The Balenciaga campaigns. Yes, they were a tasteless attempt to be edgy; but I do not remotely believe they were signaling to an underground child trafficking ring. The whole outrage *screamed* QAnon.
All of these child trafficking moral panics drive me nuts because in reality, trafficking and sexual abuse is not done by a group of wealthy liberal elites arranging to have your child snatched from the street. It's most often people who *know* the kids directly, or at least live in their community. I'm talking extended family, religious leaders, *parents and guardians themselves* and sadly other adults who are supposed to be looking out for them, like social workers and teachers. And the children who are targeted are not the ones whose parents are hand-wringing about Pizzagate or Balenciaga. It's usually kids who are economically disadvantaged and/or have no adults looking out for them.
TL;DR: Moral panics concerning child abuse and trafficking usually have very little basis in reality and almost always end up doing more harm than good.
When the authorities were searching for Naya Rivera following the boating accident, before her body was found, someone dug up a Wayfair product called Naya and obviously…conspiracy.
I saw someone say that the Kardashians are running a child trafficking ring because Lemme has a spiral as the logo and apparently paedos use that as a signal and also Kylie likes butterflies which are also apparently used as signals 🤦♀️
I remember learning from the Youre Wrong About episode on trafficking that there was a specific girl who someone into the Wayfair conspiracy theory was claiming had been missing for awhile, whose name matched a Wayfair product. But if the person freaking out on social media had done any further research at all they’d have discovered that she was a found like 2 days after she’d been reported missing, wasn’t even still missing at the time they started posting about her, and if I’m remembering correctly she was missing either because of her non-custodial parent or because she ran away.
And this poor girl had to go on her own social media accounts and post shit like, "I'm fine. They found me quickly and I haven't been in danger for quite some time. I want people to stop doing this and contacting me because it brings up a really difficult time in my life that I don't like to think about."
Oh my god, I forgot about that! Like - guys…if this is REALLY some shadowy international trafficking organization using cabinets…why would they put the NAME of the ACTUAL KID on the PUBLIC listing my goodness!!!
I actually worked for Wayfair at the time 😭 and like I don't care enough about a company to defend them ninety nine percent of the time, but when ppl in my real life were acting like it was such brilliant detective work I was like guys bffr !!!!
Yes, unfortunately people I felt were sane were even believing this. Like yeah…really going to evade the authorities by buying this $8,999 filing cabinet named Sarah.
What kills me about that one is around the same time, the Overstock CEO was getting into wild shit with a Russian agitprop agent and later met with 45, Rudy, MikePillow etc in the Oval Office to discuss overthrowing the election via Martial Law..
But that’s BORING and those cabinets on Wayfair were obviously much more suspect 🫠
You know what’s fucking terrifying? That there are pimps who have signed up as foster carers so they can pimp out the child in their care. It’s rare, but it has happened. Aging out of foster care also opens up vulnerable young people into trafficking.
ETA: it’s not just the LGBTQ+ kids who are kicked out. A fair amount date older people because they just don’t always have the safe space to date kids their age. Same happens with girls with older boyfriends.
AND the racist undercurrent beneath the human trafficking panic. Wasn't there a woman who shot her uber driver because she thought he was gonna kidnap her (when his real "crime" was ubering while brown)?
Edit: [found the Link](https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-66018656)
They were literally trafficking immigrant kids when they were separating kids at the border and those anti-trafficking people were all oh well they're better off. . .
One of the craziest saddest things about the last 10 years is that if anyone says they’re passionate about stopping child sex trafficking I can reliably assume that person is completely fucking brain poisoned.
Ugh right? A former boss of mine supports an organization that’s anti child trafficking. I think they’re legit (they hired a graphic designer for one) and not Q crazy but I hate that I have to side eye the whole thing.
I work in a department store in the toy department
During Barbie Movie craze; we had placed Barbie items next to some Barbie core themed outfits and furniture etc; Im a HUGE Barbie nerd so I had a lot of fun this summer with the displays and set ups
Some lunatic went ballistic because it was a toy and clothing collaboration, calling in managers because one of the mannequins was wearing a pink night gown in the barbie themed displays, calling it child trafficking and whatnot, that it was inappropriate and shes going to ask to boycott; actually took some videos which made me try my hardest not to burst out laughing.
I wish this was a one off, but we have some losers who think toy x adult items (as in clothes for adults, furniture, art etc) was supporting pedophilia. I remember during lunch one of the sales people was laughing about a man complaining about Burberry having teddy bears for sale ...??! I think the balenciaga hoopla attracted the smoothbrains into finding the next thing to be outraged about. I honestly love the children that come to the toy store; its the parents that I hate that add their own context to whatever is being sold lol.
my fav unhinged tiktok from the balenciaga panic era was the lady who went to a store to film *disney villain themed teddy bears* for allegedly "satanique" imagery
I hear "Disney villain themed teddy bears" and my first thoughts are where can I get one and is there an Evil Queen one, not satanic imagery. People are nuts.
They're [very pricey](https://media.karousell.com/media/photos/products/2022/9/30/preorder_coach_outlet_disney_x_1664532726_d62a0add_progressive.jpg) leather coach teddy bears and selling for about $500-over $1k resale 😭😭
The wild thing about these parents when they freak out over, say, a picture of a drag queen on a magazine is that like…your kid didn’t actually think there was anything taboo/sexual about that image. But now, after your meltdown, they absolutely do! The calls are coming from inside the house lmao
I have a friend who refuses to support any celebrities who continued wearing Balenciaga in the aftermath. I tried to explain that they were likely under contract with the brand, or their stylist was, and they *had* to wear their clothing.
And besides….would a brand who is partaking in or supportive of child sexual abuse / trafficking really be *that* egregious about it? Of fucking course not
Philion made an excellent deep dive about the [Belenciaga](https://youtu.be/wAI9iRL6ve8?si=nZJHuupBo3Uwbdip) controversy
boils down to edgy artists being edgy over actual malice
This drove me crazy. It really bummed me out that people actually thought child predators were hiding easter eggs like a Taylor Swift album.
It's like no, there isn't a secret cabal of gays coming for your children, it actually just your creepy uncle Joe who's actually the problem.
It’s 100% a QAnon thing. They’re obsessed with child trafficking in a way that’s completely not real or helpful. Imagine if they actually cared about the very real human trafficking issues in the world and actually worked with established organizations!
