Let’s be serious for a moment – if you were the parent of a child like Miley Cyrus, you’d be appalled.

Just think of the implications. If you were the father of a child like Miley Cyrus then you, by definition, would be just like Billy Ray Cyrus. And that doesn’t even bear thinking about, does it? You’d have to grow a girl’s haircut. And a funny little beard that makes your entire face look like a stripper’s vagina. It’d be horrible.

Oh, and you’d also be appalled because your child would end up being named as the worst celebrity influence of the year, just like Miley Cyrus has.

Sometimes it seems as if poor Miley Cyrus just can’t do anything right. She can’t take a simple photo of herself without accidentally drenching her T-shirt and then uploading the pictures to the internet. She can’t meet new people without offending roughly 60% of the world’s population. She can’t sing a happy little song at an awards show without grinding up against a pole like a dead-eyed lapdancer. She can’t make a film without it being so awful that just thinking about it makes us want to violently corkscrew our eyes out.

And maybe it’s her insistence on blundering into these awkward situations like a ghastly teenage cross between Mr Bean and Prince Phillip that has earmarked Miley Cyrus as the worst celebrity influence of 2009.

Apparently, according to an AOL survey of 9-15 year-olds, Miley Cyrus is such a dreadful influence that she even managed to push Britney Spears and Kanye West – people who have spent the year either baring their vagina onstage or grossly disappointing their dead mother – into second and third place respectively. Phil Spector didn’t even get a look-in, and he murdered a woman’s face off. That’s how much of a bad influence Miley Cyrus is. What a turd. Reuters reports:

“I think Miley is in an interesting space where she is trying to graduate from being ‘Hannah Montana’ and a Disney channel celebrity and coming into her own and having a career beyond Disney,” said Stephanie Cohen, editor of JSYK.com. “I think her fans still want her to be the sweet Hannah Montana and she is trying to age up…Parents are definitely resisting it.”

This might come as bad news to Miley Cyrus – and worse news to the Disney executives who, upon hearing this news, presumably began to look for another grinning apple-faced teenage girl to buy and raise as their own – but she needs to remember that this is just another part of her natural progression. First came her fame as a childstar, and now Miley Cyrus needs to cut her ties and develop as an artist in her own right.

After all, if she doesn’t do that then she’ll never fulfil the third stage of her career plan – failing as an artist in her own right and spending the rest of her life punctuating her underperforming straight-to-DVD movies by crawling around the nightclubs of the world drunkenly belching “Don’t you know who I am?” into the face of disinterested strangers. And she does want that to happen, right?

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