Miley Cyrus's Crotch: Take Two

File this under, you can run but you can't hide. Take note, teens, tweens, and the like: If you put it on the Internet, it's there forever.

About three years ago I blogged right here on ABM about a picture of Miley Cyrus's crotch that was making the rounds on the Internet. I was writing for Gather.com at the time, a joyless, ridiculous gig that was set in a hamster wheel and fueled by SEO and Google hits. And I wrote that the people who were writing the Entertainment sections were getting huge hits, while the News and Politics writers like myself, in comparison, were getting pittance in the hit department. That meant if you were blogging about Miley Cyrus and her crotch, your family was getting fed, and if you were writing about the BP oil spill or the economy, you were starving. Such was the whims of the American public.

And just because I didn't want anyone to feel cheated, I included the picture of Miley Cyrus's crotch.

So this week, I pull up the analytics for old Action Bob, and what do I see? A huge spike. I figure it's some bot in India trying to hack into my account, which is usually what that means. But further investigation showed that all the activity came from people Googling some derivative of "miley cyrus's crotch."

Mostly, my analytics will tell me the ISP of the visitor, but sometimes it tells me the organization. Included in this round were the European Patent Office and, whoo-boy, the United States Homeland Security. So either there's someone on the first line of defense for our nation's security surfing for porn while on duty, or else I'm being watched for my un-American ways.

Anyway, I still think the whole thing--her crotch three years ago, or what she did the other night at the VMAs--is ridiculous. Poor little Miley (you read that right) was simply a sacrificial lamb for some corporation. People are criticizing and yelling at and about Miley, without realizing that that entire show the other night was given the green light by some pretty powerful MTV execs. Do people honestly think they said to Miley, Hey, just get up there and do what you want? No! That entire production was orchestrated. MTV could have pulled Miley and her handlers aside and said, Uh, we really don't think this is a very good idea.

My friend Jennifer Pierce, who is really smart and says some really smart things, yesterday said to me over Facebook, "The ancient practice of sending children and virgins into volcanoes is alive and well. Somewhere, in the back of our minds we believe that we need to feed the money machine innocence in order to keep the prosperity coming.  The beast must be fed or the wealth of the land dries up, you see."

Doesn't that seem to be the case? Starting with Britney Spears and then Amy Winehouse and who knows who else I'm missing because I really don't follow this stuff, our society seems to thirst for grand displays of public humiliation and degradation by young women in the entertainment field. Is this to make ourselves feel better about ourselves? If it it, I certainly don't. I get thoroughly depressed.