I thought once Britney Spears’ brain had been adequately sautéed by drugs and exposure-induced psychosis, America would finally feel shame and I’d be spared inane popwhore news for at least six months. I suppose it was too much to ask.

The latest celebrity “scandal” involves television star Miley Cyrus. In a recent Vanity Fair photo spread shot by famous nudity fusion photographer Annie Liebovitz, Cyrus is seen clutching a sheet to her likely topless body. Her back, arm, and face are exposed. While the primary thing I found disturbing about this photo was Cyrus’ horrid likeness to her fame-aping father underneath a makeup job out of the “Underworld” movies, apparently I missed the real scandal. Yes, word on the street is that the 15-year-old Cyrus is being a poor role model revealing her nipple-less back in an artistic photo shoot. Mind you, this was merely a climax in a lurid series of photos that surfaced last week involving a fully-covered breast and a reclining position. For SHAME!

Please tell me why I’m supposed to be outraged. Are eight-year old girls suddenly going to wrap sheets around their topless bodies? Are we to infer that Liebovitz took the picture after Cyrus had done speedballs and completed coitus with two costars of “Hannah Montana?” Is the mere combination of Cyrus’ mullet-addled genetics, pasty back, and satin bedding threatening to give pastor John Hagee the apocalypse he craves?

Celebrity scandal is hardly complete unless the main character shows remorse at the events leading to it. Cyrus herself expressed dismay at the photo shoot and the story, though I’m fairly certain it was because of pressure from her network rather than her own preoccupations. Her outrage would be plausible only in the event of utter obliviousness about its implications. If she was that concerned about her viewers’ perception of her, why did she agree to do a Vanity Fair shoot? Did she not even run Liebovitz’s name through wikipedia to get a handle on the kind of shoot she’d be doing? Did she not bother to ask her father about a magazine that’s banked its success over the past 15 years on featuring suggestive shots of celebrity women? How exactly did she THINK she was going to look topless with a sheet mashed up against her breasts?

A far more plausible explanation for this recent rash of “suggestion” is that Cyrus knew full well what she was doing and did it for a reason. In all likelihood, the 15-year-old is discovering her own sexuality and probably doesn’t want to be roped into playing a goofy tween machine on a Disney show for the rest of her life. Just as Daniel Radcliffe tried to shed his Harry Potter typecast when he appeared nude next to a horse last year, the Miley Cyrus thing should be taken for what it is: a girl growing up. Sadly, neither a rabid media nor a nation of apathetic parents demanding that television play surrogate role model will accept such an expression of individual choice and maturation.

The only disturbing aspect of this controversy is the fact that less than 1% of Cyrus’ audience would even know about this bullshit unless the media pumped it out in such a concerted fashion. Now, instead of Cyrus appearing in a magazine that her fans would merely see in fleeting periphery on the way to Claires, everyone with an internet connection and a finger can and WILL see it. Before you know it, we’re going to have Rick Santorum stumping on the need for America to clothe teen backs before fornication devours us all. And some of us who sanely pass over such inane crap will unfortunately be privy to insane reactionary application whether realized or merely suggested.

If at this point people fail to draw a connection between the marketability of our country’s attachment to Puritan sexuality and these manufactured scandals, they should put themselves on a waiting list for a cerebral cortex transplant. Has anyone ever wondered why modern Americans are expected to be shocked by nudity that would fail to raise even a Victorian era boner? It sells magazines and ad space. Why? Because idiotic parents are too uninvolved to tell their daughters that Cyrus did an artistic photo shoot with a photographer who fuses nudity into her art medium. When Cyrus has to wear long sleeves to hide her gangrene track lines in a few years as your daughters head to college rather than into gonzo porn as expected, there will be a real scandal that goes underreported. Panicky parents who bought the story killed the protagonist. This time, her name won’t be Britney.