Former Disney Channel stars have ruined my childhood. From Selena Gomez’s and Vanessa Hudgens’ promiscuous roles in Spring Breakers to Miley Cyrus’ VMA performance, it’s difficult to salvage any of my shattered childhood.

By the time you read this, the Internet will probably have moved on from criticizing Miley Cyrus to criticizing some other celebrity, but will it have offered me solace for my wasted fresh-faced years? I doubt it.

Miley’s VMA performance Sunday night brought forward polarized opinions about the former Disney star, effecting criticism about her inability to twerk properly, her tongue being stuck out too much and her outfit. All the criticism tends to reinforce one concern: our ruined childhoods.

The 20-year-old’s use of black people as props to validate her “ratchet” behavior rarely makes it into the dialogue, and it shouldn’t. Racism has nothing to do with white, middle-to-upper-class citizens’ childhoods—that’s what’s truly at stake here—but sexuality does.

I admit I did not watch the VMA, even Miley’s performance. But I saw enough on Buzzfeed and Tumblr to know it ruined the integrity of Hannah Montana. From Cyrus’ outfit to her getting low, it’s easy to see how she ruined her femininity.

It wasn’t until I started writing this column (specifically, this paragraph) that I found out Robin Thicke also participated in the performance.

You might wonder why no one shames the nearly 40-year-old man for getting down with a woman nearly half his age, but then, you’d be missing the obvious. The self-proclaimed feminist, famous for his song about women needing him—and a certain appendage of his—to “liberate” them, is doing just that: liberating her.

Robin Thicke knew once Miley released the video for “We Can’t Stop” that she needed some help. He only grinded with her so he could set her free from the sinful path she’s treading down. If anyone’s going to save femininity, it’s Robin Thicke.

But not even the “Blurred Lines” singer can save us from the blow to our childhoods that came with Raven-Symoné’s coming out as a lesbian. That one hard hit.

Following the That’s So Raven star’s tweet announcing her sexual orientation, her fans flooded Twitter, denouncing her and declaring #ChildhoodRuined.

The fans’ backlash received some negative media attention, but they have a point. Having portrayed a heterosexual high school student, it is unbelievably selfish for the star to expect support from her fans. She should have changed her character’s name on the show—about a teenage psychic—so we could discriminate between fiction and reality more easily. (Come to think of it, the same could be said for Miley.) For instance, she might go by Wendy, who would’ve been a heterosexual teenage psychic played by Raven-Symoné, a homosexual actress.

Never mind that she tried to keep her sexuality a secret, claiming, “My sexual orientation is mine and the person I’m dating’s to know.” Never mind that she is a 27-year-old trying to live a personal life separate from a television show that found its end in 2007.

Miley Cyrus and Raven-Symoné (and Selena Gomez and Vanessa Hudgens) aren’t acting out of the ordinary insofar as acting their respective ages goes. They’re acting out of character—their characters. Their Disney characters. And that’s the problem.

We who maintain that Disney stars have ruined our childhoods are neither being sexist nor discriminatory in any way. We are merely upset about how selfish these actresses are for being themselves, when we want to retain the image we had of them six years ago.

So, it isn’t even hypocritical of us to post videos of ourselves twerking on Instagram or Vine, because we never had television shows—we don’t have anyone to let down.

And it isn’t selfish for us to want our childhood idols to keep the roles they abandoned years ago. After all, we are adults now. Our own growing up doesn’t sever our ties to a childhood long forgotten—actors we’ve never met are the ones who do that.