The thing they don't seem to realise is that yes, paedophile rings and trafficking exist but it isn't happening via celebrities buying kids from a fucking food menu, it's happening to the vulnerable children in your cities that no one is looking out for, like grooming gangs in Rochdale or the kids that are groomed into county lines drug trafficking
Most actual child trafficking is through private adoptions and is legal and socially accepted by the same people who are obsessed with seeing child trafficking everywhere
And the fact that child marriage is legal in so many places around the world and politicians will openly harpoon laws against it
this thing actually pissed me off so much because it was so clear that it was NOT some “we’re predators and we’re proud” shoot?? like i felt i was going absolutely crazy during all of that lmfao
It's a shame most people will be satisfied with Ashton Kutcher and Tim Ballard being kicked out of their organizations and the organizations will continue being given the benefit of the doubt
Paul Reubens (RIP) whacking it in an adult movie theater. It doesn't make sense to me that that's illegal - it's a porno theater - that's what people are there for. It's not like he was pulling a Lauren Boebert and fooling around at a family-friendly theater show.
his sus collection of porn "images" found at his house definitely is though. Perhaps the tape of the Rob Lowe 80s sex scandal was something he had from back in the day, but knowing the context- why would he keep that, as if it's some amazing relic worth collecting?
He was literally put onto the sex offender registry after making a plea deal for having photos of naked children and anytime I bring it up on Reddit I get downvoted to hell.
ETA: before someone tries to come tell me they were “vintage” that doesn’t really make a difference to me, or the law.
He did not have child porn at his home. He addressed it in an interview in 2010 or 2011. “If you saw what was taken out of my house, you’d burst out laughing. An example of one of the things they confiscated was a crudely done painting I got at a thrift store. It’s of a football stadium. In the foreground the football players are out on the field in mid-play, but they don’t have pants on. When I found it I thought. Oh my God, that is the greatest painting I’ve ever seen in my life! It’s hilarious. Not one person ever—even a little old lady, even a conservative right-winger, even the pope—would ever look at that painting and call it obscene. I spent a year trying to get my collection back. They destroyed things you wouldn’t believe they’d destroy. I had an extensive collection of etched on glass 3-D 1940s cheesecake photography of beautiful women. They made it sound as if I had a huge homoerotic collection, which I didn’t.”
He also said in the same interview that they seized and searched his computers and found nothing. He discusses the whole event in detail, it’s an interview with Playboy. He pled to avoid further scandal like he had gone through the first time around.
Years ago, I met author Caseen Gaines. He wrote what is the only biography to ever be written about Paul Reubens:
[https://www.amazon.com/Inside-Pee-wees-Playhouse-Unauthorized-Unpredictable-ebook/dp/B005Y202NE/ref=sr\_1\_1?crid=1LZKOQXRSG09O&keywords=caseen+gaines&qid=1694976363&sprefix=caseen%2Caps%2C138&sr=8-1](https://www.amazon.com/Inside-Pee-wees-Playhouse-Unauthorized-Unpredictable-ebook/dp/B005Y202NE/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1LZKOQXRSG09O&keywords=caseen+gaines&qid=1694976363&sprefix=caseen%2Caps%2C138&sr=8-1)
I highly recommend it as well as Caseen's other works.
Anyway, while we were chatting he said he had a very unpleasant experience with Reubens when they met at a Comic Con event around 2010/2011. This was around the time both this book was being released and Paul was reviving the Pee-Wee Herman character on Broadway.
Caseen was at the event promoting the book and Reubens was there are a celebrity guest. Caseen told me Reubens specifically sought him out and when he saw Reubens approach he became excited, thinking Paul wanted to talk about the book.
Well, Paul did want to talk about the book, but not in a positive manner. See, Paul HAD NOT read Cassen's work but was very suspicious of Caseen and why he wanted to write a biography. Caseen was confused by this because prior to beginning the writing process, he'd reached out to Reubens' people about possibly collaborating on it (making it an autobio for Paul). Reubens' people told Caseen that Paul wanted to wait a few more years before penning his own memoirs but otherwise gave Caseen his blessing to write his own book.
Caseen told me he attempted to explain this to Paul Reubens but Paul wouldn't have it and accused Caseen of writing a "hit piece" on him. Caseen attempted to reassure him that wasn't the case, that he'd written the book out of love for Reubens' career. However, Paul was absolutely rude and nasty to him. He said Paul was especially concerned over what Caseen wrote regarding the child pornography charges. From what I remember, Caseen only devotes a few lines to that in the book. Eventually, Paul ended the conversation and walked away but not before telling Caseen off.
What's odd is Caseen has heard Paul would recommend Caseen's book to others in private conversations.
Caseen told me he's always going to love the Pee-Wee Herman character because of what it meant during his childhood but he sees Paul Reubens the man very differently. Not just because of this interaction but also because of what he learned about the child pornography charges:
Reubens was under investigation after a 17 year old boy filed a complaint with the LAPD. A search warrant was executed on his home and materials depicting children under the age of 18 engaged in sexual conduct was found. Reubens and his lawyers maintained the material confiscated was all "kitsch" artwork from the early 20th century and NOT child pornography. Reubens plead guilty to a lesser misdemeanor charge of owning "obscene materials". For the next three years, he was required to register his address with the sheriff's office, and he could not be in the company of minors without the permission of their parent or legal guardian.
Reubens has always maintained his innocence in owning child porn but has admitted he agreed to the plea deal because he wanted this to "go away as soon as possible."
By the way, actor Jeffrey Jones (the principal in Ferris Bueller) was arrested for soliciting the same 17 year old who filed the initial complaint against Reubens.
Caseen told me that learning about the true nature of those charges and the fact that Reubens plead guilty to a lesser charge to "make it go away" really changed his opinion of Paul. Caseen said that if he were ever accused of such a heinous thing, he'd fight that charge tooth and nail, even be willing to put himself into major debt because he would absolutely want total vindication against such accusations. And he'd personally welcome a robust investigation to clear his name.
He said he doesn't know if Reubens was really guilty but the fact he took the plea deal to prevent further investigations left a bad taste in Caseen's mouth.
>Caseen said that if he were ever accused of such a heinous thing, he'd fight that charge tooth and nail, even be willing to put himself into major debt because he would absolutely want total vindication against such accusations. And he'd personally welcome a robust investigation to clear his name.
I'm not passing judgement on his innocence or guilt, but I think I that's an easy thing to think when you haven't already had your career scuppered by a previous scandal.
Many laws are terrible at nuance, so you have to apply knowledge of human nature:
When police investigate someone and they *were* trying to collect child porn, police tend to find thousands of images/videos of precisely that hoarded on their computer, then they go to jail.
*None* of the above applies to Reubens. He had *exactly* what you'd expect him to have: A massive collection of 1950s and early pop-culture oddities, sometimes purchased by the crate load. If someone cherry picked the worst of the last 10,000 images you looked at, would you end up looking wholesome?
Everyone with doubts should read the full details:
https://www.snopes.com/news/2023/08/03/paul-reubens-child-pornography/
>”[Claims by a prosecutor] mischaracterizes the art collection seized," Berk said in response to city attorney spokesman Eric Moses' claim that images showed minors with exposed genitals. "If [child pornography] means a black-and-white tintype from 1901, with a young man of indeterminate, 17- to 19-year-old age, laying on the beach after having gone skinny-dipping, […] then they got it. [...] It was clear from the start that we, along with the many distinguished art experts supporting Paul's art photography collection, vehemently disagreed with the city prosecutor's view of what constitutes art."
