Gawker
The Walt Disney Corporation was nothing short of outraged when its billion-dollar-a-year child star Miley Cyrus appeared in Vanity Fair wearing only a bedsheet, as shown in the rightmost image above. Said a spokeswoman at the time: "A situation was created to deliberately manipulate a 15-year-old in order to sell magazines." But check out the Disney billboard pictured on the left, snapped by Slate's Daniel Brook in Beijing, China. The model, who looks barely pubescent, is being used to sell a matching bra-and-panties set. Brook said the billboard made "the controversial 1990s Calvin Klein underwear ads look artistic by comparison." And it's not the work of Chinese intellectual property pirates; it comes from a legitimate Disney licensee pledged to clear all ads with Disney corporate. What does Disney say? Controlling child exploitation is hard! Also, Chinese people have certain... tastes:
"It has caught us totally by surprise," [a Disney spokesman] told me by phone from Guangzhou... "We have literally hundreds of licensees making our products. They are supposed to submit any kind of imagery to us before it is used, but it's hard to enforce that sometimes," he said...
"I don't want to make excuses for them at all because it is not anything that we would ever approve, but in other parts of the world this is not unusual at all... In fact, in Europe, they have similar type of taste, if you will. Here in China that's not unusual at all, but it's not usual for the Disney brand."
Disney's hypocrisy has been on display since the start of the Cyrus scandal. The company isn't against the manipulation of a 15-year-old for profit when the profit in question is its own, derived from selling a wholesome image of Cyrus to young girls through the Hannah Montana franchise. That's why Disney was so eager to tamp down Cyrus' natural and fairly tame (if unusually public) experimentation with her own sexuality, a process well under way — and heavily photographed — on the internet before Vanity Fair's Annie Leibovitz turned her lens on the star.
But this billboard is the clearest, simplest symbol yet of how Disney's beef with Vanity Fair is about business, not morality. If this sort of thing were a moral question for the company, it would police so-called manipulation of all its child icons with equal vigor, whether the kid in question was selling 10-figure TV packages or cheap underwear sets. That clearly is not the case.
[Slate]
Comments
Oh, you didn't get the memo. It's ok if Minnie Mouse hand puppets are involved.
The kid also has talent. She has great comedic timing and her show at Nassau Colliseum a few months ago got a review in the Times that you couldn't buy. I've seen a couple of her tailers and she's far above the previous Disney girl singers to whom she's been compared lately. That said, the photo with her dad was a bit edgy.
Two posts?
Please tell me that billboard is Gawker's idea of a sick joke...
1 post for America, 1 post for China.
That billboard reminds me: I must now voluntarily turn myself into the Feds.
@nightwatchman_flamekeeper: My point being is that she doesn't have a diva act or a leering hip shaker act, she has a rock act backed by a rock band (pretty good lead guitarist too), doesn't dress provocatively, and runs around stage like Jagger. So I don't get the sense that she's out to sell sex. And that bare back shot is damned tame.
@nightwatchman_flamekeeper: how much are you being paid by the cyrus family? she has a weak singing voice. granted i'm not her target audience, but her show doesn't hold a candle to "that's so raven"
with that said, i do enjoy her song "see you again" which supposedly she co-wrote. "co-writing" of course meaning she managed to rhyme "out" with "shout".
Those aren't hand puppets. They're golf club head covers.
@nightwatchman_flamekeeper: What the hell?
@bunnywith: If so, it must be The Consumerist's, too, because it's over on that site as well.
I'd babys-hit that.
What's really sick is that the girl in the billboard is all rouged up, like Jodie Foster in Taxi Driver. Actually I don't remember if Jodie was all rouged up.
Miley Cyrus is fairly talented. And if she can keep her clothes on, she won't be the worst role model ever. "See You Again" or whatever it's called is far more provocative than the sheet picture.
You know, normally I fell like an idiot and a sucker when I spend an extra moment staring at an American Apparel bilboard, thinking about climbing all over the model. But this, this is something much more exciting.
Um...the age of sexual consent over there is 14, btw. And has no one seen the babydoll fetish?
It's not sick...it's a different culture, thanks.
What we are reaping here is not hypocrisy, but the destruction of demographic boundaries, thanks to the internet, which confuses, apparently, everyone over 30 or so.
M-I-C-K-E-Y STAT-U-TORY RAPE!
Cool: How new media panders to their audience. Just like old media.
Not as cool: Selective pull quotes, even with a source link. [Hint: "He assured me the billboard would be removed immediately."
Uncool: Failing to appreciate the enormous scale of Disney's licensed property portfolio and cultural differences.
BUT, for manufacturing still more outrage, this post has got it going on, dog!
My question is: what kind of god-awful parents would allow their pre-pubescent daughter to do an ad like this? Sick.
@bess marvin, girl detective: Aw, go easy. I will always defend the honor of the Gawker-beached superfan.
I agree on the weak voice and there is no way she writes a word of that stuff, but she is fun...and this has nothing to do with her, but her backing band IS made up of some very cool people.
Mike Schmid on keyboards, FTW!
