yes it has some explicit sexual overtones, but they’ve been so bleached out of the dance that I routinely see sisters, friends, and other non-sexual partners grinding and think nothing of it. It’s a non-issue. this is just how the younger generation dances. It’s kinda/ icky that there is an age disparity, but actually? Not really!

  7. Sorry to derail my own thread here, but I just saw a bunch of stories about this Miley video expressing disappointment that it wasn’t actually a lap dance and how sad their lives are now that they haven’t seen a video of Miley giving somebody a lap dance and I find this annoying. Is that just me?

    Anyhoo, carry on, thanks for the comments.

  8. I was also grinding when I was 16 (um, younger even. I know! THE HORROR!), so I hear y’all. Just thought it’d be interesting to see what others thought.

    Also, this: “And better that it be someone who […] cares about her as a person than somebody who might take it as a sexual come-on” is an interesting way of putting it.

  9. A friend of mine who watches 6-7 year old kids in an after school program says he’s seen the kids doing the grinding type dancing all the time. They watch MTV and copy what they see.

  10. I see Miley Cyrus in many ways as a kind of tragic figure. It’s always going to be tough for me to take her seriously as an adult because she is so enmeshed in my mind with the tween/teen set. She looks very young, too, so that’s part of the disconnect.

    But yes, it’s really unfortunate that people will give Lawrence Taylor a break in ways that they never will Miley Cyrus. I think part of it is that she is sort of this figure upon which many people will project their own envy and insecurity, sort of hating that which they cannot be or have themselves.

  11. “but I just saw a bunch of stories about this Miley video expressing disappointment that it wasn’t actually a lap dance and how sad their lives are now that they haven’t seen a video of Miley giving somebody a lap dance”

    Ew. How sad are their lives already when they’re super-disappointed that they can’t get an eyeful of an under-aged pop star giving someone a lapdance in presumably a private setting?

  12. “Are you asking if there’s a difference between an older guy allegedly sexually assaulting a 16 year old and a 16 year old consensually dancing with an older guy?”

    well, what makes LT an assaulter is the fact that the girl is 16 / underage, otherwise it would be a consenual act. So, AS indeed has the same problem in regards to assault and consent.

    But his act is less sexual than LTs, though not quite non-sexual. So there’s a difference, but not quite as big a differnce as your gobsmacking implies.

  13. “And better that it be someone who is (1) gay and (2) cares about her as a person than somebody who might take it as a sexual come-on.”

    You know, I’m having some difficulty feeling comfortable with this, not because it’s a 16 year old expressing sexuality, but because it’s a 16 year old expressing sexuality with a 40 year old man. If anyone acted inappropriately at all in this situation, it was the 40 year old man not the 16 year old girl. And if he hadn’t been gay, I’d definitely find it repulsive and predatory and I make no bones about that matter.

    BUT

    I am troubled by the idea that it’s better simply because he’s gay – if you eliminate the age difference – because, heaven forbid, the dude might interpret it as a sexual come-on. Because without the age difference there, the sexual come-on bit wouldn’t be a problem at all as long as the guy respected her for it.

  14. Why is the age difference such a big deal? If she were 18 and he were 45 this would be a total non-issue even if he wasn’t gay. She’s 16 and she’s dancing, I just don’t see how this is a big deal.

  15. well, what makes LT an assaulter is the fact that the girl is 16 / underage, otherwise it would be a consenual act. So, AS indeed has the same problem in regards to assault and consent.

    No. The 16-year-old girl he assaulted had been forced into prostitution. She also had injuries. Either he gave her those, or he fucked a girl who had just been beat up by her pimp. She was probably drugged too. Like that fuck didn’t know what he was doing.

  16. Even with the correction I think this is an odd post that is making a false connection between sexual assault and dancing. When watching the video of Miley Cyrus dancing my question isn’t, “why aren’t we all more upset about this?” instead it’s “why the hell is this on the news? why are we so obsessed with policing young women’s bodies that we need to zoom in on her ass and act like she’s doing something wrong?” They were dancing at a party. This shouldn’t even be in the public eye. It wasn’t a music video or some piece of media that we get to critique. It was people having consensual fun when they thought they were off camera.

  17. I think it’s important to note that the LT case involves prostitution and possible sex trafficking of a minor, not just statutory rape. see here

    (trigger warning on the article and title.)

  19. Seriously, what RD said. I don’t know how anyone can argue with a straight face that this is just an age-of-consent issue.

  20. “No. The 16-year-old girl he assaulted had been forced into prostitution. She also had injuries. Either he gave her those, or he fucked a girl who had just been beat up by her pimp. She was probably drugged too. Like that fuck didn’t know what he was doing.”

    OK, I reverse my opinion and conceed defeat.

  21. Faith: I think that you’ve got a good point. I wasn’t even thinking in those terms, but I ought to have been. Of course, it shouldn’t matter that he’s gay.