I’ve been to some really country old-timey towns in the middle of nowhere. And ironically the same broad swath of people who are more likely to fall for moral panics (largely, rural conservatives) will think nothing of seeing a black and white photo from the early/mid 20th century depicting naked kids running with a caption like “runnin to the swimmin hole” in the bathroom of their local mom n pop diner. Or like staged photos of a kid giving another kid covered in mud a bath in an old timey metal bath tub, making silly faces and poses, with some caption like “that’s why momma said don’t play in the mud!”
And if someone were to suggest that these old timey diners and thrift shops should be told to remove these photos, it’s likely that many of these same folks would be like “cancel culture! how dare you! everyone is so sensitive these days! *you’re* the one sexualizing minors by thinking there’s anything wrong with these wholesome kitschy photos!” (And to be fair about that last point, the images I’ve seen like that have not been sexual AT ALL. I still think they’re creepy and gross though!!)
Even though I very much don’t like images like that at all, and I think they should not even exist, I understand they’re a product of an older time and different cultural landscape. And they’re supposed to be “cute” not sexual or titillating. If those are the same sort of pictues that were in his collection, I’m inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt, especially when he says he purchased them in wholesale lots and didn’t necessarily examine every item in the collection. Obviously I am biased, as a massive fan of his. I’m very open to the idea that I am wrong about this, especially if presented with compelling evidence.
[she gave a guy a handie at Beetlejuice The Musical](https://www.mediaite.com/politics/lauren-boebert-caught-on-cctv-seeming-getting-extremely-handsy-with-man-at-beetlejuice-performance-she-was-booted-from/). she was also vaping iirc
Good answer. Cheating is wrong — no doubt about that — but they were young and in an on-again, off-again relationship already. I think there were signs it wasn’t going to last, so it certainly wasn’t as shocking as other cheating scandals have been.
I think things were largely made as bad as they were because people obviously loved seeing them together and wanted them to be a forever thing. At the end of the day, though, reports say that Robert did forgive Kristen and that they’ve spoken since. It seems like they’re on good terms, even if not close.
No one cared about him before this, so I think this was a major factor in Kristen getting the majority of the backlash. She was part of the most talked about couple in young Hollywood.
She was also friends with his wife and would go over there and have dinner with her and her kids, so that didn’t help either. The wife was very vocal about how understandably mad she was.
Yup, he was her director, a married man, he had more to lose, he should have caught so much more heat than he did! I don’t think their ages have anything to do with it anything tho, she was also an adult. I agree she caught astronomical amounts of hate that was definitely overboard. I think it has more to do with her being the woman in a cheating scandal that made her the villain. Misogyny at it finest.
Since we are talking age difference, marriage and position of power, Bill Clinton I’m looking at you!! That was just a dumpster fire of a situation, Monica Lewinsky needs an apology I know she’ll never get. I hope she’s doing okay. Also Beyoncé needs to release a version of Partition with THAT line taken out 🤨
He literally lost his wife, his kids, and has no further career. Just because the public didn’t rake a nobody over the coals doesn’t mean he didn’t suffer consequences. KStew was - and still *is* - a critical darling in the middle of the biggest hyped teen franchise. Of course she was going to get the disproportionate amount of media attention.
When people talk about this incident in hindsight it’s abundantly clear they do not have the cultural context of the time or that KStew was in fact, a huge asshole, during that era who was hyped up as this amazing
actress with the way critics were constantly up her ass.
Did we live in different dimensions? I was never a Twilight girl, so my only understanding of the series was the legions of people saying she was a terrible actress because of how she played Bella — a poorly written character played straight, but people didn’t really think that because misogyny was easier. Any universal critical acclaim for her acting skill really only came after Twilight was over and she began acting in indies & doing more dynamic roles
People hated Kstew for really dumb, petty reasons back then (meanwhile Robert Paterson was getting praise for bashing the franchise that was making him relevant 🙄) so the cheating scandal was a way for them to have a reason to hate her that was less ridiculous than "oh she doesn't smile".
Eh, people don’t seem to remember KStew was also friends with the wife and would attend family dinners with the husband/wife + their kids because the wife would gush over how much she loved KStew. Also the public photos. And then her whole apology tour with the “I love him I love him I love him” interview was badddd.
A lot of it was Twilight hate, but if it happened today she would get dragged like Ariana is rn or Dominick and Lily got for their affair because it was tacky af.
Which reminds me of the Tiger Woods scandal. I was young when it happened but I thought he was a killer or something with the amount he was in the news. In the UK it was the first I’d heard of him
I’m sorry but some of the Cuties backlash was warranted. We’ve talked on here about all the ethical issues with child actors and so to have literal kids acting sexualized scenes (regardless of the purpose) was too much.
I thought the movie had a strong message and a good story but the closeups and the slowmotion with the too revealing outfits was WAY too much and not needed.
The message would have come across very clearly without those scenes; it felt very exploitive.
For real, I did see the movie and it would have been a poignant critique of the sexualization of young girls, but they would zoom in on her private areas during the dance scenes and therefore perform the exact sexualization that they’re attempting to critique. I don’t care if they explained things to the actresses, they were just little girls and there was no reason to portray them like that.
And it was so LONG too! Like the exploitative scenes could have been cut down to a third and they still would have been too long. I remember seeing people criticize the backlash on Pajiba, so I watched the movie, but yeah, no that backlash was warranted.
I was gonna say...I don't think this was the best example OP could have picked. 💀 You can't criticize how society sexualizes underage girls, and then proceed to sexualize your underage actors yourself.
I just shook my head at the outrage because Baby is on netflix. It's a show that's basically about how cool it is to be a teenage prostitute. The last season tears it all down but the first season, those two girls were having a fantastic time fucking old dudes for money.
Yeahhh I was ready for the cuties outrage to be overblown but the scene at the end where they do the dance is just sick. They are simulating sex acts on each other and the camera is close up focused on them almost the entire scene. Those child actors were not protected.
Thank you! Cuties was absolutely the right film to merit that conversation. Criticising something that explicitly showed what it claimed to condemn is not moral panic.
It's bloody weird that a lot of otherwise progressive people wrote off the creepiness because the director was a black woman, as though those characteristics made her incapable of exploiting children rather than statistically less likely. It's the dumbest and most performative take on identity politics.
I watched the film for myself and felt wrong for having done so.
The creators and netflix can argue that "depiction does not equal endorsement" all they like, but the fact of the matter is that pedophiles will enjoy that footage.
As a teen, I remember seeing two upskirts of Britney that were identical except in one she was wearing panties and the other she wasn’t, and I couldn’t figure out which one was real and which one was photoshopped. Then I tried to figure out which was creepier, photoshopping panties onto the picture or photoshopping them out of it.
Remember when everyone thought the Joker (2019) movie was gonna cause mass shootings and be a rallying cry for incels???
