Parents of the United States, stand up to protect your sons and daughters from the evil of . . . Miley Cyrus?

There’s something about being a teenage geek that’s refreshing. When I was a wee lad of 13 or so, I was way into science fiction. I just heard about this guy named Heinlein and I was watching Star Wars. It would be another year, I think, before I attended my first Comicon and witnessed a world of oddity. I remember at that age, when the stirring bits of manhood started to swell in my brain, of looking at magazines like Heavy Metal and maybe some odd French stuff that showed lots of nudity of women. If I was really lucky I would catch an issue of Playboy and see the really old women in the magazine. They were old because they were 21.

I don’t recall, and my memory might be a bit off on this, thinking of anyone my age at the time as being a sex symbol. I think the closest might have been Brooke Shields but she was presented to us as a girl next door sex symbol, but also not approachable.

There has been a lot of chatter about Miley Cyrus and how she is corrupting the youth of America because she did a ‘pole dance’ at the Teen Choice Awards. Added to the photo she did last year for Vanity Fair draped in white whom some called child porn and you have to wonder what is going on with . . . well, actually you don’t need to think about what’s going on with the youth of today. Here is a weird instance where I’m going to have to say it’s tough to have a perfect answer for this because we’re dealing with the morals of teenagers and adults. To be very specific teenage girls and mothers.

I brought up some of my geek youth days because when I have heard some of the discussion about provocative images, it isn’t clear as to the range we’re talking about. On one discussion I heard a person said Cyrus has to be mindful of her fan base, which she put at 7-13 year olds. Even if you watch old Leave It to Beaver episodes when Wally was 16 he didn’t want to have Beaver hanging around him. Wally wanted to be treated as an adult. It seems to be a lot of the female stars that come out of the Disney/Nickelodeon machine start off being ‘wholesome’ role models but when they become, like, real teenagers at 16-17 years old, they want to rebel like all teenagers. It’s the adults that can’t deal with the fact of the change. It becomes this pseudo moral decay of children, at least in the parents eyes, when the truth is they’re putting pressure on a 16 year old to stay Daddy’s or Mommy’s little girl when it just can’t happen that way.

I still believe the shock comes with the age range. Little kids are going to look up to big kids, but you can’t expect a 15-16 year old to act like the model you have in your head all the time. Parents are worried that the 7-13 year old is going to start acting like Cyrus? Unless parents are going to install a stripper pole in their house (like I saw in an episode of the Kardashians) I doubt young kids are going to take up pole dancing. Also, we as adults see it as pole dancing. Kids see it as an ice cream cart with the umbrella removed.

Maybe it’s the title of the show that is throwing me off. The award show she was at was called the Teen Choice Awards, yet the teenagers I would be concerned about, from about 15-17, probably were no where near the awards show unless they participated in the show. From the little I saw of the screaming masses crying about the Jonas Brothers and the like, that seems to be more of a pre-teen crowd than actual confused teenagers. Where I’m conflicted is as a Teen Choice Award, which teenagers to me being 13-17, you have a wide range of maturity going through that range. Using myself again, as a 13 year old some pole dancing 16 year old wouldn’t have registered in my mind at that age because I was into comics and science fiction. If I were 16 or 17 maybe it might do something, but by that point I have access to a lot of material. What I mean is by that point I would be able to find stuff that would talk about parents concern about the pole dancing 16 year old and I’m going to seek it out. Probably.

What you have are ranges of maturity that are tough to define and separate. Honestly I think it should be the Pre-Teen Choice Award. If that were the case, then I would probably call the dance a bit inappropriate. However, one thing not really pointed out are the ‘celebrities’ that show up for this award show. When you look at some of the people that showed up, the Cyrus dance seems a bit silly to focus on. You had Megan Fox, promoting her R rated film and is known for, well, being a sex symbol. You had Kim Kardashian, whom we have to keep reminding people got famous because of a sex tape. Even Levi Johnston showed up with Kathy Griffin as his ‘date.’ The less said about Griffin the better but Johnston is the model teenage boy who knocked up Sarah Palin’s daughter without being married. So example for example, as a parent I would be fearful of those people rather than some girl dancing on a pole if we’re talking true teenagers. As pre-teens, I might be concerned.