@Ack: Relliable sources tell me the girl in the billboard shot is older than Miley, by some 2-3 years.
@lothario: wow. good for you hahaha.
It's complicated. We have our social norms here, and I personally find the Cyrus picture icky.
Asian cultures have a completely different understanding. Like, eels-in-vaginas different. Bukkake different.
Multinational companies have always had the problem of justifying American social norms in a global world that most Americans would find pretty shocking. Pitching a PR fit is the smart move, because it will keep sales and stoek interest here in America. Hypocrisy is someone else's problem; it's not like Disney's shareholders seem to care about their pedophilia revenues.
Asian cultures have a completely different understanding. Like, eels-in-vaginas different. Bukkake different.
By my understanding, both of these are aspects of Japanese culture, and this is a Chinese billboard, no? Not to mention the things you are describing are hardly "norms" in any culture. Even if they were readily accepted by the citizens as a whole, society keeps things strapped down pretty tight on a superficial level and it surprises me that this would be allowed to be seen, even if everyone there secretly liked it.
@ADismalScience: Used undies in vending machines different?
@KillNewYork: Creepy!
@ObtuseIntolerant: I'll bet Miley writes some of her music. It's not incredibly deep material. She has some song about her grandfather dying, and it seems pretty believable that she could have scribbled down a few of the notes.
@twobighands:
They allow this to be seen. I guess it's different strokes for different folks.
[www.spiegel.de]
Mmm! Disney should bring back "baby burlesk" and get their child stars started when they're 4.
+ Watch video
i am putting my 5 y o in a convent. srsly
None of this is really worse than, say, the "Disney Hannah Montana Girls Rock Bikini."
Of course, it's no better, either.
[disneyshopping.go.com]
all of this cause of a bare back shot of a 15 year old starlet ? WTF ...
Honestly ... i hope you guys never find out about public pools in austria or nude beaches in germany ... you would go into immeate cardiac arrest ...
@Redwraithvienna: d00d, let me know when u have a daughter, okay?
@Ack: I know. Cyrus' parents really should have put their foot down during the photoshoot. Shame they approved.
Although they did say no to the twitching-eels-in-Miley's-vagina photo concept, so there's hope of their winning Christianist Parents of the Year.
@Trai_Dep: thank heavens for that much
@ADismalScience: If nothing else, at least this thread has given me another addition to the ever-growing file of wicked band names... the Vaginal Eels.
This better mean my Disney stock is going through the roof.
@ObtuseIntolerant: That girl is not 14, my friend.
And this is ADULT lingerie, it's not a training bra line. I blogged about this on the parenting blog yesterday.
Miley Cyrus has been trained to be sexy for so long she just can't stop when you point a camera at her. On the red carpet, she sticks her ass out like Kim Fucking Kardashian.
Disney claims they're putting her on ice for now; they're probably just using it as an excuse to put the focus on a different kid for awhile till the heat dies down.
At least the company handled this well. I GET that China's a different country, and you should see the stuff they do in Italian ads with kids, but the fact is, it's Disney. If they don't want to be associated with eleven year olds in adult, kid-fetish lingerie, they don't have to print the posters in the first place.
None of this is new... Where has everyone been for the last 30 years or so?
Many of those high-fashion models we see are teens. I don't know what their average age is, but that would be an interesting stat.
Also, on a recent cover of New York Magazine they displayed the stars of the new "Gossip Girls" laying down in their underwear... One of them is only 14!
... Again, NOT new people. It's old news.
@KillNewYork: Your comment is weird and disgusting.
@KillNewYork: The Seven Dwarves would like to marry you.
While the Chinese poster is hardly appropriate, at least the model isn't giving off a vibe like someone just Mileyed the Cyrus out of her.
agree with GeorgeBabbitt it is not so much the bare back but the vibe and the shadowy inuendo of the poses with her father - in one of the pictures her elbow on the inner tight area is certainly making her back and biceps touch her father's crotch - quite uncomfortable to watch - as a mother of a little girl and 3 older boys - I train my daughter to keep a respectable distance from her siblings as she is growing into a developing tween- I also warned her that sitting on daddy, uncles, and grandfathers' lap is at this point somehow not ladylike -inasmuch as I trust all of them and I truly do - and I have no issues about their sanity, innocence and filial disposition , I am not about to tempt luck and allow my little girl to be the cause of an involuntary erection. SO yes - I beg to differ from someone above- you do not have to be a psycho to err in the safe side and prevent idiotic portrays of what should be -no matter how close- a paternal image- Billy Ray is an idiot if not a pervert. The pictures that are disturbing are the ones where they are together
@LZ10001: Wows. I really pity your children, feeding them such perverse stuff. Really. Stop watching local news so much and get out a bit more? Please?
Ah, Disney. So, it's all good to objectify children as long as it's in Europe or China?
God bless America, say I.
Everyone is mistaken. That's the welcome sign you see when you leave the airport in Cambodia.
The prepubescent girl on the left seems to have some photoshopped cleavage. Stay classy, China.
@Astrolabe:
... or Disney, rather.
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