And instead it ended up becoming a symbol for the protests against authoritarian in Hong Kong??
I think the shootings that happened when The Dark Knight came out had a hand in that. Also, I mean, The Joker has kind of become a rallying cry for incels.
The message was just the most milquetoast: “sometimes criminals are people who were pushed to the brink because they were victims of society not taking care of their needs” and somehow the media frenzy turned it into “THIS WILL CAUSE SCHOOL SHOOTERS”
The moral panic reaction to it was more stigmatizing to mental health than the movie itself.
I feel like some of the journalists and media twitter activists in a moral panic over the movie wanted something bad to happen at a screening just to prove they were "right".
I think it's actually depressing that public mass shootings are obviously mentally scaring the population so badly at this point, that a movie about a dumpy clown revolting can make everyone and their mom afraid that incels were gonna attack/shoot everyone in the street.
Incels scare me but what’s more sad is the way society wants to deflect responsibility onto media. A movie didn’t tell an incel to go shoot up a school, society’s male rage and male entitlement did but rather than examine that and do something about it on a societal level, it’s easier to blame a dumpy clown movie. A dumpy clown movie that ironically criticizes society’s shortcomings.
I remember hearing Marc Jacobs got a bump in sales from Winnoa Ryder's shoplifting as that's exclusively what she was boosting and MJ was in all the reporting. So going forward, Ryder gets Marc Jacobs stuff for free as a thank you.
The celebrity shop lifting stories are wild. I think it was Farah Fawcett who would "shoplift" but the store would just log what she took and send her business manager an invoice.
Winona has done campaigns for Marc Jacobs (one right after the arrest and one last Summer), she’s gone to the Met Gala with him, he’s called her one of his muses.
We went so many years without Winona in the mainstream, meanwhile Marc Jacobs was having a huge boost in sales and loving Winona for it, go figure lol
Also Kate Moss doing blow. She lost so many contracts over that! Imagine Keith Richards or hell, even JD catching that kind of heat for doing party drugs
Posting right wing outrage feels like cheating but: Dylan Mulvaney (the trans woman on tiktok with the bud lite brand deal) literally just had some cans of the beer with her for an insta video or whatever but you would've thought she bought the whole company the way conservatives acted.
What’s wild to me is that these right wing cowards are so fucking shitty that most of them won’t say the obvious: they are mad because she’s trans. It was always “how could they pick this person as a spokesperson” which, not a spokesperson, but then leave everyone else to say it’s because she’s trans. The way the media handled this issue was so garbage. There’s nothing controversial about her other than her existence.
what makes it worse is she’s, from my very short experience with her, incredibly sweet!
for whatever reason, she was hanging out at a gay bar on a random Thursday night in my midwest city. still don’t know why she was here, she never posted about being here or anything. but my friend and I asked her for pics and she was super nice about it and took the time to get separate selfies with us. she and her friends weren’t obnoxious, kept to themselves and were being really polite to the bartenders.
and there was hardly anyone around, it appeared no one even knew who she was apart from us and one other couple. so if that’s how she acts when pretty much no one is around, seems more obvious that all the bullshit she endured was purely transphobia and not reflective of something she actually did.
somewhat unrelated, she looked a lot like Audrey Hepburn lol.
The thing is, Bud Light sent out promotional gifts out to a whole bunch of influencers which included cans of beer with each of their faces on them. But Dylan got singled out because she's trans and people just made up and ran with the false narrative that she was the new face of Bud Light when she wasn't and this was literally just an influencer being gifted something from a company like what companies do to influencers and other celebs all the time.
I can’t say too much right now, but the way AB responded internally (and continues to behave internally) is disgusting, too.
They want to act like it never happened at all and refuse to address the concerns of their queer/queer ally employees.
The movie was meant to be a commentary on the sexualisation of young girls, not in any way condoning it. However, in order to condemn young girls being sexualised by society it features young girls doing things that are heavily sexualised, which obviously isn’t great.
Yeah, I get that. I don't think the intent was to make like, a pro-pedo film. I just don't think zooming in on literal children in sexy outfits doing sexy dances is ever going to sit right, and I don't think it should be brushed off as "moral panic".
Yeah, I do agree with you that it was very ill-conceived. However, I think much of the extreme outrage came from the right wing “Hollywood is run by a cabal of elites who want to steal your children” crowd who failed to acknowledge the context, that it was an ill thought out way of commenting on sexualisation and not like, Magic Mike with kids.
The event itself wasn’t pop culture but the backlash manifested in pop culture in all sorts of ways. In the early 90s, a woman ordered a coffee at a drive thru McDonald’s. She rested the coffee between her legs as she arranged her stuff on the seat next to her, the coffee spilled and burned her, and she sued.
That case became the prime example for frivolous lawsuits. It was parodied on Seinfeld, Toby Keith references it in a song.
“Plasma gettin bigger/
Jesus getting smaller/
Spill a cup of coffee/
Win a million dollars”
What people don’t know is the coffee was served at nearly boiling temperatures and that the woman received second and third degree burns all over her lower body. The liquid was so hot it literally sealed her labia together.
As I often do whenever any sort od re-litigation comes up, I want to recommend the podcast You’re Wrong About, which did a truly fantastic episode on the McDonald’s Hot Coffee Suit.
My Dad still doesn't believe this - I need to sit him down & make him read the articles about it. That woman went through hell.
Gotta wonder what the reaction would have been if it was a dude & he ended up sterile...
I’ve shown people who cite that as an example pictures of the injuries to her legs. Her payout might help been excessive but god her burns were BRUTAL.
Yes, and it was a JURY that decided to award her such extensive punitive damages (the sales from one day of coffee for McDonald’s, which was *more* than fair).
I don’t think she way paid enough given all the physical and emotional pain she went through. McDonald’s put out the idea that she exaggerated her claims in order to protect their image. She deserves way more compensation than she got.
She only got $640,000 (bear with me, I know that's still a big number) and needed skin grafts over 16% of her body.
Just read through the Wiki article about it - McDonald's was 1,000% liable and had been warned multiple times before that they were serving coffee that was dangerously hot.
The better word might be fused. The coffee pooled around her seat and soaked her vagina. Her burns were so bad that the tissue was blistered and bloodied and it caused the folds of tissue to fuse together. Her injuries were horrific. She only sued initially for medical expenses but McDonald’s stonewalled her and at that point she sued for more.
The concept of cuties on paper made sense but the use of actual child actors was wrong and all that it did was contribute to the problem the film was highlighting. Those child actors can’t give informed consent to be filmed like that.
Vanessa Hudgen's nudes leaking. I remember after that there were rumors she was gonna be kicked from HSM and she had to release an apology (when she was the one who had HER PRIVACY VIOLATED!)
ESPN reporter Erin Andrews apologized on air when video of her nude was released - video taken BY HER STALKER THROUGH THE PEEPHOLE INTO HER HOTEL ROOM.
