"Twerk" on MTV, Miley Cyrus Did

In 2013, 'twerk' was added to the Oxford Dictionary Online. The dictionary said the word had been around for 20 years, but the evidence for it to be included in the dictionary had tipped the scale when U.S. pop star Miley Cyrus gave a controversial and headline-producing twerking dance at the MTV Video Music Awards on August 25, 2013.

— Wikipedia          

The verb "twerk," says the Oxford dictionary, means "dance to popular music in a sexually provocative manner involving thrusting hip movements and a low, squatting stance."

Much debate ensued after Miley Cyrus "twerked" onscreen at MTV. Was her performance appropriate, the multitudes asked, or not?

Miley Cyrus on MTV

More Miley

I say not. My thought is that it extended a long-term trend a bridge too far. When I was in college at Georgetown in the late 1960s, the university enforced a rule against "public display of affection": no kissing or petting outdoors or in public view. The more general rule, at G'town and in society, was that sex is to be kept private. If it's sexual, hide it from public view.

The rule was coming apart at the seams even then. It had been doing so for decades, going back to the ending of the Victorian era of the final two-thirds of the nineteenth century. "Victorian morality can describe any set of values that espouse sexual restraint, low tolerance of crime and a strict social code of conduct," says Wikipedia. Strict restraints on sexual attitudes and behavior meant men and women wore clothes that covered all and that emphasized nothing that might arouse sexual feelings. Sex obviously happened, and a lot of it was downright illicit. There's no doubt about it. But it was done in private.

My generation was not the first to rebel, but in our own nineteen-sixties sexual revolution the gloves — and much else besides — came all the way off. Ample justification was given: that getting rid of repression and of hypocrisy would make society and its citizens all that much healthier.

Now we have a 20-year-old former child star looking to extend her something-very-like-a-career by a twerking display on TV. We have rampant sexual abuse in the U.S. military. "More than 70% of male Internet users from 18 to 34," according to Wikipedia, "visit a pornographic site in a typical month." Priestly child sexual abuse has racked the Catholic Church. Scandal after scandal has cut short a host of political careers and besmirched the memory of one of the most revered of college football coaches.

All because sex is, I believe, now more public than private. Not the act itself (at least for the most part) buts its hintings, simulacra, and accouterments.

You might think — and a lot of people actually do think — there's no reason why the loosening of nineteenth-century moral strictures that was supposed to make us saner would instead be making us sicker. You might think that between Queen Victoria's corsetings and Miley's MTV cavortings there ought to be a sweet spot which society can occupy, with only a few depraved outliers to either side of the sensible median strip.

It hasn't happened. The depraved outliers are everywhere. So I'd say we need to rein ourselves in. The only way to do that, I think, is to take sex back into the privacy of the boudoir an keep it under demure covers.

How might that happen? We need to start by shrinking the boundary of personal behavior that is considered appropriate. I have in mind, to begin with, a new reticence about stuff that really isn't all that naughty, in the grand scheme of things. For example: no posterior anatomy visible for guys with low-slung belt lines; no visible bra straps for gals. Start with tiny little things like those.

Start with making this taboo ...

... and this.

Whoa! I hear voices raised in protest already. These infractions are, to the extent they are sexual displays at all, very minor ones. They are matters of personal choice and free individual expression. Every generation since Victoria passed away in 1901 has shown more and more anatomy, more and more underwear, and where do you draw the line? Isn't this all just a Trojan horse for a thoroughgoing new Victorianism?

I hope not. But it isn't at all clear to me that there really exists a viable sweet spot between Victorian deprivation and no-holds-barred depravity — it has to be one that the bulk of us can hold to — unless it is also one that abhors (for example) hordes of us "sexting" up a storm or assiduously "tweeting our junk" at every conceivable opportunity. Such activities are not necessarily immoral but, as I hope we are learning, they straddle the increasingly invisible line between public and private. Which is why we all now know so well the name of former-Rep. Anthony Weiner.

So, no more "sexting." No more "tweeting our junk." No more peeking-out bra straps. No more visible vertical smiles. And no more of the many other "innocent" behaviors that put us on a slippery slope to less-minor infractions and then to much more that is far worse.

Notice that I am saying nothing about what can or ought to happen between consenting adults in their bedroom or boudoir. I make no claim to knowing what kinds of sex are quote-unquote bad, or, for that matter, good. All I am saying is give sexual privacy a fighting chance. Keep sex, its stand-ins, its simulacra, and its accouterments well out of public view, and we will see whether I am right and the abuses diminish.