...[Miley Cyrus'] performance was an opportunity to discuss one of the summer's most arresting pieces of journalism — a long New Yorker account of what became known as the Steubenville Rape.
...
The first thing you should know about the so-called Steubenville Rape is that this was not a rape involving intercourse. The next thing you should know is that there weren't many young men involved — just two were convicted. The next thing you should know is that just about everything you do know about the case from TV and the Internet was wrong.
...
unhappily immersed in a teenage culture that was stupid, dirty and so incredibly and obliviously misogynistic that I felt like a visitor to a foreign country. That country, such as it is, exists on the Internet — in e-mails and tweets and Facebook, which formed itself into a digital lynch mob that demanded the arrest of the innocent for a crime — gang rape — that had not been committed.
...
And yet what indisputably did happen is troubling enough. A teenage girl, stone-drunk, was stripped and manhandled. She was photographed and the picture pa**ed around. Obviously, she was s**ually mistreated.
...
This is what got me: a teenage culture that was brutal and unfeeling, that treated the young woman as dirt.
...
So now back to Miley Cyrus and her t**ng. I run the risk of old-fogeyness for suggesting the girl's a tasteless twit — especially that bit with the foam finger. (Look it up, if you must.) But let me also suggest that acts such as hers not only objectify women but debase them. They encourage a teenage culture that has set the women's movement back on its heels. What is being celebrated is not s**uality but s**ual exploitation, a mean casualness that deprives intimacy of all intimacy.