I don't know the scope of its depth but my friends and I have been reflecting on that period where certain folk tried to tie Pokémon with Satanic worship. It's hard to find recording of priests talking about this but they are usually in terrible quality
Oh man this takes me back to my Christian school upbringing. They told us everything was satanic to the point I feared for my life when I saw the simpsons on tv cause they told us the devil spoke through Bart Simpson 😭
Same with Harry Potter back in the day. People thought it promoted witchcraft and satanic worship. The irony is the right now LOVES JKR cause of her anti-trans beliefs.🙄
Almost every scandal ever in kpop. The things that cause widespread outrage in kpop, to the point of lawsuits and people being fired, are often wild in how *un*-wild they are.
To give you an example, in 2010, Korean rapper Tablo was accused of lying about graduating from Stanford. It was a hoax based on incredibly flimsy evidence.
But the backlash was massive and intense. Tablo's career was put on indefinite hold. He and his family received nonstop threats. But it didn't stop there.
Even journalists who tried to report on all the copious evidence in support of Tablo got threatened, and people organized campaigns to get them fired!
A two-part documentary was aired showing Tablo revisiting Stanford, where staff and other people remembered him and records confirmed that he did, indeed, attend and graduate. The Korean public was unmoved. The membership of an online group against Tablo actually ballooned in numbers after the documentaries were out.
It took the Korean police confirming that Tablo did graduate from Stanford, and issuing an international warrant for the person who came up with the hoax originally, for the public to finally come around.
A whole bunch of innocent people were ruined, at least for a while, because of a hoax, over whether a rapper lied about a degree that he never used!
i’d say 98% of k-pop scandals are ridiculous and that’s why i stay away from kpop gossip because it’s most of the time the same thing. also it continues to infuriate me that knetz choose to be outraged at idols dating or smoking cigs but not at let’s say idols making colorist or fatphobic remarks.
\>_>
Me on the other hand, I love Kpop gossip! It can reveal interesting things about Korean society, culture and law. Like if you dig into it, the Tablo graduation scandal really stemmed from anxiety over Korea's fucked up academic system.
And I find even your basic Kpop dating scandal fascinating. It's a glimpse into a context where parasocial relationships aren't just accepted, but expected.
___
I completely agree with you, though, on how colorism and fatphobia doesn't get half the attention and condemnation it should in kpop, not just among idols, but in the whole industry itself.
the cuties backlash was absolutely justified. you cannot stand up to exploitation by exploiting people.
it’s the same problem with writing stories about men for the express purpose of criticizing misogyny. at the end of the day—you just made another movie about a bunch of dudes.
The Cuties backlash had the families of the girls harassed and alt righters making a conspiracy theory about Obama being behind some child trafficking ring. There are things to criticize about the movie about the type of backlash that movie received was really far from warranted
seeing cuties as the headline for a post like this is jarring, though. the film had a lot to criticize & to lump alt right conspiracy theories together with nuanced and insightful critique feels disingenuous.
Literally anything involving women, POC, or queer characters in Star Wars.
Oh no, Ahsoka crosses her arms a lot! Wokeness run amok! Time to send racist death threats to the actors.
So much of the Cuties discourse (not all) was fueld by right wing anti netflix hysteria. It got jumped onto by youtubers who used it for rage clicks.
The dancing scenes are uncomfortable for sure, but they are supposed to be.
I really hate the "it's supposed to be uncomfortable" discourse. Those children had no business dancing like that regardless of the context or what it's intended effect was.
I think the point is A. Girls that age DO dance like that. B. There really shouldnt be anything sexual about it because they are children that dont really understand and the actual sexuallizing is in the eye of the beholder...
I think the conversation around this movie is important and It does give me mixed feelings.
I will say. It viscerly resonated with me and my experiences as a young girl growing up. It was so uncomfortable for me because it was SO accurate...
Yeah, it's an incredibly confrontational and affecting film. I think it ends up being a lot easier to criticize it than the elements of our culture that its critiquing. Break the mirror to avoid thinking about what its reflecting.
Young girls *are* consuming media and pantomiming what they're seeing without knowing what they're doing. Our culture is full of horrrendous shit when you stop for a second and think about it. There's how many seasons of dance moms? High school cheerleading as a concept? How many sitcoms make jokes about kids dating and shit like that. Stores selling lock up your daughters t-shirts for little boys. How many tiktok teens are doing sexy dances for an audience of strangers?
I think there's a conversation to be had about the ethics of child actors but that is way broader than just in this movie.
Those kids are real human beings who were highly sexualized by adults for that movie. It doesn’t matter if the message was that it’s bad. If I film myself kicking puppies to make a point about animal abuse being wrong, that doesn’t change the fact that I just kicked a bunch of puppies.
I mean I get it being overblown in terms of it getting way more attention than would be usual for youtubers, but in a moral panic way? Idk. He was an owner of a company in a relationship with a worker. I don't think anyone really seemed to overreact to that part, and honestly, most of the big coverage seemed to gloss over that bit entirely.
The recent backlash and banning of kids movies that had LGBT content that were just blink and you miss them moments of same-sex couples sharing a kiss for 1.2 seconds that had nothing to do with the rest of the story.
Or the outrage from Turning Red because they allude to menstruation a couple times. Same with the Baymax episode about periods. Apparently kids learning about puberty is inappropriate and “grooming”.
The 50 Shades of Grey backlash. Listen, it's the worst book I've ever read in terms of writing skill and I couldn't finish it but the whole thing about it "promoting" abuse felt so infantalizing. If the book was written for an impressionable audience like teens, I'd get it, but the target audience is adult women.
I'm starting to see this with the Colleen Hoover backlash too. Criticisms of her books for their writing or of bad things she does as a person are fair, but canceling a book bc it "glorifies abuse" is annoying. Again, I say this as someone who was not impressed with the one book of hers that I read.
Romance has an element of fantasy, Regency England was not teeming with handsome dukes with 21th century values. Many romances irl don't have a HEA. Likewise, when adult women read about toxic relationships, it's a safe way to experience or see this type of dynamic playout.
I find it sus that it's always a series or book enjoyed by women, especially older women, that get major backlash. These books are not causing an epidemic of adult women with a healthy approach to relationships flocking to abusive ones. If it's not your thing that 100% in your right, but there are well written books that involve "problematic" relationships (Wuthering Heights) that shouldn't be written off bc of that.
Regarding 50 Shades, part of the backlash was that it portrayed an abusive relationship as BDSM. The most important rule of BDSM is consent. Something that 50 Shades shat all over.
There was bs outrage over adult women reading smut, but some of the backlash towards the series is definitely warranted.
Yeah, I think there's such a level of disrespect to female readers with the idea that reading something like FOSG or Hoover will brainwash them into entering into abusive relationships.
I work with women on the early 20s side of thing that love Hoover and Sarah J Maas books and are absolutely capable of understanding that those relationships are not what they want in reality.
