Twerking Officially The Worst Thing In America Right Now [NSFW Video]
If you didn’t know what “twerking” was yesterday, by now you probably do whether you wanted to or not, and you probably never ever got to witness the awesomeness that was the “twerking at Walmart” video. Which, by the way, is the single most effective tool in your happiness shed for combating a bad day. You’re welcome.
Somehow, oddly, a former Disney purity queen twerking it to the floor at the MTV thing made America clutch its collective pearls and so much more. Twerking brought up race tension. Twerking forced us to confront the fact that girls become women who are in charge of their own sexuality. Twerking made us question why we wasted precious hours of our lives tuned in to watch MTV give people awards for more than 30 seconds.
If you, like me, missed the twerking meltdown’s precipitate, it involved Miley Cyrus, Beetlejuice, and racially offensive teddy bears. I have not seen it, and if you have not, we can move on with this discussion in the knowledge that twerking has crossed a boundary in America and now it is officially Almost A Moral Panic.
Complaint one about twerking seems to be “it’s slutty,” and in fact, the top trending topic (no joke) when we opened Twitter Sunday night was “Billy Ray Cyrus.” The reason? Americans turned out in droves to console him because his daughter, like many other celebrities male and female, was ribald and titillating on MTV. Someone call a grief response team!
Complaint two? Slut shaming. The other half of America, it seems, was displeased to see that a young woman in 2013 was excoriated so hard for dancing sexily — something us thirtysomethings grew up on Madonna doing every few months with a new, gross at the time twist.
Complaint three? Racial appropriation. If someone wasn’t up in arms about twerking being too scary for white people, they were up in arms about a white girl capitalizing on a black cultural trend as if that’s not exactly how Elvis Presley got so rich and died on the toilet.
Ultimately, twerking is evidence of one specific phenomena plaguing America — that there really is nothing new under the sun. No matter how strapped for time, money, or other resources our great country’s people become, we can always spare a bit of time for our favored national pastime… manufactured outrage.
And now that we’ve twerked our righteous anger from every angle, check out this lady twerking it to the floor in every section of Walmart. (Above.)
