Miley Cyrus from Schoolgirls Point of View

Schoolgirls these days may dress in a sexually suggestive manner, but they are also insecure about the way they look, and even more judgmental about how role models like Miley Cyrus look, and the message those role models send. The New York Times reports what some schoolgirls had to say about Miley’s Vanity Fair pictures:

“My friend loves her,” said one 15-year-old sophomore who wouldn’t have class for another hour. Eye shadow and blush with a hint of glitter were brushed across her perfect face, giving her the look that Barbie gets when some young girl decides she could have even prettier pink cheeks. “Well, she love-hates her,” she corrected herself. Once her friend saw the pictures in Vanity Fair, “She called her a slut.”

It stung to hear the word; another version of it came up a moment later. Looking quickly at the image — Ms. Cyrus with her hair damp, her back bare, a sheet draped over her front — another Beacon sophomore looked not so much shocked as disturbed. “Is this who we’re supposed to be growing up to be?” asked the young woman. She wore sunglasses, a tight baby-T and short shorts over black leggings. “I don’t want to be that,” she said. “It’s sending a message that girls are supposed to be whores.”

Dressing sexy, as she and so many of her classmates do, was one thing. Dressing in bedding, seemingly otherwise unclothed, was apparently quite another: contemptible, an actual evocation of sex itself. It’s a paradigm about this generation of teenage girls that’s perplexing to anyone who’s aged out of it: They exude sexuality, even as they’ve internalized a language of shame and anger around it, a language that makes anyone who crosses some ever finer line of appropriate behavior a slut or a whore.

The girl in the baby-T wanted to make it patently clear that she didn’t care about Ms. Cyrus. But she did care that the image embodied the way she and her friends, and even more so, girls younger than herself, were being forced to grow up so fast.

“It’s like you only get so many years to be a child, and then once you’re an adult, you’re an adult for, like, 100 years,” she said. “That’s it. Welcome to adulthood. There’s no turning back.”

Once a teenage girl starts to exhibit sexually suggestive behavior, as Miley has been doing, there really is "no turning back," and that is exactly what Disney is worried about.