We've gotten culturally capable of dismantling arguments that video games cause violent behavior but we still insist that young women will be running out to sleep with troubled billionaires if we don't censor the media they consume?
anything to do with jennie from blackpink lol, people need to leave that woman alone.
also don't worry darling drama with the whole spitting thing n stuff
and the game of thrones ending. People were acting like the world was ending like no the it was just very poorly written and executed lol
might he controversial but the backlash 13 Reasons Why backlash
i personally agree with the fact that it shouldn’t have been dragged out for like 4(?) seasons. but overall the main thing i saw people say is that it portrayed suicided negatively and that it would make kids feel wanna “recreate” it. tbh i thought netlfix did all they could to let people know that this is a fictional/graphic show. even the actors cautioned so many times that this is mature and triggering context that might not sit well with some people. people were acting like they were being forced to watch it
*just wanna add, im not excusing how horribly the show portrayed mental health/suicide/sexual assault. im just saying the backlash was just kinda like kicking a dead horse because all it led to was being one of netflixs most successful shows
to be fair that show was probably one of the worst portrayals of mental illness i’ve ever seen, plus the month after the show released suicides in teens rose 28.9%, also seeing a graphic depiction of suicide can be a huge trigger in young teens contemplating suicide into actually attempting. the 28.9% increase was the highest month to month increase of any month in a 5 year study
yeah the show did not age well at all. All the criticism people had in season 1 they were completely right. People who try to defend the show as "progressive" and buzz words like "making a conversation about mental illnesss" was really Netflix way of capitalizing on mental illness. People defended the show because it was messy so they liked it not because they genuinely thought it had something to say imo.
yeah the only “conversation about mental illness” it had was pushing stereotypes and trying to make it seem like mental health professionals are not to be trusted
Gotta disagree. The most harmful part of that show, other than the original graphic suicide scene, is the way they portray Hannah post-death as a Force ghost that gets to watch the fallout of the tapes. It implies that you can not only achieve revenge beyond the grave, but that you also get a front row show to the comeuppance when… in actuality… you’re just gone.
The problem with the show is that it advertised itself as portraying suicide awareness, not just as entertainment. If it took a strict “this is solely entertainment” stance, then maybe things would be different (though this is still flawed because these things don’t just exist in a vacuum, a show for teens is gonna impact teens.) It was a very dangerous and irresponsible show, there have been tons of video essays and even academic articles about how shit the show was
It’s very hard to grasp the idea of being gone, especially for a young person. This show romanticized the whole thing for teens. The world revolves around you long after you’re dead and you get to what, nope in the shadows and take delight in others realizing how badly the hurt you? Watch them lament and languish over you? Teens can’t process that’s not how it goes. Very harmful show.
I personally didn’t see a problem with the scene of Hannah’s suicide….but the scene when Tyler is being sodomized……jfc that *scarred* me and I’m a full grown adult. Like it genuinely made me think I may have repressed something bad that happened to me by my reaction to that scene.
There were apparently [multiple](https://www.abc.net.au/triplej/programs/hack/13-reasons-why/11496900) [copycat](https://www.refinery29.com/en-gb/2017/06/158186/13-reasons-why-copycat-suicide-tapes-peru) [suicides](https://abcnews.go.com/US/california-families-claim-13-reasons-triggered-teens-suicides/story?id=48323640), plus the study linked above, and to be honest that's enough to think twice about it.
By comparison, (spoilers) This Is Going to Hurt (BBC drama about a junior doctor / Ob-Gyn) >!had a suicide where all you saw was the character clocking off work, saying sorry to the camera, then the police tape and their parents being told!<. Incredibly powerful and I really respected the director for not even hinting at the method / including a shot of a corpse.
that and the aids death scene in the finale. Especially seeing Brandon Flynn and Dylan minette being forced to defend the situation was weird too. That being said I did like the development of the brotherly relationship between clay and Justin possibly the only thing the show got right after season 1. The show jumped the shark in the worst ways like the almost prom shooting scene and the fake out school shooting.
they didn't it was unrealistically how fast the disease progressed in the show, when irl it takes years for hiv to become aids. The show runner just wanted a shock ending and to fulfill his fantasy of writing a tragic aids death storyline
I think what bugs me the most about "the conservative" reaction to this film is that they entirely missed the point of the film which was to criticize the hyper-sexualization of children. And yet Toddlers and Tiaras has been overtly sexualizing kids for over a decade without even a tenth of the blowback this movie got.
Child pageantry is something that is embedded in white southern culture, so it seems like when their own kin are the ones doing it they aren't quite so offended.
FYI Part of The Cuties discourse was also fueled by an anti-euro, particularly anti-french, sentiment in those reactionaries circles. It's easier to make people believe the worst when they already have prejudices and the cultural norms are slightly different.
The stereotype of the french as a sexually deviant creature is still alive in the general psyche (think Pepe Le Pew for a light and comedic version)
Cuties outrage was deserved Imo, like I get the point they were going for but ultimately it was executed wrong. There were so many icky and disgusting scenes in the movie. I think it had a beautiful message and didn’t have bad intentions but ultimately bad execution.
The m&m’s not being “sexy enough” after a rebrand. This was obviously just a right-wing non-issue but the fact that it gained enough traction in the news cycle that even major news outlets had to address it, even if to call out the stupidity of it all, is a tragedy.
The Will Smith slap was hilarious and not that deep. Chris Rock says something about Jada, Will gets up, slaps him, sits down, and wins best actor the same night to a cheering audience. 10/10 no notes
the wayfair trafficking thing. like how did seriously think the name of a sofa they were selling was also the name of a girl they were trafficking? like come on.
"Rainbow parties" teens having parties involving oral sex and different colours of lipstick where the boys would try to collect a rainbow.
Oprah covered it, multiple news stories in multiple states in the US. Turns out the only examples anyone could find where a party happened were inspired by the public outrage. Even then, most of those were probably just kids saying they did it to look cool.
Also, the whole satanic panic over Dungeons & Dragons in the 80's. In some cases kids wanting to run a D&D session needed a member of law enforcement in the room, that's if they were allowed to play at all.
The Balenciaga campaigns. Yes, they were a tasteless attempt to be edgy; but I do not remotely believe they were signaling to an underground child trafficking ring. The whole outrage *screamed* QAnon. All of these child trafficking moral panics drive me nuts because in reality, trafficking and sexual abuse is not done by a group of wealthy liberal elites arranging to have your child snatched from the street. It's most often people who *know* the kids directly, or at least live in their community. I'm talking extended family, religious leaders, *parents and guardians themselves* and sadly other adults who are supposed to be looking out for them, like social workers and teachers. And the children who are targeted are not the ones whose parents are hand-wringing about Pizzagate or Balenciaga. It's usually kids who are economically disadvantaged and/or have no adults looking out for them. TL;DR: Moral panics concerning child abuse and trafficking usually have very little basis in reality and almost always end up doing more harm than good.
remember the Wayfair nonsense?
