Theo Wargo/WireImageWho says people don't have any free time anymore?
Just because Miley Cyrus' now-iconic performance with Robin Thicke at the 2013 MTV Video Music Awards didn't feature a visible nipple or an audible F-word doesn't mean offended viewers didn't bombard the Federal Communications Commission with concerns about what they were witnessing on their screens.
No matter that the FCC, which was quick to levy a hefty fine (that was ultimately successfully appealed) on CBS after Janet Jackson's "wardrobe malfunction" during Super Bowl XXXVIII, doesn't have the authority to punlish cable networks—the roughly 150 people who filed entertainingly descriptive indecency complaints presumably didn't know that.
Here are some of the most outraged/outrageous responses, according to the sheaf of complaints obtained by The Smoking Gun:
• Calling Miley's actions "deplorable," one viewer—who assured the FCC that he/she is "not a prude"—wondered, "Where has censorship gone?"
• "If you fined Justin & Janet...Miley should be excommunicated from the music community!"
• This one must have been filled out in an enraged rush: "She made multiple very indecent sexual poses and gestures, from grabbing her crouch [sic], using a foam finger like a dildo and licking the butt of a stuff bear in a sexual manner. Plus the fact she barely had any clothes on."
• "Do your f--king job (I would normally not use the word 'f--king' but you don't really seem to care about such things anymore"
• "She is shown what she is acting like a devil flicking that tongue as deamons [sic] do."
• One woman's 10-year-old Hannah Montana fan daughter "was compelled to bury her head under the covers."
• "Obscene, slutty, indecent implied sexual acts with bears and foam finger. 'Twerk' seems to be the word, and should not be on during evening programming, or limited to a subscription channel."
• Miley was "objectifying black women," apparently because some of her backup dancers were black.
• "It was as if I was at some sort of strip club and it went on and on and got progressively worse."
• "...much worse than that disaster at the super bowl with one of the jackson girls."
You get the idea. But Miley, bless her, is probably the last person to be bothered by this.
A few days after the VMAs, she told MTV that everyone who was still talking about it was "over-thinking it. You're thinking about it more than I thought about it when I did it. Like, I didn't even think about it 'cause that's just me."
And there's a person from Tuscon, Ariz., who suggests that she spend "12 months in a convent" to change all that.