Mickey Mouse OperationForget Miley Cyrus. Check out Disney’s Chinese underwear ad.

By Daniel Brook
Posted Tuesday, April 29, 2008, at 6:23 PM ET

The May issue of Vanity Fair hits newsstands tomorrow, but it’s already made the cover of the New York Post. The issue features a photograph of Miley Cyrus, star of the Disney Channel’s mega-hit Hannah Montana, clutching a satin sheet to her otherwise naked torso. Cyrus quickly disavowed the photograph, which was taken by Annie Liebovitz: “I took part in a photo shoot that was supposed to be ‘artistic’ and now, seeing the photographs and reading the story, I feel so embarrassed,” she said in a statement. “I never intended for any of this to happen, and I apologize to my fans who I care so deeply about.” Disney, for its part, shared Cyrus’ outrage. Disney spokeswoman Patti McTeague told the New York Times that “a situation was created to deliberately manipulate a 15-year-old in order to sell magazines.”

Reading McTeague’s comment over coffee yesterday morning, I couldn’t help but think of an advertisement I’d seen a few months ago while on a reporting trip to China. I was walking from my Beijing bed-and-breakfast to a nearby subway station when I was stopped in my tracks by a billboard that made the controversial 1990s Calvin Klein underwear ads look artistic by comparison. Staring down at the throngs of shoppers on Beijing’s Xinjiekou Nandajie Avenue, a busy commercial thoroughfare about a mile west of the Forbidden City, was a white girl who looked all of 12, reclining in a matching bra-and-panties set adorned with Disney’s signature mouse-ear design. In a particularly creepy detail, the pigtailed child was playing with a pair of Minnie Mouse hand puppets. In the upper left-hand corner was the familiar script of the Disney logo.

Not believing my eyes, and on an assignment that touched on images of Westerners in the Chinese consumer’s imagination, I snapped a photo:

 

 

After reading of the Cyrus flap, I e-mailed my photo to Disney’s McTeague. I was curious: How did the company square its position on the Liebowitz photo with its risqué billboard in China?

 

 

 

Note:

Indeed, this is the legacy of the liberals’ sexual/atheist/Political Correct culture; Disney (the mainstream of mainstreams) is now soft peddling child pornography!