Late last October, Hilary Duff released a video for her song “Reach Out,” a production that can best be described as a study in heroin chic. In the video, Duff wears sheer tops, gyrates on couches, sucks a shirtless man’s thumb, engages in acts with sadomasochistic bents and generally looks cracked-out. Hollywood Records, a subsidiary of Disney, produced the record and the video.
Duff, who starred in the highly-rated show “Lizzie McGuire,” was once the poster girl for adolescent purity and goodness. Her Disney-backed persona was so thoroughly synonymous with innocence that Miley Cyrus, Disney’s contemporary version of Duff, felt obliged to thank Duff in 2007 for “making it cool to be a good girl.”
One year after making that statement, Miley Cyrus (“Hannah Montana”) begins a whirlwind series of very serious and very stupid PR mistakes that make her assertion that she is a “good girl” hypocritical, if not straight-up ridiculous.
If, for some unknown reason, one is not familiar with 2008 in the context of Miley Cyrus, Cyrus’s downfall began with her pulling her shirt down to expose her bra and then taking a picture of herself. She was fifteen. Later that year, she was involved in a Vanity Fair photo shoot in which she was wearing a bed sheet and nothing else, exposing only her back. This picture inspired thousands of angry letters to Disney and an apology from Cyrus to her fans. The year finished for Cyrus with an internet hacker leaking her personal photographs, including such gems as Cyrus in the shower wearing only a white T-shirt, as well as a seemingly endless series of her lifting up her shirt and taking pictures of her belly.
The Disney Corporation has had a long and sordid history of young female stars becoming train wrecks, starting with Britney Spears and ending with the alleged self-mutilation of new star Demi Lovato. Therefore, a fairly reasonable conclusion is that Disney is, rather than a wholesome family channel, merely a well-connected, lollipop-fueled whore house. Some claim that Disney pimps out its young stars and sexualizes and then sexually represses its young properties, most notably the female ones. However, a case could be made that Disney simply has a chronic case of bad luck.
Disney could never have predicted that Lindsay Lohan would start snorting coke, start skanking it up and then start dating Samantha Ronson. The blame for Lindsay Lohan falls squarely on her shoulders. Britney Spears and Miley Cyrus similarly self-destructed. Yet there remains this lingering feeling that the Disney Channel is somehow orchestrating these downfalls. The sheer number of young girls falling into compromising situations yields a natural suspicion of the corporation. After all, despite Miley Cyrus’s underage sexual hijinks, 2008 was also Cyrus’s most successful year-to-date. This begs the question of whether or not Disney is profiting from the sexual exploitation and expression of very young girls –– which, of course, they are.
But child stars going nuts by no means started with Disney. The Two Coreys (Feldman and Haim), Tatum O’Neal, Jodie Sweetin –– all had their downfalls due to indulging in the excesses of stardom. The only difference contemporarily is that most young stars fall under the umbrella of the Disney Corporation. My guess is that being a celebrity at twelve, with all the money and responsibility that comes with that role, probably had more to do with hyper-sexualizing Miley Cyrus than a channel who caters to the tween set (and who consequently have a vested interest in keeping their stars drug- and sex-free).
This is not to say that Disney is averse to sexually exploiting their female stars. However, they only allow their stars to have some kind of sexual expression when they are of an age to legally do so. Disney will sexually stifle Miley Cyrus because she is 16 years-old. For all Disney and the general American population cares, Duff can screw a Chihuahua in her next video –– but Cyrus better keep it in her pants. Which makes me, for one, ecstatic: I don’t want to watch a 16 year-old girl constantly reminding me that she has a vagina, because it makes me (and most normal people) super uncomfortable to want to screw a sophomore in high school. The over-18 set is not the market for Disney ––your little sister is. So, bravo Disney, for making it cool to be a good girl.