Paying the social and emotional price

As crude and grotesque displays go, one has to search far and wide to find a more blatant example than the recent rise of the pop starlet Miley Cyrus. The former Disney favourite has reinvented herself as a hyper sexualised and sexually available young woman and has done so at the expense of young women everywhere and modern culture at large. The purpose of this letter is not to tut at pop music or to enact a prudish or puritanical stance, sex and the popular song have been closely related since Ivor Novello penned his first tunes here in Cardiff a century ago. The reason why the Welsh Council on Alcohol and Other Drugs takes a position on this is because the wider culture that generates such banality is also responsible for immense emotional harm and dysfunction. It has long been understood that the simplistic notions of how people interact with role models that were dreamt up decades ago no longer apply, young people don’t simply absorb and directly emulate the actions of role models, it is in fact far more complex. When we see images of those who society and the media have validated by declaring them famous or celebrities we unconsciously take on the values that they seem to represent and of course for most of us the ‘ideals’ they represent are largely unobtainable. For those that can live up to what they are presented with a different problem exists, which is that of adopting the artifice (a tricky enough job for the celebrity, Norma Jean Baker, AKA Marilyn Monroe would frequently refer to the persona of Marilyn as ‘her’). We, as a society, encourage through subtle, silent and unconscious cues our young people to be something they are not. Our TV, internet and advertising creates a constant sense of lack, a constant sense of not-good-enough, and the reach of these messages increases year on year. When young people do act out these hyper sexualised roles they inevitably pay some social or emotional price, but the biggest of all is an alienation from self. So little is done in our society to encourage young people to develop and authentic and positive sense of who they are that pretense eventually becomes an accepted default setting and the burden of holding up this make believe for many becomes unbearable, resulting in the retreat to drugs, drink and other dysfunctional behaviours to numb the hurt. The fame of a few is bought at the price of the loneliness and confusion of the many and we as a society must try to engage in a meaningful discussion about how we engage our young in an exploration and appreciation of themselves, not the animated adverts for dysfunction they see on the screen.