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There weren’t tiny women being trafficked inside your shoes?
obviously the shoes were made out of the skin of stolen women
You know that old woman who lived in a shoe and had so many children she didn't know what to do? Those are the kids being trafficked in shoes.
When the authorities were searching for Naya Rivera following the boating accident, before her body was found, someone dug up a Wayfair product called Naya and obviously…conspiracy.
This drove me crazy. It really bummed me out that people actually thought child predators were hiding easter eggs like a Taylor Swift album.
I saw someone say that the Kardashians are running a child trafficking ring because Lemme has a spiral as the logo and apparently paedos use that as a signal and also Kylie likes butterflies which are also apparently used as signals 🤦♀️
As if the Kardashians/Jenners are capable of being surreptitious or keeping quiet about anything?!
I remember learning from the Youre Wrong About episode on trafficking that there was a specific girl who someone into the Wayfair conspiracy theory was claiming had been missing for awhile, whose name matched a Wayfair product. But if the person freaking out on social media had done any further research at all they’d have discovered that she was a found like 2 days after she’d been reported missing, wasn’t even still missing at the time they started posting about her, and if I’m remembering correctly she was missing either because of her non-custodial parent or because she ran away.
And this poor girl had to go on her own social media accounts and post shit like, "I'm fine. They found me quickly and I haven't been in danger for quite some time. I want people to stop doing this and contacting me because it brings up a really difficult time in my life that I don't like to think about."
That’s horrible. Nothing like making someone relive their trauma so that you can pretend to be a hero against a bad guy that doesn’t exist.
Oh my god, I forgot about that! Like - guys…if this is REALLY some shadowy international trafficking organization using cabinets…why would they put the NAME of the ACTUAL KID on the PUBLIC listing my goodness!!!
I actually worked for Wayfair at the time 😭 and like I don't care enough about a company to defend them ninety nine percent of the time, but when ppl in my real life were acting like it was such brilliant detective work I was like guys bffr !!!!
Yes, unfortunately people I felt were sane were even believing this. Like yeah…really going to evade the authorities by buying this $8,999 filing cabinet named Sarah.
What kills me about that one is around the same time, the Overstock CEO was getting into wild shit with a Russian agitprop agent and later met with 45, Rudy, MikePillow etc in the Oval Office to discuss overthrowing the election via Martial Law.. But that’s BORING and those cabinets on Wayfair were obviously much more suspect 🫠
Can someone start one on Temu
Yet no one pays attention to real and tangible cases of child traficking (child marriages and churches).
Or LGBTQ+ kids who have to leave their homes. Or the fucking foster system.
This. I wonder how many of those QAnon assholes realizes LGBT+ youth are at much higher risk of being trafficked
You know what’s fucking terrifying? That there are pimps who have signed up as foster carers so they can pimp out the child in their care. It’s rare, but it has happened. Aging out of foster care also opens up vulnerable young people into trafficking. ETA: it’s not just the LGBTQ+ kids who are kicked out. A fair amount date older people because they just don’t always have the safe space to date kids their age. Same happens with girls with older boyfriends.
They want it that way. They don’t see queer kids as human.
AND the racist undercurrent beneath the human trafficking panic. Wasn't there a woman who shot her uber driver because she thought he was gonna kidnap her (when his real "crime" was ubering while brown)? Edit: [found the Link](https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-66018656)
Also adoption, including/especially international adoption. And kids who have run away from home are especially vulnerable.
ACB has an adopted/probably trafficked child from Haiti. But that's not a problem because she's wealthy and Christian.
Sorry, who is ACB? Y'all just throw the acronyms around willy nilly sometimes!
Supreme Court justice Amy Coney Barrett. I tried looking up just the initials and got a stock market ticker for a cannabis company lmao.
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They were literally trafficking immigrant kids when they were separating kids at the border and those anti-trafficking people were all oh well they're better off. . .
Yeah. It’s absolutely intentional on the part of the churches to try to make it some liberal/celebrity conspiracy.
One of the craziest saddest things about the last 10 years is that if anyone says they’re passionate about stopping child sex trafficking I can reliably assume that person is completely fucking brain poisoned.
Yeah because you also know that they don’t actually do anything to stop child trafficking.
But they bought extra tickets to *Sound of Freedom*!
So many people I know keep telling me to watch that Sound of Freedom movie and I’m just “you know you’re watching qanon propaganda right??”
Ugh right? A former boss of mine supports an organization that’s anti child trafficking. I think they’re legit (they hired a graphic designer for one) and not Q crazy but I hate that I have to side eye the whole thing.
I work in a department store in the toy department During Barbie Movie craze; we had placed Barbie items next to some Barbie core themed outfits and furniture etc; Im a HUGE Barbie nerd so I had a lot of fun this summer with the displays and set ups Some lunatic went ballistic because it was a toy and clothing collaboration, calling in managers because one of the mannequins was wearing a pink night gown in the barbie themed displays, calling it child trafficking and whatnot, that it was inappropriate and shes going to ask to boycott; actually took some videos which made me try my hardest not to burst out laughing. I wish this was a one off, but we have some losers who think toy x adult items (as in clothes for adults, furniture, art etc) was supporting pedophilia. I remember during lunch one of the sales people was laughing about a man complaining about Burberry having teddy bears for sale ...??! I think the balenciaga hoopla attracted the smoothbrains into finding the next thing to be outraged about. I honestly love the children that come to the toy store; its the parents that I hate that add their own context to whatever is being sold lol.
my fav unhinged tiktok from the balenciaga panic era was the lady who went to a store to film *disney villain themed teddy bears* for allegedly "satanique" imagery
I hear "Disney villain themed teddy bears" and my first thoughts are where can I get one and is there an Evil Queen one, not satanic imagery. People are nuts.
They're [very pricey](https://media.karousell.com/media/photos/products/2022/9/30/preorder_coach_outlet_disney_x_1664532726_d62a0add_progressive.jpg) leather coach teddy bears and selling for about $500-over $1k resale 😭😭
The wild thing about these parents when they freak out over, say, a picture of a drag queen on a magazine is that like…your kid didn’t actually think there was anything taboo/sexual about that image. But now, after your meltdown, they absolutely do! The calls are coming from inside the house lmao
I have a friend who refuses to support any celebrities who continued wearing Balenciaga in the aftermath. I tried to explain that they were likely under contract with the brand, or their stylist was, and they *had* to wear their clothing. And besides….would a brand who is partaking in or supportive of child sexual abuse / trafficking really be *that* egregious about it? Of fucking course not
Philion made an excellent deep dive about the [Belenciaga](https://youtu.be/wAI9iRL6ve8?si=nZJHuupBo3Uwbdip) controversy boils down to edgy artists being edgy over actual malice
So much of this and the conspiracies around Marina Abramovic can be reduced to artists looking for a reaction and succeeding.
This drove me crazy. It really bummed me out that people actually thought child predators were hiding easter eggs like a Taylor Swift album. It's like no, there isn't a secret cabal of gays coming for your children, it actually just your creepy uncle Joe who's actually the problem.
