Around this time last month, the Internet exploded with amusing gifs of Nicki Minaj at the VMAs yelling, “Miley, what’s good?” and videos of Miley Cyrus looking traumatised as she hosted on stage. For those of you who somehow managed to avoid this flurry of articles, this feud owes itself to the fact that Taylor Swift’s ‘Bad Blood’ music video was nominated for the VMA’s video of the year shortlist, while Nicki Minaj’s music video for ‘Anaconda’ failed to make the cut. This left Minaj disillusioned as she felt that her video had made a huge impact on pop culture in 2014 – you couldn’t switch on the TV or the radio or browse the Internet without having the song blasted at you from all directions – and she subsequently took to twitter to express her disappointment, implying that if she were white and fit a specific body standard, then she would have been treated differently.
Miley later commented on this, stating that Nicki was making too much of a big deal over the situation and that if she just worked hard enough, then she would get nominated. You may be asking yourself why I care so much about this seemingly insignificant gossip, however, it is not so much the Hollywood stars themselves that interest me, but rather how the media and their fans have responded to the issue over the past month and the implications of this reaction.
In her compelling speech ‘The Sociology of Gossip’, Canadian reporter Elaine Liu explained how gossip and tabloid news could be used as a window for the observation of social culture and behaviour since when we gossip, we cannot do so without “filtering it through the prism of our own experience”. Remarks and reactions to popular gossip are therefore an undeniable “reflection of popular morals and ethics of that time” as they help researchers to understand society’s attitudes towards a wide variety of pressing issues.
Liu maintains that tabloid news is not a new phenomenon, directing her audience to various examples such as Egyptian hieroglyphics, suggesting that an ancient king was having an affair with one of his army generals. So what will future anthropologists extract from today’s attitudes towards current celebrity gossip, and how will that reflect on our society’s values and mentality in a few hundred years’ time?
As someone whose attitude has been more or less neutral towards Miley Cyrus, friends have asked me why I’ve suddenly taken a dislike to her. Firstly, the media did not fail to live up to my low expectations, with many online articles choosing specific freeze frames portraying Nicki as simply “an angry black woman”, rather than an artist who was frustrated at what she perceived as racism within the music industry.
Moreover, the differing opinions of these two celebrities were trivialised and watered down to a Twilight-esque “Team Miley versus Team Nicki”, all the while portraying them as simpletons with a proclivity for shallow drama and nothing more, completely ignoring the issue at hand. Whether or not Nicki Minaj’s claims and accusations were unfounded seems irrelevant to me. In my opinion, it was not Miley’s place as a white woman to completely dismiss Minaj’s concerns since she cannot possibly know the struggle of a person who has had to deal with prejudice against minorities. That’s not to say that nobody has their own obstacles to deal with, however Miley failed to take into account the socioeconomic imbalance between herself and Minaj, and the fact that should the claims of racism be true, one cannot simply reduce a celebrity’s success to perseverance. Neither should we forget that Miley had the advantage of being thrown into stardom at an early age since her father Billy Ray Cyrus had already made his mark in Hollywood. This means that with regards to race and background, Minaj would have had to work twice as hard in order to arrive at the same level of success as her more socially privileged contemporaries.
What bothers me is that Miley Cyrus has in recent months been paraded as an ideal model for feminism, something which I never felt the need to dispute until the events of the VMAs. She has indeed been actively speaking in favour of equal treatment between men and women, however, when speaking about feminism we cannot neglect to acknowledge the varying struggles faced by racial and religious minorities, women of a lower socioeconomic background and queer and transgender women. These are all factors which must be taken into account when promoting women’s rights as these seemingly separate issues are actually intertwined and must therefore go hand in hand. Of all the eye-rolls directed towards the feminist movement over the years, one of the few criticisms I am willing to agree with is the fact that some feminists fall into the trap of advocating only white women’s rights, forgetting about minority women and neglecting to provide them with a voice to express their individual concerns.
As reporter Elaine Liu suggested, this piece of seemingly petty drama may provide insight into not only racism in modern western society, but also the possible need for a re-evaluation of modern gender equality movements. So Miley, if you personally feel that hashtagging #FreetheNipple is an adequate course of action in your feminist movement, by all means do so, but the moment you refuse to acknowledge the intersectionality within feminism itself, you are leaving a large percentage of your fellow females behind. If you only cater to the needs of white women and seek to dismiss or silence minorities, you cannot endeavour to call yourself a feminist. Simple as that.