    I guess that what I was trying to say was that, to me, that seems like more proof that he wasn’t trying to creep on her. But of course there are other ways that he could have possibly been taking advantage of her – ways that aren’t directly sexual – and those are just as worrisome (for instance: it’s a good point that this video now has people going “oh if only it WAS an actual lap dance” – what if he had been the one to leak the video?). So, basically, the question of “is he sexually attracted to women” shouldn’t apply at all in this context and I retract that bit of my comment.

  22. I don’t think the Miley thing should have a stronger reaction, but it will because it’s Miley Cyrus and she’s 16. The public is waiting for her to make an ass out of herself and they are going to jump on everything she does. I don’t think what she did should be considered a “lap dance,” although it does disturb me how dancing at parties is pretty much just dry humping in these days, and not much else in terms of dance move, be it age 16 or 26. It wasn’t that big of a deal imo.

  23. Many teenage girls explore their sexuality by acting provocatively around older men — and honestly, I have rarely experienced “grinding” as a sexual thing. It can be sexy and flirtatious, or it can be goofy and exuberant. This looks like the latter. Ms. Cyrus seems to be initiating and controlling the dance, and looks happy. Might the story be more complicated? Sure. But I don’t see anything definitively wrong with what’s happening in the video, particularly given the context of Shankman’s sexual orientation.

  24. I’m a little confused about the point here, but if it’s surprise that Cyrus is getting more attention/surprise than Taylor, well, part of that is the previous reputation of the famous person involved. Miley Cyrus (a) is in the news much more recently than Taylor, who hasn’t played football for almost 20 years, and (b) had a squeaky-clean, wholesome image, while Taylor, though he’d never been accused of anything this horrible before, had been in some reasonably serious trouble. It was mostly cocaine use; I don’t think (though I don’t really remember) that he’d been accused of violence, but he at least had some unpleasant interviews where he talked about, e.g., driving while high and not caring if he killed someone. (I remember that detail because it’s the one that inspired my mom, bless her, to make my brother take an LT poster off his wall.) So a lot of people probably already thought of Taylor as basically a criminal (though he was supposed to have cleaned up since the bad old days).

    Really, I don’t see anything surprising about the difference in reactions to the two cases. In Cyrus’ case, people have thought of her as wholesome prior to now, so although there’s more surprise, there’s also more willingness to give her the benefit of the doubt. In Taylor’s case, when people say “why was he anywhere near that girl?” it’s not just that “he” is older, but that football players in general have a bad reputation, he has a VERY bad reputation, and the girl he allegedly assaulted was an abused prostitute. Even if his being black didn’t have an effect on people’s attitudes (and it does, of course), I doubt he’d be getting much sympathy.

  26. “why the hell is this on the news? why are we so obsessed with policing young women’s bodies that we need to zoom in on her ass and act like she’s doing something wrong?” (via Rebecca)

    and

    “The public is waiting for her to make an ass out of herself and they are going to jump on everything she does.” (via Ashley)

    Generally, I feel like our culture fetishizes female youth (in the obession-with-“sexy”-virgins sort of way) and likes to put them on a pedestal only to watch them fall. I know this concept isn’t foreign to most of us reading/commenting, but I thought it was important to note. It’s much more scandalous (read: ‘profitable’- for TMZ, celeb-bloggers, etc.) for OMG MILEY CYRUS to have done something that they can tout as the beginning of her descent into being a “bad girl” rather that focus on bringing a sexual assault victim justice…Also, I feel like similar things have come up regarding Cyrus in the past (like the Teen Choice Awards “stripper pole” performance and subsequent media frenzy).

  28. I don’t want to derail, but speaking of “stronger response” I’m at a loss at how there has not been more of a response to nickelodeon (and nick jr) linking to games like Perry the Sneak (sponsored, mind-bogglingly, by Kraft Lunchables). Perry is a middle aged guy peeping at naked women in the shower, trying to get revealing glimpses of their bodies, and if he’s not caught, he’s rewarded with bedding his victims. wtf? This is childhood gaming fare?

  29. oh, and the one report I saw of it in the New York Times? The woman journalist was an apologist for the game-maker, Addicting Games, saying that the game in question had been around for a long time, and it wasn’t the only game they made. Oh yeah, and same for the game where kittens are shot out of cannons and impaled.

  31. What Rebecca said.

    Grinding on some dude is a pretty common behavior for sixteen year old girls, and, relatively speaking, it’s not within shouting distance of the real shenanigans many are voluntarily getting up to.

    If you’ve decided to really critically engage the Miley Cyrus video, then I guess the age of her dance partner does make it a bit eccentric (though given that he is gay and she lives in a bubble of extreme celebrity, it’s kinda hard to specify an objection). Certainly there’s no crime involved, and it’s pretty hard to figure why we should even care about the video. I get the sense John Ashcroft would have to really focus to be able to get upset about it.

