The Male Gaze and the Problem with Blaming Women: How the Music Industry Failed Miley and Instagram

“Don’t fuck with my freedom,” Miley Cyrus chants in the song “Mother’s Daughter” from her most recent album, a celebration of her career and personal choices. I have loved Miley Cyrus since I was a kid, but recently I have found a new appreciation for her. She celebrates her body and sexuality with confidence and individual agency. I realize that it must have taken so much courage for her to break free from the cookie-cutter good-girl image that Disney wanted her to fit. Disney is known for producing stars that fit the talented, chaste, good-girl cliché, and when these stars begin to defy this image, it causes public outrage. After Miley’s infamous “Wrecking Ball” performance, America slut-shamed her and criticized her because she had ruined her perfect image. Just think of the other Disney stars this has happened to—Britney Spears, Demi Lovato, Lindsey Lohan—it is not just Miley.

Even Irish singer Sinéad O'Connor took issue with Miley’s performance. She wrote a letter to Miley after Miley said that her look for the performance was inspired by Sinéad’s shaved head. In the letter, Sinéad explains that when she shaved her head, she did it in defiance so the music industry would have to see her for her talents and not her looks. She argues that, in contrast, Miley’s look obscured her talent by allowing herself to be “pimped” or sold to the music industry (O'Connor). While Sinéad came from a place of concern, her tone is condescending. The letter hammers on the ways that the music industry exploits women’s bodies, but it does not consider any other motivations behind Miley’s actions behind her performance. Could it be that Disney's good-girl trope was oppressing Miley, and “Wrecking Ball” symbolized her breaking free from those standards? While some feminists like Sinéad argue that “real empowerment of yourself as a woman would be to in the future refuse to exploit your body,” those in Miley Cyrus’s camp argue that women should be able to choose to do whatever they want with their own bodies (O’Connor). In order to promote greater equality women should not criticize the choices of other women regarding how they decide to portray their bodies. Instead of blaming women for the images they put out of themselves, we should blame the patriarchy for condoning the voyeuristic viewing of the female body in the form of the male gaze.

One place where we can see the ubiquity of the male gaze, perhaps more clearly than in the music industry, is on social media platforms like Instagram. As Kelly Oliver of Vanderbilt University argues in her piece “The Male Gaze is More Relevant, and More Dangerous, Than Ever,” a reflection on Laura Mulvey’s analysis of the male gaze in film, “social media seems to have been created out of the very psychic desire Mulvey described as the voyeuristic, fetishistic, and possessive fantasy of the male gaze” (Oliver). Women’s Instagram posts mimick the poses we have become accustomed to seeing women take on in the media and in film such as the “sex kitten” or a vapid look with “eyes wide” and “pouty lips” (Oliver). The way in which Instagram functions exacerbates the issue because users receive validation in the form of likes and comments for posing in a certain way or fitting a specific sexy look. Marcie Bianco of Stanford wrote in an article for Quartz that “social media is an economy of the self” in which women post selfies to receive attention and affirmation from their followers (Bianco). Women and girls put themselves on the social media market to see how much they are worth in the currency of likes, comments, and views. Along those lines, Sinéad suggests that in the music industry, women musicians receive validation in the form of more opportunities and higher earnings for an appearance that fits into this male gaze ideal (O'Connor). In this process, women are objectified and converted into things that have a certain social media presence value or music industry value, something less than human.

Crucially, we cannot blame or chastise women for being drawn into the attention economy of social media and the toxic methods used to reach fame in the music industry. Their collective experiences in society have ingrained this method of achieving validation and success in their psyche. Social media platforms have taught women that their value as a person is determined by the attention they receive. The problem is inherent to Instagram and its founders for creating an app that uses the male gaze to make a profit, not the women and teenage girls who post photos that ‘show off’ their bodies. Women should not have to feel like meeting the expectations of the male gaze gives them their value, but they should be able to post a ‘provocative’ photo if they are doing it for themselves.

To achieve greater women's equality, there need to be upstream changes to patriarchal culture. Women should not feel limited in how they express themselves publicly. Even if empowerment is “shorthand for I wanted to do this and it made me feel good,” there is nothing wrong with women doing something that makes them feel good and powerful in the moment (Bianco). In our methods of dismantling the male gaze, we should be careful not to tell women how they can and cannot portray themselves. If we police women’s portrayals of themselves we risk maintaining specific tropes that women should fall into. If we say that women cannot be sexy and fit the male gaze look, then we risk implicitly saying that women should fit the perfect princess home-body trope.

So, what about Miley? There is nothing wrong with Miley Cyrus singing about her sexuality and dancing ‘provocatively’ in her music videos. It is the music industry's fault for obscuring Miley’s talent by focusing on her look instead of her music; it is not her own. She should not have to “refuse to exploit her body” to be taken seriously in the industry, as Sinéad suggests (O’Connor). She should not have to “be protected as a precious young lady” from herself and the industry (O’Connor). She should be able to look however she chooses and be appreciated for her talents above all, just as a man in the industry would be. Sinéad assumes that she was exploiting herself, when she could have just been making a creative choice; we do not know what Miley’s intentions were. Sinéad should have allied herself with Miley and called out the music industry for focusing on Miley’s body instead of her talent. Women should lift each other up and focus on getting rid of toxic behaviour in the music industry and the social media platforms that create ridiculous validation complexes instead of criticizing each other’s behaviour.