If you live under a rock, let me break it down for you: Miley Cyrus did some Vanity Fair photos clad in a bedsheet with rumpled hair. This one comes after we discovered Jamie Lynn Spears is knocked up and Vanessa Hudgens has topless pics on the internet. All of which I suppose has parents tearing out their hair and wondering how to explain these things to their young daughters, the ones who make up the fan bases of these girls. I suggest something like, "Honey, all the girls on television and in the movies are nothing but tramps and harlots, and god help you if you ever do anything like that."

Seriously? I guess the concern is that people are afraid their children will find the behaviors of their teen idols "cool" and perhaps emulate it themselves. I can assure you that Vanity Fair has not sent Annie Leibovitz to my house to tempt my child into a Lolita-esque photo shoot, so I think we're safe. But you know, there's all kinds of discussions to be had with our daughters about how girls and women are portrayed in the media, and how different people make different choices with their lives and those choices have different consequences. And we could even have these discussions before a 15-year-old poses in a sheet because there's plenty of imagery that flies under the radar but carries the same messages. I don't think we need to be real judge-y or impose media blackouts, but we can teach our kids to be critical media consumers from the get-go. And I doubt our girls are idiots, so we can probably trust them not to run out and try and be like the stars they follow.