    The LT incident, by contrast, involves seriously violent criminal episode, including a sexual assault, for which LT allegedly provided funding support and some level of active participation. It’s an outrage to anyone who gets informed about the basic facts of the situation, and it’s clearly not the sort of thing society can tolerate.

    Also, for what it’s worth, if there was a 59s TMZ video of the LT incident, I’ll bet my bottom dollar that nobody would be drawing parallels with the Miley footage.

  32. I think another important factor is context. As others pointed out the Miley thing happened in a private party. But, furthermore, there are different social norms for different situations. One element of certain kinds of parties is exploring the boundaries of sexuality and taste. When one throws in an LGBT mix, where it there is a unspoken but firm status quo of consent that allows for those boundaries to be more fluid, and creates more of a safe space for boundary crossing and exploration–well, things happen. In that context, I wouldn’t be surprised at everyone grinding everyone.

    I think the main concern here is two-fold: 1) that it’s OMG MILEY!!11!! on the video (and all the attendant social control issues noted by other commenters) and 2) what about the concern regarding the consent of video-ing at this party? What kind of bad form is that? The only reason we are able to see this video is because OMG ITS MILEY!!!111!! and some party goer gets their 10k$ payday from leaking this to TMZ so they can peddle this shlep and we can all go OMG ITS MILEY!!!11!!1

    Honestly, Regardless of one’s age (though 16 might be the very low end of the spectrum), in a context like that of the party, I have never known it to be inappropriate to grind one’s friends. It is a safe and consentual way to dance/explore one’s sexuality. Shouldn’t we encourage safe and consentual exploration?

    I appreciate the OP using the space to explore feelings about the video, and think it is a great opportunity to work out those concerns. I agree with some comments and would fall on the side of the issue that it seems a bit concern trolly.

  33. I’m 18 and at the age of 16 I grinded all over my friends at prom. It’s what we did. I don’t have any respect for the “well she’s only 16 and he’s 40” crap. Regardless of why she is doing it she is clearly okay with what she is doing and therefore we have a responsibility to respect her autonomy no matter what we feel.

  34. Here’s the thing – the man is (and I repeat) Gay. When did “Well – he’s gay so it doesn’t count” become part of our sexual iconography in this country? I’m a 50-something lesbian and I can tell you there is nothing I would want less than a straight teenager giving me a bump and grind in my lap (well maybe free tickets to Arizona) … This whole scene smacks to me of the worst kind of smirking homophobia… wrapped up in “acceptance” that’s really all about making nice pets out of us and treating (once again) like objects.

  35. Lets say all of the repugnant context around the Lawrence Taylor case wasn’t there and it was just a case of a 50 year old man having consensual sex with a 16 year old girl. I think we’d still have a major difference between that and the Cyrus lap dance. The reason we have age of consent laws is to protect young people from being taken advantage of sexually by older, more experienced adults. They extend into mid-to-late teenage years because teenagers, by nature, are experimenting with their sexuality and are thus more vulnerable to being preyed upon by manipulative adults. The important part isn’t really the age difference but the difference in power and maturity that becomes especially important in the face of sex. Just like we keep novice swimmers in the shallow end of the pool while they learn how to swim, we keep teenagers with people of generally similar levels of sexual experience while they navigate the transition into adulthood.

    Thats the difference between these two cases. In one case we have a pretty mild sexual exploration, apparently controlled and initiated by the teenager involved, which had little likelihood of abuse occurring, and which happened with what seems to be a mature adult with good boundaries and a lack of interest in taking any kind of advantage, but which we find kind of creepy because it looks similar to something else. Basically, aside from the age difference, we have something unremarkable and pretty much healthy that we’ve noticed only because we’re fucked up about sex as a nation and obsessed with celebrity.

    In the other case we have a rape. Talking about them in the same breath is like talking about your house being on fire and your house not being on fire as similar because they both involve a house.

  36. I have a slight issue with the assumption of “he’s gay, so it’s ok,” only because that can be generalized to “he’s not interested, so it’s ok.” I think that’s dangerous. I also don’t think this is remotely analogous to the Taylor case, where the teen was (in my mind) clearly a victim of sex trafficking.

    I wouldn’t, however, put the onus on her to stop. Honestly, it’s on him. Considering the culture we live in, I’m quite sick of the responsibility being placed on women to avoid sexual behavior because of gossip. At 16, I was figuring out my sexuality. I had the luxury of not being followed by cameras.

    I also feel like we’ve already had this dialogue about Brittany Spears, Christina Aguilera, and Lindsey Lohan. ZOMG!!! They were all innocent and now suddenly they’re sexual without anyone seeing that coming because no young woman has ever been sexual before!!!!!111!!!!! Girls never would have known about sexual dancing if they hadn’t seen this video!!!

    I think it’s pretty gross that we have dialogues about their sexuality, period, and then proceed to generalize that to all young women. But that’s celeb culture, I guess.

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