Hannah Montana is a wholesome role model for pre-teens, but the teenager who plays her has posed provocatively in a grown-up's magazine, sparking a new outcry about sexualisation of young girls
Thank God for Hannah Montana - that was the fervent prayer whispered by parents when the fictional American teen rockstar exploded on to our television screens and into the hearts of pre-pubescent girls everywhere. Putting up with the inane dialogue and the dopey slapstick humour of the Disney show, not to mention Hannah's girl-power yodelling - "Go on and make some noise/every girl has a choice/to lead her own parade" - seemed a small price to pay. Because Hannah Montana, played by 15-year-old Miley Cyrus, seems squeaky clean. The worst she gets up to is a little mild flirtation with some floppy-fringed youth, and it's all under the watchful eye of her on-screen (and off-screen) father, country singer Billy Ray Cyrus.
This week, that carefully-crafted innocent idyll has been severely rocked, with the publication of a photograph showing young Miley wrapped in a satin sheet, bare-backed, all tousled hair and pouty lips. Taken by renowned photographer Annie Leibovitz for Vanity Fair magazine, the shot provoked outrage and weary déjà vu in equal measure: after all, the good-girl-gone-bad trope is a familiar one, already comprehensively mapped out by other former Disney stars such as Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohan. While initially claiming that she was happy with the image, considering it "artsy", not "skanky", Cyrus rapidly went into reverse once American morality crusaders began talking about burning Hannah Montana gear. While Disney, mindful of its lucrative franchise, fulminated about the manipulation of a 15-year-old for commercial purposes, Cyrus was abject: "I have let myself down. I will learn from my mistakes . . . my family and my faith will guide me through my life's journey."
The teenager has a career and a massive fortune to protect: some estimates have suggested Cyrus could be worth $1bn (€648m) by the time she is 18.
But just how bothered should we be about the photograph? It's the apparently deliberate subversion of the sunny, girlish persona of Hannah Montana into a knowing-eyed, possibly post-coital wench that has inspired most column and blog inches. For some, the image is redolent of those sleazy websites that count down the minutes until child stars are "legal". There's speculation that the whole thing could have been a marketing move gone wrong, an ill-advised attempt to propel Cyrus beyond the juvenile limitations of the Hannah Montana brand and into the adult market. After all, the sexed-up "girl-to-woman" photo-shoot has become something of a popular culture cliché.
In fact, compared to Britney Spears's provocative 1999 cover shot for Rolling Stone, taken when she was 17 - showing her spreadeagled on a pink satin sheet, clad in black bra and spotty knickers, and clutching a Teletubby doll: the very definition of Nabokov's "precocious pet" - the image of Cyrus looks almost austere. There is a grubby, urchin quality to her features, out of kilter with the usual glossy, airbrushed appearance of celebrity pictures.
The outcry over the photograph also holds a mirror up to our own profound cultural ambivalence about teenagers and sex. After all, it's ludicrous to pretend that teenage girls are not aware of their own burgeoning sexuality, fizzing with hormonally-charged fantasies and desires. While that might be acceptable when it's safely contained in the wholesome "dungarees and pony-tails" repartee of Hannah Montana, it's evidently much less tolerable when it comes to smouldering, semi-naked magazine photo-shoots. Whether the apparent sexiness of the shot is in any sense authentic, or merely a provocative and saleable chimera created by the skilful collaboration of photographer, publisher and what Cyrus calls her "support team", is another question.
But of course it's the effect on much younger children - the millions of pre-teen Hannah Montana fans around the world - that's the real issue here. On the one hand, Vanity Fair is not exactly required reading for 8-year-old girls, and the photograph and accompanying interview were never intended for their consumption. Yet Cyrus is a tween role model, and with youngsters already inundated with all manner of sparkly paraphernalia that encourages them to be "hot tots" and "little flirts", seeing their heroine bare-backed, red-lipped and decidedly rumpled sends out an uncomfortable message.
"The sexualisation of girls is on the increase, and it has a damaging effect on their development," says Prof Sheila Greene, director of the Children's Research Centre at Trinity College Dublin. "Girls are achieving well academically, but they suffer from low self-esteem, with its attendant issues of depression and eating disorders. They are bombarded with pressure from all directions to achieve this unattainable perfection in terms of how they look. Holding up glamorous role models like Hannah Montana focuses their minds on their perceived deficits."
What's more, Greene believes that we have become complacent about the insidious march of sexualisation. While the Cyrus photograph may have made people sit up and pay attention because its impact is unequivocally sexy, Greene thinks that even the ostensibly wholesome Hannah Montana character plays up her sexuality too, with her gyrating dance moves and sticky pink lipstick. "It's become so normalised; people don't even really notice it any more. People say that girls have always dressed up or played at putting on make-up. But now it's become a perpetual obsession; it's not something that girls do when they're playing, it's become a way of life."