Willow Smith Poses With Shirtless Actor (and We're OK With That)

By now, you’ve seen Willow Smith’s “scandalous” photo shoot with Moisés Arias, a 20-year-old actor seven years Willow’s senior.

The black-and-white photo initially posted to Twitter on Tuesday (it’s since been deleted) can still be seen on Moises’s Tumblr page. In it, Willow is lying on a bed, fully clothed, facing away from the former “Hannah Montana” actor who is sitting up and is shirtless. Despite the fact that the two aren’t touching, the photo has triggered a firestorm of controversy with people calling it “risqué” and “creepy.”

There are lots of angles to attack this photo — Arias is shirtless, there’s a bed, they’re friends of the opposite sex, their massive age gap — but should we instead be criticizing the media's reaction? Maybe. Willow and Moises (who share mutual friends Kendall and Kylie Jenner) appear as two friends hanging out at someone’s house, acting goofy and casual, as young people do. In her story titled "Willow Smith’s 'controversial' photo is anything but," Mary Elizabeth Williams at Salon smartly writes about teenage girls, “They are photographed without their consent as they walk down the street. They are talked about and bullied and leered at online and off when they go to the beach or wear their summer clothes. So what’s sad in all of this is the immediate assumption of something controversial or creepy in an image that is in no way salacious or even attempting to be.”

What’s more, Willow’s parents, Will and Jada Smith, are notorious for their relaxed parenting style, allowing their daughter to make her first movie at the age of 7 and record her first album and music video at 10. Jada also stirred controversy in 2012 when she defended her decision to not intervene when Willow decided to shave her head, writing on her Facebook page, “This is a world where women, girls are constantly reminded that they don't belong to themselves; that their bodies are not their own, nor their power or self determination. I made a promise to endow my little girl with the power to always know that her body, spirit and her mind are HER domain.”

As is her right to behave like a normal teenage girl. Not everything has to be a story, after all.