The flesh coloured thongs worn by the women in the video for Robin Thicke’s horrendously named single Blurred Lines might be the perfect representation of modern pop culture's idea of female sexuality. A neutered mound, void of any suggestion of what might actually be between a woman’s legs.

Until today I hadn’t watched the video. I’d read a lot of opinions about it and figured I’d heard enough when I read “Thicke who recently cut off his trademark long hair claims to have spend £20k on marijuana” to know it wasn’t for me. He sounded like a douchebag who’d made a douchey song and an even douchier video.

In a culture where it seems more valuable to create something so deliberately horrible people will read and talk about and share it sometimes it seems worthwhile to steer clear, to not share links to Daily Mail articles about weight or sexuality. To not play into their hands.

Today though, I watched a clip from the MTV VMAs where former child star and talented singer Miley Cyrus wore a PVC eunuch costume and pretended to masturbate her erased crotch with a giant foam finger while a grinning Robin Thicke stood fully clothed upstage.

The panting, the constant lolling tongue, humping legs, wide eyed bounding around the stage suggest labrador puppies are the go to model for fearless erotica in 2013. Perhaps that makes sense as, after all the lyrics of blurred lines mention attempts to “domesticate” the “animal” or “bitch” Thicke has set his sorry sights on. I’ve read quotes defending the video and by extention the song as “fun” and a joke, isn’t that always the defense for what offends? “Where’s your sense of humour?” says the maker of rape jokes, the groper and the cat caller.

Bare breasted and caked in make up, vulvas censored, the women in the Blurred Lines video loll their heads like drugged toddlers. They are poked, prodded and leered at by Thicke, Pharrel Williams and TI – all three of whom, of course, are fully clothed and amused throughout. At one point the women parade past balloons spelling out Robin Thicke Has a Big Dick, I mean COME ON. It’s deliberately vile but knowing something is awful doesn’t make it any less damaging. I thought it had been agreed that Robert Palmer wasn’t really okay when he used women as props in a music video in 1986.

Pop sexuality of the 80s was what I found myself pining for as I watched Cyrus’ “twerking” display. When Madonna mimed masturbation on stage and sang about being made to feel “like a virgin, touched for the very first time” it shocked people because a female pop singer was unashamedly exploring her own sexual feelings and behaviours.

Cyrus’ supposed rebellion on the other hand, notably in the video for her recent single We Can’t Stop, is a sanitised, toned, oiled and deodorized display of sexualisation by numbers that looks anything but authentic. The self-consciousness of it all could almost be read as an endearingly genuine act of teenage rebellion if it weren’t all so calculatedly zeitgeisty. I can’t see anything personal or relatable about Cyrus’ ‘sexed up’ new image. Madonna was a sexual role model who you could imagine as a friend’s older sister, wise beyond her years with a stash of cigarettes and make up she’d let you try on. Her ownership of her sexuality was all of ours, she was sexy and she acknowledged sex in an all encompassing all powerful way that is so many miles from a girl prone on all fours, humping inanimate objects in her underwear, gazing dead eyed into a camera lens.