Notice: All forms on this website are temporarily down for maintenance. You will not be able to complete a form to request information or a resource. We apologize for any inconvenience and will reactivate the forms as soon as possible.

Miley. Sigh.

cyrus.JPGI don’t want to write this post.

How many times must we talk about Miley Cyrus’ latest indiscretion? When does this tripe stop qualifying as “news” and slips to a gossip site afterthought?

I’m tired of this story. I don’t want to talk about the latest batch of photos taken of Cyrus—one of which shows a woman pretending to lick Cyrus’ (clothed) breast, and another which shows Cyrus lifting her shirt (exposing a tattoo underneath her breast while posing with a bare-chested, leather-thonged guy that thesuperficial.com refers to as “Gay Tron”). I don’t want to see them. I don’t want to even think about them.

But here I am, writing about Miley Cyrus. Again.

The new photos barely made a blip on mainstream entertainment sites, perhaps because we’ve all come to expect them. Starcasm.net writes:

Miley Cyrus continues to attempt to rewrite "The Boy Who Cried Wolf" fable as "The Disney Starlet Who Does Controversial Stuff" as yet another "shocking" photo of Lindsay Lohannah Montana surfaces in which Miley is getting the Black Swan treatment from another girl. … Meh. I don't know about you, but for me this shtick is getting old. Miley Cyrus puts the "ho" in ho-hum.

I just reviewed an episode of Hannah Montana for Plugged In last week, in which Cyrus’ alter ego Miley Stewart must make peace with the paparazzi after they catch her … making faces and licking syrup off her shirt. What an irony.

For me, it’s looking more and more like Cyrus isn’t just making some mistakes: She’s leveraging her supposed “indiscretions” as a purposeful business strategy. And perhaps it’s working. While she’s quickly losing her ability to shock us, she hasn’t lost her knack for making us sadly shake our heads. Or, obviously, talk about her. Or maybe even influence others. Just recently, racy photos of fellow Disney starlet Demi Lovato—now sequestered in a rehabilitation facility to work on some undisclosed personal issues—surfaced online. But, maybe because we’ve gotten so accustomed to leaked Cyrus photos, our culture barely took notice.

In the end, we decided Cyrus is still news—at least for us—because we suspect you still care. Hannah Montana (now called, in another sad irony, Hannah Montana Forever) is trundling through its final season. Cyrus is still, technically, on the Disney dole, which means that the starlet herself may still have dwindling inspirational cachet with the teen and tween set (even though a recent poll of teens dubbed Cyrus as entertainment’s worst role model). When the show ends, Disney will likely scrub its hands of its latest starlet gone bad, and likely we’ll be forced to dedicate more time to other Disney actresses making poor decisions.

But first, a couple of questions: How important are Cyrus’ antics for you? Do you or your kids still see her as a role model? Did they ever? Is it time to move Cyrus from Disney starlet to tabloid darling, à la Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohan?