So Miley is pansexual — that’s not the root of all evil
Stop perpetuating simplistic stereotypes about commitment
To the people of New Zealand, this is a public service announcement: Being queer does not automatically make a woman a cheater, a
“slut” or incapable of monogamous love and long-term commitment — no matter what Miley Cyrus says or does.
If you’re wondering why this PSA is necessary, you haven’t been following the news of Miley Cyrus and Liam Hemsworth’s split (an understandable choice). But I have, and so has much of New Zealand. It’s been some of our most-read content since the news broke on Sunday.
I knew what was coming. I took to Twitter to preemptively post this message: “Please for the love of God can we report on @MileyCyrus’ breakup WITHOUT talking about her pansexuality like it’s the root of all evil?”
Sure enough, it wasn’t long before the world’s media — including me — were reporting on everything from the split to Miley’s new fling with Kaitlynn Carter to Miley and Liam’s strained history.
And within it all, there was the same totally expected common thread; the subtle placement of blame on Miley’s sexuality.
It’s never overtly stated. It’s added in so you, the reader, consciously take it in like a random statement of fact, and subconsciously, its hidden meaning: Queer women cannot be trusted.
Do a quick Google search about the split and you’ll find a lot of headlines about Miley’s sexuality, the fact she’s “still attracted to women” and the fact she was seen kissing a woman a day before the break-up. The scandal isn’t just the third party aspect, it’s that said third party was a woman.
Someone on Twitter wrote: “Oh Miley and Liam split because she’s gay? I ain’t that upset now.” Others agreed as if being gay is the cause of a break-up, not the fact she was
with someone who wasn’t her husband.
Fellow pop star Halsey had to step in when one Twitter troll explicitly blamed Miley’s queerness for the split. They wrote: “Miley Cyrus splitting and allegedly cheating on Liam with a woman confirms that you shouldn’t date bi people. Not offensive, just true. Bi is greedy and never satisfied.”
They also refused to accept pansexuality as a real sexual identity, saying it’s “actually bi”.
This isn’t anything new. The same thing happened to Amber Heard when she split from Johnny Depp and that whole messy divorce became headline fodder. It wasn’t just “Amber Heard splits from Johnny Depp”, it was “Bisexual Amber Heard splits from Johnny Depp”.
There’s a long-held perception that anyone who is attracted to more than one gender is “greedy” or “can’t make their minds up” and are thus “more likely to cheat.”
It’s easy (and often fair) to blame the media for perpetuating the stereotype but remember they do so because the stereotype is already so ingrained in the culture.
Even in queer culture, bi and pan erasure is very real and the idea we’re just “sitting on the fence” or “noncommittal” is omnipresent.
Miley is not helping matters. She’s spoken about her sexuality like it accounts for her aversion to traditional ideas of “commitment” and relationship labels. The two are not inherently correlated.
She’s also claimed to be “redefining” what it looks like to be a queer person in a “heterosexual” relationship. But there’s nothing revolutionary about a pansexual woman dating a man — that’s kind of the whole point.
But I digress. The point is Miley Cyrus is as problematic as ever, and we shouldn’t let her narrative speak for an entire queer community, and we sure as hell shouldn’t let reaction to her choices define us.
We don’t know why Miley and Liam split. Yet the narrative we’re being sold is that Miley is at fault, because it’s easy to pin the split in on the rock’n’roll trouble child who prefers women than it is to pin it on the heterosexual, cisgendered and otherwise completely inoffensive Liam.
But here’s what happened. A man and a woman decided not to be together any more, because their relationship no longer worked for them as individuals.
Let’s just leave it at that, shall we?