Up until this week, my main regard toward Miley Cyrus was to be grateful my daughter is no longer 11. If she were, there might have been pressure on me to get $400 tickets to a Hanna Montana concert.

The two are the same person. Miley Cyrus stars in Disney’s Hanna Montana TV series, and also gives concerts using that name.

A big part of Miley’s appeal is that she’s refreshingly innocent. Her father, a singer named Billy Ray Cyrus, got some credit for that. He’s in the TV show, too, as her dad. Fifteen years ago, he recorded a hit called Achy Breaky Heart.

This week, things got ugly.

Miley Cyrus appeared in Vanity Fair magazine in a sultry shot. She is pouting seductively at the camera, with her back naked and her front covered by a sheet she is clutching.

She is 15 years old.

In commenting on it, a lot of people have used the word “inappropriate.” As a father, I’d call it weird.

There is another shot that’s downright creepy. It shows Miley lying entwined with her dad in a pose suggestive of two lovers. She’s wearing low-cut jeans with her midriff exposed. He’s wearing a dark strappy T-shirt. The picture has an incestuous feel to it. Nice fathering there, Billy Ray.

Everyone involved has tried to defend it. The photographer, Annie Liebowitz, who I usually admire, says it’s a beautiful shot, blah, blah, blah. As for the entwined pose, some say dads all the time lie that way with younger kids. True. But not with a 15-year-old daughter.

Now that the publicity has been bad, Miley Cyrus says she’s embarrassed. Her father says none of it was meant to be sexual. But some commentators have suggested it may well have been premeditated as a way for Miley to start appealing beyond the ’tween audience and position herself to be a racier star in the years to come. Who knows?

What I do know is that it’s hardly a surprise to see the early sexualization of another underage starlet. These days, most of them end up doing it.

There was a time when the path to success for Hollywood females was to keep a clean-scrubbed image forever. Ask Doris Day.

Now, it’s the opposite.

Maybe you can’t fully blame Miley. Look at some of the role models out there, like Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera, both former clean-scrubbed Disney stars who, in their late teens, took hard turns toward becoming hypersexualized.

Maybe they knew what they were doing. It only helped their careers –– until Britney went fully off the deep end. Not long ago, Vanessa Hudgens, the equally clean-scrubbed starlet of Disney’s High School Musical, another ’tween mega-hit, had nude pictures of her released on the Web. It hasn’t seemed to hurt her.

There was a time when a graphic sex video would have ruined a conventional starlet. If that had happened to Doris Day, I doubt she would have gotten another role as a Main Street mom. Today, it seems a sex video is part of the female success track. When one leaks out, you first say you’re devastated, and a week later, you’re more marketable than ever. Ask Paris Hilton.

It’s old news to observe that shame isn’t what it used to be, but it isn’t – especially among girls.

Boys get a rap for being the raunchy gender, but in the celebrity world, the ones flaunting bad behavior have been girls. It’s almost fashionable for them to act that way.

And that’s the problem. It’s not just that the Lindsay Lohans out there are acting inappropriate in their own world; they’re modeling indulgent and sexualized behavior in a way that says it’s cool for young girls to be trashy.

I know, that train has long since come through to some extent. Teen girls haven’t worn sweaters and bobby socks for a long time.

But lately, the bar keeps getting lower.

First Britney starts to get raunchy at 18.

Then her sister Jamie Lynn, another clean-scrubbed teen star, gets pregnant at 16.

Now Miley Cyrus is posing semi-nude at 15.

In Jamie Lynn’s case, her mom let her live with her boyfriend at that age.

In Miley’s case, her dad joined one of her most inappropriate poses.

For years, it’s been obvious that celebrity girls want to behave a certain way.

But I’d like to end with a question about someone else.

Where are their parents?

mpatinkin@projo.com