Miley Cyrus spent the better part of two decades building a career on exposure. First, it was Hannah Montana, the wig-and-wardrobe double life that made her every tween girl's favorite Disney star. Then, in 2013, she took a sledgehammer to that image, literally, swinging naked on a wrecking ball and twerking on national television at the VMAs.
The message, delivered with a tongue and a foam finger, was that this was liberation. She was done being anyone's good girl.
Twelve years later, sitting across from Monica Lewinsky on a podcast, Cyrus said something that should make headlines. She said she kept "dressing or acting a certain way," and her relationships fell apart as a result.
Nobody wanted to build something real with a woman whose body and sexuality had already been handed out to the world for free. She wasn't being scolded by a pastor or a parent. She was describing, in her own words, what a decade of researchers, therapists, and worried mothers has been saying all along: exposure has a cost, and the bill eventually comes due.
I hear some version of this in my office constantly. Young women who were told that their bodies were tools of empowerment, that shame was the enemy, that "sex work" was just work like any other, and that a man who judged a woman for her past was the one with the problem.
And then, in their late twenties and thirties, when they want to be chosen and not just consumed, they discover that the culture lied to them. Men remember. Men notice. Commitment is built on scarcity, and we spent generations teaching women to give away the very thing that made them valuable.
This isn't only a female problem. Hookup culture flattened men too, training an entire generation of them to expect access without effort, intimacy without investment, and a never-ending supply of partners. Nobody in that arrangement is winning. We just built a marketplace and called it freedom.
Interestingly enough, shame used to do a job.
Shame was a guardrail, a low hum in the back of your mind that said slow down, this matters, protect this. We dismantled that guardrail on purpose. We renamed prostitutes "sex workers" so the transaction would sound like a career choice instead of a last resort. We turned "slut-shaming" into a moral crime worse than the behavior it was policing. We told girls that judgment was the only sin left. And now we have a generation built without shame screaming, “But my feelings!”
We need to bring back the art of shaming.
Not shame as cruelty. Shame as memory. The kind that reminds a nineteen-year-old that her body is not a marketing tool, and reminds a young man that a woman is not a convenience. People tend to relearn this the hard way, usually a decade after the culture told them they didn't need to learn it at all. There's real research showing political and moral attitudes shift rightward with age far more often than the reverse, precisely because life eventually teaches what ideology couldn't.
Miley Cyrus didn't need a critic to tell her what hookup culture cost her. She lived it, and she said so herself. In a world where Porn-hub seems to be the strive for success, be a Miley Cyrus 2.0.
Soad Tabrizi is a licensed marriage and family therapist with a private practice based in Orange County, CA (www.soadtabrizi.com). Soad is also the founder of www.ConservativeCounselors.com.
