Go without undies or go without fame.

The latest ridiculously air-brushed cover of Rolling Stone shows yet another mostly naked female pop star who doesn’t exist. Not even Lady Gaga looks like this so don’t be shocked when you stand in front of the mirror, clasp a couple of guns to your chest and stick your g-string-wearing bottom out and you look nothing like this.

Columnist Miranda Devine recently wrote about how it seems the ONLY way for women to become famous is by taking off their clothes. An extract has been published here with full permission

Hello Gabriella Cilmi.

From the Sydney Morning Herald, Miranda Devine writes

…. It seems to be expected that for a woman to get ahead in the fashion/celebrity business these days she must become vulgarised in the manner of a porn star, with hollowed out face and vacant eyes suggesting a life of degradation, disease and constant joyless sex…..Why is our culture so toxic that to be taken seriously as a model or actress or singer or female celebrity of any description you have to strip off, look out of control and trashy, and degrade yourself in a cheaply lit approximation of ’70s cliche porn? The more hardcore and vulgar, the more hip and ironic.

It is as if whoever are the gatekeepers and shapers of our culture are offended and threatened by that most potent element of femininity: innocence.

From gimlet-eyed photographers who invade pubescent privacy and try to capture it like a butterfly pinned under glass to trashy reality shows like MTV’s Jersey Shore, young women have never been so exploited and manipulated.

Think of child stars such as Nikki Webster, the bubbly 13-year-old star of Sydney’s 2000 Olympics opening ceremony. Her career as the sweet girl next door was going nowhere. So in an attempt to ”mature her image” when she turned 18, she donned silk bodice and hotpants for a men’s magazine and performed as a wind-up doll at the gay and lesbian Sleaze Ball.

She was following the well-worn track of Britney Spears, from Mouseketeer to a pornified parody of her former sweet self. Having come to fame before puberty, former child stars are under pressure to strip off and make the transition to bimbo for fear they will have no career. Looking drugged-up and slutty is the only acceptable way to gain credibility and jettison the baggage of innocence.

So too Miley Cyrus, the once squeaky-clean tween idol who made a vow of abstinence at 14, posed topless in Vanity Fair at 15, and pole-danced on stage dressed like a stripper at 16 at last year’s Teen Choice Awards, channelling her pantless idol, Lady Gaga.

Wendy Shalit, the American author who advocates a return to modesty, wrote at the time of the Vanity Fair shoot that Cyrus’s wholesome image was too much of a ”threat” to survive.

”Having pledged abstinence before marriage, Miley poses a threat to conventional wisdom. Many people – indeed, whole industries – are invested in ‘neutralising’ that threat by getting her to take her clothes off as much as possible, as soon as possible.”

In her latest book, The Good Girl Revolution, Shalit writes that even though women are more educated and successful in business than ever, ”girls report that in their private lives, they are feeling enormous pressure to be sexually active and don’t know how to say no … Young women feel oppressed by the expectation that they will engage in casual sex, just as their mothers once felt oppressed by the expectation that they would be virgins until marriage.”

And here’s where I get a bit lost. Britney Spears and Miley….they all have to pledge to remain virgins until they’re married. Of course we know this is rubbish. Justin Timberlake came out and said that he and Britney were having sex for years while she was publicly claiming to be a virgin. But with the virginity claims come the OTT sexy outfits, videos and performances.

Miley is going exactly the same way.

And if YOU think that’s confusing, imagine being a teenage girl. Or even a tween.

It seems the message being sold to them by so many aspects of teen pop culture is: dress like a hooker but make sure you’re a virgin. Huh?

And why is that we seem to be being fed a wall-to-wall diet of samey popstars marketed in exactly the same way? Katy Perry, Miley, Gabriella Cilmi, Gaga……. where are our alternatives that say you don’t have to get your gear off to be famous?