Parenting

Miley Was Aggressively Groped And People Are Blaming Her For It

by Madison Vanderberg
Facebook and Steve Granitz/Getty

Miley Cyrus clapped back at sexist internet trolls who think she was groped because of how she dressed

Earlier this week, a man groped Miley Cyrus as she was leaving her hotel in Barcelona, Spain with her husband Liam Hemsworth. The stranger pulled her head towards him and appeared to kiss her, but luckily, Cyrus’s security detail pulled her to safety. The incident itself should have been universally deemed as unacceptable and yet, some members of the public had the gall to say that Cyrus was “asking for it.”

After the groping video went viral, one commenter wrote, “You wanted to be ‘sexy,’ what do you expect?” and another said, “Well what do they expect when they dress like whores.”

And what she shared was far from the end of it. People were completely vile with the victim-blaming.

Never one to be slut-shamed, Cyrus clapped back with the badass, feminist rebuttal we were waiting for.

“She can be wearing what she wants. She can be a virgin. She can be sleeping with 5 different people. She can be with her husband. She can be with her girlfriend. She can be naked. She CAN’T be grabbed without her consent,” Cyrus wrote on Twitter

Other intelligent women of the internet came to Cyrus’s defense with similar responses.

“Why is the woman blamed when a dude acts inappropriately?” wrote one Twitter user. “Instead of blaming Miley, how about holding these kind of creepy ass guys accountable? How about men keeping their fucking hands to themselves? Is that such a hard concept to grasp?”

“It’s actually disgusting how many people are blaming miley cyrus for being groped because ‘that’s how she portrays herself,'” wrote another fan. “It’s 2019, have we not learned by now that someone’s clothing or how they portray themselves on social media or literally anything else do NOT = consent???”

Despite the #MeToo movement and the growing support for feminism, so many people continue to ascribe to this backward idea that if a woman dresses or behaves in a certain way that she should expect to be sexually harassed.

Cardi B dealt with this when she debuted her music video for “Twerk” earlier this year. In the video, Cardi and a bevy of dancers twerked in bikinis and body paint and not surprisingly, the trolls of the internet slammed her for it.

One woman tweeted at Cardi to ask, “how does this empower women?” to which Cardi elegantly replied: “It says to women that I can wear and not wear what ever I want. do [whatever] I want and that NO still means NO…If I twerk and be half naked does that mean I deserve to get raped and molested?”

Big thank you to Cyrus, not just for talking about this openly, but for bringing this conversation back into the public consciousness. It is always a good time to remind everyone that women do not need to be told to dress or behave a certain way if they want to avoid sexual harassment, but that men need to stop sexually harassing women. Full stop.