Church Morality.

 Due to the rapid-fire, instant nature of modern news, headlines often have to be abbreviated to within an inch of their lives.

 I remember being amused several years ago when country musician Buck Owens died and The Sun, rather than focus on his legacy as a guitarist or songwriter, or his influence on the Beatles, went with the ultra-curt headline "Buck Stops."

 Today I noticed a headline that ran "'Stars Treated As Sex Objects,' Says Church." I considered ignoring it, but clicked on it anyway to see why religious people were getting their panties in a bunch this time.

 As it turns out, the truncated headline was actually referring to singer CHARLOTTE Church, who was, admittedly, getting her panties in a bunch about not showing a bunch of panties.

 ...I'm probably not making things clear.

 Charlotte Church has come out against sexualising young women in music, having been a victim of it herself. In the process, she becomes the second most famous Church to be interested in sexualising minors, after the Catholic one.

 She weighs in on the whole Miley Cyrus/twerking debate, because you're not allowed to voice an opinion in the media these days without referencing that incident, and admits that she was constantly pressured by record execs to show more skin and behave with more faux-promiscuity.

 While all this is obviously horrible, she seems to miss the point somewhat when she complains that pop music has an adolescent mindset.

 Ignoring the fact that the target market for pop music is, of course, adolescents, Charlotte also seems oblivious to the wish-fulfillment aspect of music.

 Here, to illustrate a point, is Mick Jagger riding a giant inflatable cock:

I do not wish, for the record, to ride Mick Jagger's cock...

 There's a reason you never see the London Philharmonic doing something like that - although god knows I'd like them to for sheer comedy value. Rock'n'Roll, and by extension, pop music, are fantasies. Hyper-sexualised, high energy escapism for the masses. Pop isn't just about sex, it's about giant, inflatable cock sex with impossibly attractive partners. It's not about driving, it's about driving a Mustang at 90 miles an hour with the top down and a beer.

 In the same way that most of us will never shoot a man in Reno, just to watch him die, or even probably tell someone that you've just met that this is crazy, but here's your number, so call you, maybe, we turn to music for an escape from the humdrum, tedious lives we tend to live. We'll never get to trade in our wings for some wheels and pull out of a town full of losers to win, so we turn to pop stars to tell us about it.

 Pop is meant to be catchy and energised, and do for our bodies and hormones what classical symphonies do for our higher functions.

 In effect, this makes even "adult" pop music into an adolescent medium. It speaks to the childish, restless parts of us that wants to be sexy and young and free and wild, and our pop stars work best when they seem to embody those qualities. 

 Whilst the exploitation of young women in pop music is shameful and degrading, I fear Charlotte Church is too far inside the bubble to really understand the appeal. She's too close to the tree to see the woods. 

 It would be impossible to ever take the sex out of pop music (or even to take sex out of jazz or the blues or folk, although god knows folk is trying its hardest), but what's wrong isn't the sex so much as the way it is portrayed.

 We need our pop stars to be virile, youthful and sexy, and the real problem is that people have come to confuse the phrase "sexy" with the phrase "tits out." Pop stars were sexier when they purred and inferred and cajoled their audience than they are when they're yelling and gyrating at us.

 We'll always need pop stars to be hot, and pop music will always be juvenile. This doesn't make it okay to try to make juveniles hot, but it does explain the real reason that there are a lot of young girls wearing not very much in the charts at any given moment; it's not that pop music is inherently misogynist so much that pop speaks to the fourteen year old in all of us, and fourteen year olds just aren't very good at understanding sex.

 It's not really Miley or Rhianna or even their record execs we should be scrutinising. It's whatever part of ourselves gets off on base, cartoonish sexuality. And that's something no Church has ever been qualified to fix.