Thanks to regular writer Will Montei for filling in on this 31st day of the month.

This isn’t actually an open letter. I find that title redundant, since everything on the internet is essentially an open letter. The audience remains the same — anyone perusing the internet — but the format is slightly different. Most open letters, I believe, are just op-eds in a tasteless disguise. No, this is actually just an essay with a smart-ass title.

Let’s really flay open the guts of open letters by taking a look at poor Miley Cyrus, whose life is increasingly plagued by the damn things. She recently received an open letter from Sinead O’Connor, who expressed no small amount of concern that Miley was being pimped by the sex-driven music industry. This was apparently a letter of motherly concern, though I know of no loving mother who discusses her daughter’s problems to a global audience. The more appropriate thing to do might have been to write Miley a personal letter expressing her concerns, but then young girls around the world wouldn’t have been able to see another adult disapproving of Miley’s behavior.

It wouldn’t be a true open letter, however, if there someone didn’t take offense to Sinead’s comments and write an open letter to her. Now, Sinead is being accused of slut-shaming and perpetuating a chauvinistic form of femaleness, despite the fact the nearly everyone agrees Miley seems to be doing something stupid. There is nothing about Miley’s actions that glorifies or promotes greater female well-being, but clearly these internet feminists are much more comfortable shaming Sinead’s anti-feminism than Miley’s.

But where, in the entirety of this dialogue, is the love for the creatures about whom we’re speaking? Miley and Sinead ultimately get reduced to tools by which we can talk about female sexuality, rather than beings with feelings and a powerfully present conscious. No open letter could ever have the effect on another person that an intimate conversation, bolstered by a personal relationship, could; treating an open letter as if it could is desperately wishful thinking, an attempt at side-tracking the obvious truth that we don’t write open letters to people whom we love.

The more insidious side-effect of open letters such as these is the obvious consequence of alienating the person to whom we’re speaking. Unless the open letter is directed at a business entity, it’s doubtful they would appreciate such unsolicited and inappropriately proffered advice. I’m not speaking of relational alienation, though that is certainly there; I’m speaking of Hollywood-esque alienation. The people who populate Hollywood are rarely thought of truthfully; their lives are often portrayed as soap operas, on-going tales of divorce, children, adultery, hook-ups, and what-have-you. But their lives are not soap operas, and the people in our open letters are not fake people. If we’re going to talk about Miley like she’s a tool, she’s going to be nothing more than a tool to the greater public. She is a person, and, despite her publicized defensiveness, probably hurts when she reads something scathing about her posted to the whole world.

We are not going to solve Miley’s problems with open letters. It’s not our job to solve her problems either, since we actually know little about her — what it might be like to share a meal or whisper secrets.

An honest writer would know that their open letter is not for the benefit of the recipient — another way of saying that honest writers probably don’t write open letters very often. If they’re writing something to a large audience, they write it for a large audience, without pretending that their agenda is actually the betterment of one specific individual, who, in all truthfulness, is not going to be bettered through such an impersonal medium.

I hope as time goes on that the larger internet community starts encouraging smaller, intimate, familial communities that occur in our day-to-day lives, where real change and growth happens. I hope open letters disappear. And I hope, above all, that Miley has people in her own life that bring her down to earth, where she is loved and appreciated for more than her media.

Will Montei

Will Montei is currently in pursuit of a Masters in Teaching at Seattle Pacific University. He has been writing for the post calvin since it began in 2013.