Vanity Fair is about to run a cover featuring teen superstar Miley Cyrus. The photo, shot by glorious photographer Annie Liebovitz, is not pornographic, but it is disturbing nonetheless. The Wall Street Journal notes the reason.

She is also 15. Thus this week's uproar over a seminude photo by Annie Leibovitz for Vanity Fair magazine. The photo – showing Miley draped in a sheet, back bared, hair tousled, with a come-hither smile – upset countless parents who immediately grasped the photo's essential vulgarity.
Such ordinary wisdom apparently escaped every so-called grown-up involved in the photo shoot. The sophisticates at Vanity Fair defended the picture as a "beautiful and natural portrait." Absent sensible adults, Miley herself stepped forward to issue a statement saying that the now-embarrassing photo shoot was supposed to be "artistic."

This isn’t a porno shot – it really does qualify as an art shot. But a (seemingly) naked teenage girl draped in a sheet is a bit too sexual for my taste. Frankly, it is a bit too sexualized in a society in which teenage sexuality is already a source of concern. After all, we’ve just removed hundreds of children from a religious cult over the issue of sexual abuse of girls the same age as Miley Cyrus – aren’t we sending a highly contradictory message when we show her in a seductive pose on the cover of a national magazine?

Posted by: Greg at 10:46 AM | Comments (9) | Add Comment
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