MILEY CYRUS TWERKING

Former Hannah Montana sweetheart Miley Cyrus's gyrating bikini-clad performance at last night's MTV VMA awards left watching celebrities open-mouthed and set Twitter ablaze.

Cyrus, the daughter of Billy Ray Cyrus, the wholesome country and western singer with the "Achy Breaky Heart", has been raising eyebrows for the last four years as she moves further and further away from the teenage Disney channel character that set her on the way to becoming a $150m star aged just twenty years.

Her hyper-sexualised set, which included rubbing her butt into Robin Thicke's crotch and getting extremely personal with an oversized foam finger, drew criticism from feminists for degrading her sex and from some pundits for "picking the pocket of black culture".

Bursting out of an oversized teddy bear, Cyrus started off in a strapless one-piece leotard before stripping down to a flesh-coloured latex bikini and "twerking" her tiny frame all over the stage.

Twerking is nothing new. The provocative dance became part of hip-hop culture in the 90s when it was adopted by the New Orleans bounce music scene before being made popular by the strip clubs of Houston and Atlanta.

It has its roots in west Africa and was also popular in the Jamaican dancehalls before making it to the US.

Typically, women find ever more frenetic and acrobatic ways of "presenting" their bums to their male dance partners.

It has been claimed as an expression of women having power over their sexuality. This feels harder to swallow when it's a large part of the uber-masculine club scenes in Jamaica, west Africa and in some forms of US hip-hop.

Some of the criticism of Cyrus is typically Madonna-whore, with critics gleefully denouncing her for crossing the divide while secretly revelling in the fantasy that all "good girls" have a "slutty side" aching to get out.