Our culture is positively saturated with sex. What used to be called pornography is now simply advertising, and it's standard operating procedure for child stars to toy with their images in this way to gauge how they'll make the transition to "grown up" careers.

Absolutely fantastic post about this at the blog I edit, and I'm ashamed to shill for my job in the comments, but here I go anyway (I usually just lurk here, but I just had to add to this discussion). "The Porning of Miley Cyrus" is by Kevin Scott, who has a new book coming out on the culture of porn and how it has seeped into everything.

Specifically, it seems as if our daughters are being targeted by waves of media—both in popular culture and in the "serious" media that covers the escapades of young female stars—that first encourage conformity to a new and virtual brand of highly sexualized identity and then thrills to their destruction. And so we encourage our daughters to adopt sexual identities that will eventually destroy them. Well done, us.

This is why many parents sigh with relief when the occasional Miley Cyrus comes along. And she isn't without precedence. Hilary Duff transitioned, within the current cultural regime, from child star to recording artist and actor. Even now, at 21, she doles out the sexy images of herself in small and comparatively mild doses. Soon she'll be appearing in a couple of respectable independent films and an artsy comedy with John Cusack called War, Inc. Nice work, if you can get it. And Miley very clearly wants it.

Also, for a look at how boys encounter inappropriately sexual content in kid's media as well, you must listen to Dan Savage on this episode of "This American Life." (It's free to download right now, but they usually start charging for download a week or two after the air date). He talks about his son's love of "The Suite Life of Zach and Cody," and the disturbingly adult sex drive of one of the main characters, a ten-year-old boy.