Tongue Tied

Miley Cyrus made Tongue Tied to tell you exactly what she thought about still being Hannah Montana. Not with words, but with movement, with skin, with direct stares at the camera. It was 2010 and she was done with the child-star agreement—you know, the one where the audience gets to keep you frozen in time in exchange for career opportunities.

The video isn’t subtle. She’s kissing women, dancing in ways that would never make network TV, existing in a space designed to be uncomfortable for the parents who’d grown up watching her. It’s crude on purpose. The sexuality is the point, not a side effect. She was using her body as a tool to break something.

What I respect about it is how deliberate it is. She understood exactly what she was doing and who she was breaking free from. This wasn’t artless teenage rebellion or shock value for its own sake. It was strategy. She was reclaiming the narrative about herself—about her body, her sexuality, her right to be something other than what people had decided she was supposed to be.

The weird part was that this process had to be public. Her transformation, her sexuality, her growing up—all of it had to happen on stage. So maybe making it explicitly sexual was the only way to actually own it.