Still Shocking

Miley Cyrus hit the PAPERMAG cover that month, naked with a pig. The pig’s face was honest—genuine concern about what was happening.

By then she’d been in provocation mode for a few years. New nude shoot every couple of months, each one attached to some story about breaking free from the Disney image, being authentic, rejecting control. The nudity itself never bothered me. It was the repetition that started to feel like a trap.

Shock value has a lifespan. The same nakedness that made headlines three years earlier was just background noise by then. So you escalate. Add a pig. Find a new angle. Keep people looking. But you’re just feeding a machine that stopped being hungry a long time ago.

The thing that bothered me was that she could actually sing. When she wasn’t performing provocation, when she was just working, there was something there. Real talent. Genuine songwriter. But it all got buried under the strategy of being scandalous. Every project, every interview, every image cycled back to that one thing.

I’m not prudish about nudity. The body is what it is. But there’s something wasted about watching someone talented enough to not need gimmicks disappear inside one. The cover would be forgotten next month, replaced with whatever came next. But it stuck with me as one of those moments where you could see the trap closing—the thing that was supposed to free her had become what she couldn’t escape.