Miley Cyrus is the latest target of Internet venom for her risqué performance at Sunday’s MTV Video Music Awards, but a foam finger wasn’t the only prop given a taste of the star’s twerk-tastic moves.

Robin Thicke, the R&B star on the receiving end of Cyrus’ bump-and-grind performance of his Blurred Lines hit, has taken his own share of heat in recent months for the song’s purportedly sexist video and “rapey” lyrics.

Robin Thicke and Miley Cyrus perform at the MTV VMAs.
KEVIN MAZUR, WIREIMAGE FOR MTV

“If I went up to a girl in a club and told her, ‘I know you want it,’ I think she’d know I was joking,” Thicke, 36, told USA TODAY in July. “It’s all in the delivery, you know?”

But innocuous intentions aside, could Thicke — husband of actress Paula Patton and father to a 3-year-old son — catch flack for his sexy dance with the 20-year-old former Disney star? Not likely, experts say.

“Look at the way he regained his relevancy: by releasing a video with topless women dancing all around him,” says Billboard editorial director Bill Werde of Thicke’s meteoric rise after years of modest success. “All this really accomplishes is that more people are going to be familiar with who Robin Thicke is, and that’s a good thing for him.”

Working for and against Thicke is the fact that it was Cyrus who commanded the performance of his chart-topping song, pawing at him as he essentially just stood there in his pinstriped suit, says Vulture‘s associate editor Jesse David Fox.

“What Miley did was so extreme and what Robin did was so mundane, I mean, he barely moved,” Fox says. “He’ll have a long, respectful career, but I don’t think it bodes well for him being a Justin Timberlake- or Beyoncé-level superstar.”

Timberlake, of course, successfully weathered his own not-in-front-of-the-kids flap — Janet Jackson’s infamous wardrobe malfunction — and came out on top. After tearing Jackson’s bodice during their 2004 Super Bowl performance and exposing her naked breast, Timberlake released a deeply regretful statement that got him off the hook. Although Jackson also apologized, her career never fully recovered from the fallout.

In the Justin-Janet incident, “you have the man as the aggressor who rips this shirt off Janet, and it’s the woman’s fault,” Werde says. “And now in the Miley-Robin situation, it’s the woman who’s the aggressor and still where all the focus is. America needs to make up its mind about how it feels about the sexualization of women in the pop-music spectrum.”

Thicke, who was traveling Monday and unavailable to comment, appears content with how the performance played out, tweeting, “That was dope,” and giving Cyrus a Twitter shout-out not long after the number Sunday night.

https://www.usatoday.com/videos/life/music/2013/08/26/2699503/

Miley Cyrus twerks it at the MTV VMAs
Miley Cyrus made headlines after a racy performance with Robin Thicke at Sunday’s MTV Video Music Awards.
VPC

And that’s about as much as we can expect to hear from him, says Us Weekly entertainment director Ian Drew, who believes the controversy will blow over in a matter of days.

“It was just something to talk about,” Drew says. “It was tasteless, yes, it had its elements of shock, but I don’t think it’s a career-halting moment” for either of them.

“This is what the VMAs are about, it’s about going crazy and having fun.”

Contributing: Elysa Gardner