I didn’t watch the VMAs last night. I didn’t watch them because I’m one of those assholes who doesn’t have TV, which of course means that I have a TV, it’s just that I only use it for Netflix and whatever I get from the neighborhood video rental place (yes! They exist! And ours is terrific! It even has a British Accents section!). But even if I did have TV – and I did for several years before this one – I wouldn’t have watched it, a guess which is based on my personal history of not watching it for probably the last fifteen years. In fact, I usually forget that the VMAs (and MTV, actually) exist at all, and it’s only when people I know on the Internet talk about them that I’m reminded they still happen for some reason, and people still care about them for some reason, too.

I still haven’t seen last night’s VMAs, but from what I’ve gathered based on the Internet, it involved N’Sync (should that be capitalized, or contain an asterisk? Does it matter?) doing that stompy dance they did once, Taylor Swift looking like someone’s WASP-y grandma and being bitter at one of her ex-boyfriends, and Miley Cyrus acting like one of those 50-year-old drunk ladies my mom started going on party cruises with when she got divorced.

The majority of people who are complaining about Miley Cyrus seem to be doing so because she wasn’t wearing a lot of clothes and, to quote more than one woman in my office, “She was acting like a slut.” Which I know is an easy word to use and I see where it’s coming from, but as far as problems go – and I mean actual problems that affect your actual life – Miley Cyrus “acting like a slut” is pretty fucking minor.

She’s 20. I can think of about a hundred stupid things I did when I was 20, and about two hundred stupider things I did when I was 21, three hundred stupidest things I did when I was 22, and continue adding or multiplying (whatever, I don’t math) until you get the point. I just didn’t have access to a stage on which to do them, probably because my dad isn’t some hillbilly shag haircut who put his daughter in the Disney machine when she was too young to understand what sucks yet.

…this isn’t to say my dad is a class act, though. I mean, seriously. He looked like this sometime around 1986, and this was just his casual taking-the-kids-to-the-zoo outfit:

(That has no relevance to this story, I just wanted you to see why I’m probably like this. And frankly, I’m surprised that he was wearing brand-name shoes.)

Anyway. Miley Cyrus is a 20-year-old girl with more money than brains who spent years under contract with a corporation whose ostensible interest was making her as sexless as possible (or at least as covertly sexy as they could because they’ve got to make money somehow). Now that she’s free of those obligations, she’s allowed to be as tawdry as she wants her record company wants her to be, and because her industry has been dominated by marketing strategy and AutoTune since she entered it, she’s a bit creatively stunted and is probably seeking the sincerest limits of her artistic expression by pretending that a giant foam finger is her dick and not being able to put her crazy-ass clam tongue back in her mouth for five seconds.

I don’t have a problem with Miley Cyrus “acting like a slut.” She’s an adult, let her take off all the clothes she wants. Let her dry-hump the shit out of the tolerable version of Mike Seaver. I just wonder why she can’t make better music, or figure out a more interesting way to perform it, or not appropriate a cultural fad that has nothing to do with rich white girls from Tennessee, or, again, seriously, what the what is going on with her tongue? Is that the new duckface? Why am I so old? Grumble grumble grumble.