Miley Cyrus A.k.a. Hannah Montanna

Miley Cyrus is 15 years old. She is popular and she makes millions a year for herself and I believe billions of dollars for the Disney world. She is a product. She is a worker, she is an employee and she is a child. When did she start working?

As society we are riddled with double standards. While we fight against child labor in the third world countries we look the other way when we practice the same thing in North America. The only difference between those third world children and North American child actors is that one works in factories 8 hours a day to help feed her family and the child actor works a 16 hour day of drudgery playing make believe in all kinds of roles. When all is said and done it is work. Work is work and a child is a child.

Take that one step further; if an ordinary person had been caught taking such risqué pictures of an ordinary girl and trying to sell it in a national magazine, we would have raised our voices in protest. We would see nothing artistic about it but probably a child abuser. Why is the standard different for girls in the entertainment industry? Why do we allow our young children to be polluted by money and fame way too soon.

I have to ask the question could Miley's father have stopped her? How could a parent try to stop a girl who earns more than him from doing whatever she wants? This is the problem with young people given a lot of responsibility and too much money too soon.

Let's call a spade a spade. Regardless of what the artist will tell you to defend this indefensible decision as a work of art, that may be so but the intention is to show Miley's sexuality. The photographer could have chosen to artistically show the reality of a typical 15 year old girl such as the emotions a young girl goes through at that age - such as confusion, body image, innocence, naivety and just the sheer simple awkward beauty of a 15 year old girl, not this picture that invites men to drool over her and by extension other 15 year old girls as possible sexual role model and sex interest.

When are going to stop using women and girls as cheap objects of men's sexual fantasy. This is the continuation by women of the degrading and objectifying of women and girls that was started by men.

This picture of Miley Cyrus is another low and another loss for women and all that women fought for women and girls to achieve respect in this world. Why are we so obsessed with sex? Aren't we getting enough? Sex has been so exploited, so much talked about, so much photographed - I do believe that we have truly lost our sexuality and perhaps that's the reason we have to continually talk about it to prove to ourselves that we still have it. We continually want to come up with stupid ways to bring it to our attention like using one of the most popular girls these days, Miley Cyrus to do it. I do not believe for one minute that Miley or her dad did not know what they were getting into. This is a symptom of our insatiable appetite to be "more" famous, "more" rich, "more" popular, more, more. We are in a sad state when we can justify pictures as artistic, classic using the sexualized image of a 15 year old naked body.