Pop culture has long been a driving influence in teenage morality—and adults have been complaining about it for decades—back to Elvis shaking his hips on Ed Sullivan.
But wow—is it ever getting bad now.
Maybe you’re like me and don’t pay a lot of attention to these things. But guess what—an awful lot of people do. That’s what puts the “pop” in pop culture. And what are they learning? What sorts of messages are they getting?
Brace yourself.
One pop superstar is Miley Cyrus. She became a sensation as a young teen by being cast in the Disney Channel TV series Hannah Montana, where she gained a huge following among young girls. The year after, her first album went quadruple-platinum—selling 4 million copies. She has had 24 songs in the U.S. Hot 100, and 14 of those were in the Top 40. At age 19 she was the richest teen in Hollywood, having made $120 million. In 2014, she won both Billboard Music’s top streaming artist of the year award and mtv’s Video of the Year. The same year, the World Music Awards crowned her the World’s Best Female Artist and named her the World’s Most Talked About Artist on Facebook. On Twitter, she has 22.5 million followers—more than CNN or the New York Times. More than 47 million admirers have liked her Facebook page.
This young woman is influential. She’s in the spotlight, and she knows it.
She likes to think of herself as a philanthropist. She has used some of her fortune for philanthropic activities. She supports several charities and health organizations. She’s an advocate for animal rights and for helping the homeless. She is known for her charity work. Compared to a lot of celebrities, she is generous with her time and money for causes she supports. I’m sure there are many who admire her for her charity work.
But what Miley Cyrus is really known for is her vulgarity, her profanity, and her over-the-top exhibitionism. She is well known for using marijuana; she has called cannabis “the best drug on Earth.” She has also praised the drug ecstasy, calling it a “happy drug.” She is well-known for her revealing outfits and her raunchiness. To her 22.5 million Twitter followers, she regularly tweets sexually explicit selfies.
Pansexuality
Lately, Cyrus has been talking a lot about her sexuality.
In a recent interview, she called herself “pansexual.” What is that? Debby Herbenick, Ph.D., the associate director of the Center for Sexual Health Promotion at Indiana University, explains that this “generally means that somebody is open to either falling in love and or being sexually attracted to people of all genders.” “It just widens the scope,” Herbenick says.
Yahoo Health paraphrased Herbenick’s explanation this way: “It’s different from bisexuality because bisexuality suggests that there are just two genders. Pansexuals, on the other hand, are open to the idea of being drawn to people who are gender-queer or transgender, as well as those who identify as male or female.”
Miley told one magazine recently: “I’m not in a relationship. I’m 22, I’m going on dates, but I change my style every two weeks, let alone who I’m with.”
She said in another recent interview: “I am literally open to every single thing that is consenting and doesn’t involve an animal and everyone is of age. Everything that’s legal, I’m down with. Yo, I’m down with any adult—anyone over the age of 18 who is down to love me. I don’t relate to being boy or girl, and I don’t have to have my partner relate to boy or girl.”
This is what the millions of people following Miley Cyrus are learning.
This is hardly the first time that a high-profile celebrity made destructive lifestyle choices. But I don’t believe there has ever been someone so influential—so mainstream—so widely accepted—who was such a vocal advocate of this level of immorality.
There have been weird celebrities, fringe pop stars, who have attracted fringe audiences with antics along these lines. There have also been mainstream popular artists who were into some terrible behavior as well, but who were more private about it because they didn’t want to damage their public reputation or their appeal to a mainstream audience.
Miley Cyrus, however, is as mainstream as they come. Her audience is young single men and women, teenagers and children. She is setting an example for them. She is teaching them—by the millions. And if she wants to stay in the limelight, she will almost certainly feel compelled to get even weirder.
This pop superstar is making these bold public proclamations just as the issue of gender confusion is blowing up in society today.
As the Trumpet recently noted, “Half of Britain’s Young People Say They’re Not 100 Percent Heterosexual”: “A recent survey conducted by the research firm YouGov found that only 46 percent of young people in Britain ages 18 to 24 would classify themselves as 100 percent heterosexual. The survey used a scale which plots people on a range of zero to six based on their own sexual inclination; zero being exclusively heterosexual and six being exclusively homosexual. [T]he majority of young Britons believe that sexual orientation is something more fluid and ambiguous, rather than something fixed and concrete.”
The reason for such rampant confusion becomes a lot clearer when you hear mainstream pop stars making such outrageous statements.
Consider: What sort of society would we have if everyone conducted themselves like her? If everyone were so disinterested in long-term relationships, so inimical to marriage and family? What if everyone bounced from one liaison to another, changing partners and/or sexual preferences “every two weeks,” searching for something new to titillate them for that particular moment? What if everyone prioritized their own gratification in all their relationships?
Such thinking represents the annihilation of family and social stability.
Miley says, “I’m down with … anyone over the age of 18 who is down to love me.” Anyone who thinks like that has no idea what love is. “Love” is mere carnal pleasure—no emotional connection, no significant mental connection, no commitment, no giving of self, no personal sacrifice. That is, in truth, the opposite of real love.
How many people are listening to these obnoxious statements and following stupidly along into this destructive mindset, and these disastrous personal choices and life-altering mistakes?
Last month, polling company Vouchercloud found that 78 percent of British parents named Cyrus the worst celebrity influence for children. But there’s no such thing as bad publicity, right?
‘Whore-phobia’?
On a bbc program two weeks ago, Chrissie Hynde, the now-64-year-old lead singer of long-time English-American rock band The Pretenders, described the younger generation of highly sexualized pop stars like Miley Cyrus as being no better than prostitutes. She even accused them of encouraging rape culture with their skimpy outfits and erotic gyrations. “It’s provoked by this pornography culture; it’s provoked by pop stars who call themselves feminists,” she said. “They are selling their music by bumping and grinding and wearing their underwear in videos. … I would say those women are responsible for a great deal of damage.”
Can reasonable people dispute that assessment? Look at what these superstars are doing. Are we to believe this is having no effect on society?
Remarkably, though, Hynde was vociferously condemned for her comments. Many people were outraged at her suggestion that women who dress like tramps and perform raunchy, exhibitionist acts might be creating problems or doing something to contribute to men mistreating women in any way. They denounced her for what they called “whorephobia”!
This is where feminism has come to: To criticize anything a woman chooses to do with her body is considered patronizing and misogynistic.
Crazy. Society has fallen off its chair.
Behold the results, a few generations on, of the Sexual Revolution. The further we go down this track, the more perverse, nonsensical, destructive and anti-family we become.
In his book The Missing Dimension in Sex, Herbert W. Armstrong traced the sexual revolution to pop culture, which is predominantly teen culture. “What many do not realize is that this teenage influence on the whole society is predominantly sexual influence,” he wrote. “There is much more intense preoccupation with sex during these years than in later maturity. Therefore sex became the basic formula for motion pictures—along with violence and crime, including murder.”
He first wrote that in the 1960s. The level to which that trend has since degenerated is truly shocking.
But this is what happens when you go down this road. It turns bright-eyed, talented young girls into shameless spectacles. And millions of spectators are watching, absorbing, allowing these things to shape their thinking, coming to see this as acceptable, and normal—and, in many cases, emulating.
These influences are like a wreckingball, smashing our culture, our families, our society.
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