On Monica Lewinsky’s podcast Reclaiming, Miley Cyrus said something most people weren’t expecting: the Bangerz era didn’t cost her her career — it cost her every personal relationship she had. Men pulled back, her engagement to Liam Hemsworth took damage, and her siblings sometimes skipped school to avoid the headlines. Years of therapy later, she finally put words to what the double standard actually looked like up close.
What She Actually Said — and Why It Hits Different
In 2013, Miley was doing everything she could to shed the Hannah Montana image she had carried since childhood — the foam finger moment at the VMAs, nude magazine covers, stage looks that the press couldn’t stop writing about. From the outside it looked like a calculated reinvention. From the inside, she told Monica Lewinsky, it felt like watching her private life collapse in slow motion.
The reason men gave her — when they gave one at all — was specific. Her sexuality wasn’t private anymore. It belonged to the public, and that made partners feel like they were being denied something that was supposed to be theirs alone. “No one wanted to date me because they didn’t want to be with a woman whose sexual expression was shared with the world,” she said. That’s not a breakup line. That’s a blueprint of how the double standard actually operates: men who consumed that image publicly were the same ones who penalized her for it privately. Much like the impossible standards women in entertainment have always navigated, the cost is almost always personal, not professional.
The engagement to Liam Hemsworth — which was already on and off during this period — absorbed some of that pressure too. And her siblings, she said, sometimes didn’t go to school because of what was circulating in the media. That detail is easy to skip past, but it shouldn’t be: the fallout from a woman owning her own body landed on the people around her who had nothing to do with it.
A Decade Later, She’s Still Processing It
Miley has talked about therapy before, but the framing she used with Lewinsky was more specific than the usual “I learned and grew” narrative. She said it took years to work through the guilt and shame from that period — not because what she did was wrong, but because the consequences were real and the internalized message was hard to shake. When the entire media apparatus treats a woman’s body as a public controversy, it has a way of making the woman herself feel like the problem.
The podcast pairing itself is worth noting. Monica Lewinsky spent years being defined by a public narrative she didn’t write, which makes Reclaiming an unusually honest space for these kinds of confessions. Miley isn’t the first guest to walk in with a version of her story and leave with a sharper one. The irony is that both women became shorthand for a cultural moment that said more about the people judging them than about the women themselves.
What’s left, more than a decade after Bangerz, is an artist who has genuinely moved on — creatively, personally — but who is now articulate enough about what happened to name it without softening it. That’s the part worth paying attention to.
- how Miley Cyrus built her post-Bangerz identity
