Miley Cyrus\' VMA Performance and the Sexualization of Society Essay

I. Introduction

In American society of 2013, sex sells — a premise so widely accepted that it barely registers as a claim. Sexuality is deployed to market every manner of product and service, and the images chosen to carry that message skew increasingly young even as the treatment of those images grows increasingly adult (Zurbriggen & Roberts 55). The result is a deceptive, two-part message: first, the normalization of hyper-sexuality across culture as a whole; second, the application of that norm specifically to girls and young women before they have the maturity to evaluate it critically (Zurbriggen & Roberts 57). These two dynamics reinforce each other in a feedback loop that makes it difficult to isolate cause from effect — but examining a high-profile, concrete case reveals how the cycle operates and why it demands a cultural response.A1 Miley Cyrus's performance at the 2013 MTV Video Music Awards offers exactly that kind of case: a moment sufficiently visible, sufficiently debated, and sufficiently representative to illuminate the broader problem of media-driven sexualization and its measurable consequences for young women's self-image and behavioral norms.

II. Miley Cyrus and the 2013 VMAs

Among the many moments in recent popular culture that illustrate the sexualization of young women, Cyrus's VMA appearance stands out for its deliberateness and its reach. The Oxford English Dictionary (2013) defines "twerk" as to "dance to popular music in a sexually provocative manner involving thrusting hip movements and a low, squatting stance" — and that definition captures precisely the nature of Cyrus's routine alongside Robin Thicke, which was watched by millions of viewers in real time and then replayed countless more times online.A2

The cultural context matters here. Cyrus had spent her adolescence playing the title role in Disney Channel's Hannah Montana, making her a role model for a generation of girls. At twenty years old in 2013, she was exercising her right to redefine her public image as an adult artist — an entirely predictable transition. The question is not whether Cyrus had the right to grow up publicly, but whether a performance built around hypersexual spectacle was the appropriate vehicle for that growth, or whether it instead compounded the very problem it seemed to be celebrating: the reduction of a young woman's value to her sexual availability.A3 Her "Wrecking Ball" video, released in the same period, extended that theme — nudity deployed as artistic provocation — and deepened the public debate (Duca).

III. Supporters, Backlash, and Celebrity Responsibility

Public reaction split sharply along moral, religious, and even racial lines. Cyrus herself stated that she intended to make history and expressed little concern about the offense her performance caused (Duca). Supporters, including her father Billy Ray Cyrus, defended her artistic autonomy. Critics — including the editor of Vogue, who publicly reversed a decision to feature Cyrus on the magazine's December cover — argued that she had crossed a line that carried real costs (Collier).

The most honest version of the pro-Cyrus argument deserves direct engagement: adults are responsible for their own choices, audiences are not compelled to imitate what they watch, and holding a pop star accountable for the values of her fan base places an unreasonable burden on individual expression.A4 That argument has genuine force. Yet it underestimates the asymmetry of influence between a celebrity with tens of millions of followers and any individual viewer. Cyrus did not invent the culture of premature sexualization, but she had, at that moment, an unusually large platform — and platforms carry a proportionate weight of consequence, whether or not the person holding them wishes it.

IV. Media as a Driver of Early Sexualization

The VMA performance was a concentrated expression of a far broader trend. Research published by the American Academy of Pediatrics found that sexual content appears across an overwhelming proportion of television programming, and argued that repeated exposure shapes young viewers' understanding of what counts as normal behavior and desirable identity (Committee on Public Education 191–192).A5 Television is only one channel of influence: popular music lyrics routinely tie women's worth to their sexual attractiveness, while mainstream magazines use heavy digital retouching to present bodies that are physiologically unattainable and then promise readers the means to achieve them (Zurbriggen & Roberts 88).

A 2008 report by the University of California, Santa Barbara — "Sexuality in the Mass Media: How to View the Media Critically" — documented the prevalence of sexual content across prime-time television and argued that such exposure, without corresponding critical media education, accelerates the internalization of sexual norms by younger and younger audiences.A6 Taken together, these media channels deliver a coherent, if uncoordinated, curriculum: that a girl's social value is primarily sexual, that this value must be demonstrated early, and that failure to perform sexuality appropriately carries social penalties — labels like "prude" or "tease" — that are particularly powerful during the adolescent years when peer acceptance feels paramount.

The causal chain runs from celebrity performance to media normalization to shifted peer norms to individual behavioral change: when Cyrus performs hypersexuality on a global stage, that performance is amplified by replays, commentary, and imitation until it begins to register as a cultural baseline, subtly relocating the threshold of what is considered age-appropriate for the girls watching.A7 No single performance accomplishes this shift on its own, but each one contributes to an accumulating pressure that redefines the normal.

V. Self-Esteem and Body Image

The downstream consequences of that normalization are not merely behavioral; they are psychological. Girls who absorb the media message that sexual attractiveness is a prerequisite for social worth, but who do not match the retouched, choreographed images the media presents, face a structural impossibility: a standard they are told is mandatory but cannot meet. Zurbriggen and Roberts document how this gap generates shame, anxiety, and disordered relationships with the body — including, in more serious cases, clinical-level eating disorders (95). The issue is not that girls should be shielded from the existence of sexuality, which is a normal dimension of human experience, but that they are being taught, via media repetition, that sexuality — performed in a very specific, commercial idiom — is what defines their worth above any other quality.

That lesson is false, and most people come to recognize it as false with time and experience. The problem is that the years during which girls are most vulnerable to media influence are exactly the years during which identity and self-worth are being formed. A message absorbed at twelve or fourteen does not simply evaporate when a person turns twenty-five; it shapes the assumptions from which later growth must struggle to depart.

VI. Conclusion: What Can Be Done

The question that follows from this analysis is one of responsibility. Parents occupy the first line of defense: maintaining open conversations about media messages, modeling critical viewing habits, and affirming the values and qualities in children that the media routinely ignores. But parental vigilance alone cannot counter a cultural environment in which sexual messaging is pervasive across television, music, social media, and print. Expecting families to individually resist an industry-wide norm is to misplace the burden.

The deeper structural change must come from the media industries themselves — from broadcasters, streaming platforms, music labels, and magazine publishers choosing standards that do not treat the sexuality of young women as their primary commercial currency; and from celebrities, who may not have sought influence over young fans but who carry it regardless, making decisions about public performance with that influence consciously in mind.A8

Miley Cyrus's 2013 VMA performance did not create the problem analyzed here; it crystallized it. She was simultaneously a product of a hypersexualized media environment and one of its most visible amplifiers in that moment. Understanding how that dynamic works — how celebrity behavior, media amplification, peer normalization, and individual psychology interact — is the necessary first step toward changing it. The girls who watched that performance deserved a cultural context that valued them for more than their ability to perform desire. Building that context is the shared work of industries, artists, families, and policymakers together.