This is Not a Post About Miley Cyrus

Remember that time I didn’t write a post about Fifty Shades of Grey, and that other time I didn’t write a post about Kristen Stewart? Well, now I’m not writing a post about Miley Cyrus.

Last weekend at the MTV Video Music Awards, Miley Cyrus appeared in a performance where she danced with Robin Thicke and smacked the butts of black female backup dancers, and the Internet promptly exploded.

Are you shocked?

I was, too. I didn’t know the MTV Video Music Awards were still culturally relevant, either.

But apparently, they are culturally relevant enough to prompt a week and a half of articles criticizing Miley for showing too much of her skin and being too overtly sexual, articles defending Miley because her body is her own and she should be able to do whatever she wants with it, articles criticizing Miley for appropriating black culture and using black women as props, and articles asking why we are even talking about Miley when there are more important things happening in Benghazi Syria.

Some of these points were good points, especially the points about the way the performance objectified women of color, a subject that white feminists are often much too quick to ignore.

But then a week passed, and people were still talking about Miley Cyrus and the VMAs.

And then Miley said something stupid and thoughtless about the performance, the blogs erupted again, and the phrase “circle-twerk” was invented. (By me. I’m taking credit for that one, unless someone beat me to the punch and I was unaware of it.)

And I couldn’t help but wonder what people hoped to accomplish in continuing to dissect a performance by a person who clearly reveled in any and all attention, positive or negative.

And while cultural appropriation, racism, objectification, and sexism are all very important topics that require ongoing conversations, I also couldn’t help but think that discussion of this particular instance of cultural appropriation and racism and objectification had been exhausted after the third or fourth article on the subject, and if by continuing to discuss it almost two weeks after it happened, we were in danger of beating a dead horse with Miley’s skinny, not-really-twerking white girl butt.

And that’s why I’m not writing a post on Miley Cyrus.

And I hope I don’t have to hear her name again for quite some time, unless it’s in the context of Vanessa Bayer’s excellent impersonation on Saturday Night Live.