Who would’ve thought that libertarians would be up in arms over Miley Cyrus?

Should libertarians oppose social pressure as much as we oppose government intrusion?

by Mary Ann Johansen

By now, most of us have probably either watched or heard about Miley’s controversial performance at the MTV Video Music Awards. The Mises Institute recently published a piece by James Miller defending the modern practice of “slut-shaming” in the context of the response to the controversy. (Link to LVMI was removed at their site immediately after posting this article on TLR. A link to a copy of the piece from Miller’s blog is provided) Responding to libertarians who criticize attacks on Miley Cyrus’ recent VMA “performance” as slut-shaming, Miller writes:

“Engaging in “slut-shaming” is a welcome course of action – even more so in an era where young women wear their craving for erotic climax as a badge of honor. The term itself is borderline tautological… True human power comes from resisting hedonistic temptation.”

The backlash against Miller’s piece ended up being more of the same critiques that inspired it. Should libertarians oppose social pressure as much as we oppose government intrusion? We don’t think that the government should be involved in behaviors that don’t hurt anybody, but does that mean we shouldn’t speak out about any of those behaviors?

First of all, I think it’s important to realize that being a childish bully is pointless and can arguably damage the cause of liberty if we make people feel unwelcome. This is largely where I have a problem with Miller’s article. Calling someone a slut is, for lack of a better word, usually stupid. It’s also usually totally arbitrary; some people would consider anyone who has premarital sex a slut, while others save the slur for people like Miley, whose actual sex life we know nothing about, but whose body was recently displayed to the nation in a flurry of simulated sex acts.  Another problem is that slut shaming tends to be rather sexist. After all, we can all observe that men tend to get congratulated where women are ostracized and shamed. Liberty is, and should be, an inclusive thing! Most of us agree that what other people do in their private lives should not be a concern of the government, and really doesn’t impact us either.

However, none of this means that libertarians can’t care about standards or morals or decency.

As Austin Petersen has pointed out, I’d imagine most libertarians are okay with shaming neo-Nazis, racists, or conspiracy theorists who dabble in anti-Semitism. While the idea of “shaming” is troublesome when it comes to sexuality, we all have standards of what we think is acceptable and what we think is not. That’s how a society of individuals works.  And I would venture to suggest that no society can function for very long if its only value is absolute permissiveness on everything. When what is private becomes public and what is public becomes a weird, disgusting national spectacle, we’re allowed to critique it as a degradation of our culture and a symptom of moral decay. And guess what? As long as we don’t think the government should be involved in enforcing our opinions, we can all still “count” as libertarians. Free speech applies to opinions that we don’t like, even when they come from fellow libertarians.

-Mary Ann Johansen

Mary Ann is a right-leaning libertarian feminist, a political scientist in training, and most of all, a proud individualist. She  has a B.A. in political science from the University of West Florida, and is currently working toward her M.A. in political science, also from the University of West Florida. She is the program director for two juvenile diversion programs in Pensacola, FL.