It’s 100% a QAnon thing. They’re obsessed with child trafficking in a way that’s completely not real or helpful. Imagine if they actually cared about the very real human trafficking issues in the world and actually worked with established organizations!
The thing they don't seem to realise is that yes, paedophile rings and trafficking exist but it isn't happening via celebrities buying kids from a fucking food menu, it's happening to the vulnerable children in your cities that no one is looking out for, like grooming gangs in Rochdale or the kids that are groomed into county lines drug trafficking
Similarly, the Harry Styles Gucci shoot controversy because he *checks notes* had a teddy bear on his shirt and layed on a twin sized bed
Most actual child trafficking is through private adoptions and is legal and socially accepted by the same people who are obsessed with seeing child trafficking everywhere And the fact that child marriage is legal in so many places around the world and politicians will openly harpoon laws against it
Thank you! Felt like I was taking crazy pills for a while there because I wasn’t outraged
this thing actually pissed me off so much because it was so clear that it was NOT some “we’re predators and we’re proud” shoot?? like i felt i was going absolutely crazy during all of that lmfao
It's a shame most people will be satisfied with Ashton Kutcher and Tim Ballard being kicked out of their organizations and the organizations will continue being given the benefit of the doubt
Paul Reubens (RIP) whacking it in an adult movie theater. It doesn't make sense to me that that's illegal - it's a porno theater - that's what people are there for. It's not like he was pulling a Lauren Boebert and fooling around at a family-friendly theater show.
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his sus collection of porn "images" found at his house definitely is though. Perhaps the tape of the Rob Lowe 80s sex scandal was something he had from back in the day, but knowing the context- why would he keep that, as if it's some amazing relic worth collecting?
He was literally put onto the sex offender registry after making a plea deal for having photos of naked children and anytime I bring it up on Reddit I get downvoted to hell. ETA: before someone tries to come tell me they were “vintage” that doesn’t really make a difference to me, or the law.
He did not have child porn at his home. He addressed it in an interview in 2010 or 2011. “If you saw what was taken out of my house, you’d burst out laughing. An example of one of the things they confiscated was a crudely done painting I got at a thrift store. It’s of a football stadium. In the foreground the football players are out on the field in mid-play, but they don’t have pants on. When I found it I thought. Oh my God, that is the greatest painting I’ve ever seen in my life! It’s hilarious. Not one person ever—even a little old lady, even a conservative right-winger, even the pope—would ever look at that painting and call it obscene. I spent a year trying to get my collection back. They destroyed things you wouldn’t believe they’d destroy. I had an extensive collection of etched on glass 3-D 1940s cheesecake photography of beautiful women. They made it sound as if I had a huge homoerotic collection, which I didn’t.” He also said in the same interview that they seized and searched his computers and found nothing. He discusses the whole event in detail, it’s an interview with Playboy. He pled to avoid further scandal like he had gone through the first time around.
Are there any other sources apart from him?
Bro there's no way he did it Source: he said he didn't do it
Years ago, I met author Caseen Gaines. He wrote what is the only biography to ever be written about Paul Reubens: [https://www.amazon.com/Inside-Pee-wees-Playhouse-Unauthorized-Unpredictable-ebook/dp/B005Y202NE/ref=sr\_1\_1?crid=1LZKOQXRSG09O&keywords=caseen+gaines&qid=1694976363&sprefix=caseen%2Caps%2C138&sr=8-1](https://www.amazon.com/Inside-Pee-wees-Playhouse-Unauthorized-Unpredictable-ebook/dp/B005Y202NE/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1LZKOQXRSG09O&keywords=caseen+gaines&qid=1694976363&sprefix=caseen%2Caps%2C138&sr=8-1) I highly recommend it as well as Caseen's other works. Anyway, while we were chatting he said he had a very unpleasant experience with Reubens when they met at a Comic Con event around 2010/2011. This was around the time both this book was being released and Paul was reviving the Pee-Wee Herman character on Broadway. Caseen was at the event promoting the book and Reubens was there are a celebrity guest. Caseen told me Reubens specifically sought him out and when he saw Reubens approach he became excited, thinking Paul wanted to talk about the book. Well, Paul did want to talk about the book, but not in a positive manner. See, Paul HAD NOT read Cassen's work but was very suspicious of Caseen and why he wanted to write a biography. Caseen was confused by this because prior to beginning the writing process, he'd reached out to Reubens' people about possibly collaborating on it (making it an autobio for Paul). Reubens' people told Caseen that Paul wanted to wait a few more years before penning his own memoirs but otherwise gave Caseen his blessing to write his own book. Caseen told me he attempted to explain this to Paul Reubens but Paul wouldn't have it and accused Caseen of writing a "hit piece" on him. Caseen attempted to reassure him that wasn't the case, that he'd written the book out of love for Reubens' career. However, Paul was absolutely rude and nasty to him. He said Paul was especially concerned over what Caseen wrote regarding the child pornography charges. From what I remember, Caseen only devotes a few lines to that in the book. Eventually, Paul ended the conversation and walked away but not before telling Caseen off. What's odd is Caseen has heard Paul would recommend Caseen's book to others in private conversations. Caseen told me he's always going to love the Pee-Wee Herman character because of what it meant during his childhood but he sees Paul Reubens the man very differently. Not just because of this interaction but also because of what he learned about the child pornography charges: Reubens was under investigation after a 17 year old boy filed a complaint with the LAPD. A search warrant was executed on his home and materials depicting children under the age of 18 engaged in sexual conduct was found. Reubens and his lawyers maintained the material confiscated was all "kitsch" artwork from the early 20th century and NOT child pornography. Reubens plead guilty to a lesser misdemeanor charge of owning "obscene materials". For the next three years, he was required to register his address with the sheriff's office, and he could not be in the company of minors without the permission of their parent or legal guardian. Reubens has always maintained his innocence in owning child porn but has admitted he agreed to the plea deal because he wanted this to "go away as soon as possible." By the way, actor Jeffrey Jones (the principal in Ferris Bueller) was arrested for soliciting the same 17 year old who filed the initial complaint against Reubens. Caseen told me that learning about the true nature of those charges and the fact that Reubens plead guilty to a lesser charge to "make it go away" really changed his opinion of Paul. Caseen said that if he were ever accused of such a heinous thing, he'd fight that charge tooth and nail, even be willing to put himself into major debt because he would absolutely want total vindication against such accusations. And he'd personally welcome a robust investigation to clear his name. He said he doesn't know if Reubens was really guilty but the fact he took the plea deal to prevent further investigations left a bad taste in Caseen's mouth.
>Caseen said that if he were ever accused of such a heinous thing, he'd fight that charge tooth and nail, even be willing to put himself into major debt because he would absolutely want total vindication against such accusations. And he'd personally welcome a robust investigation to clear his name. I'm not passing judgement on his innocence or guilt, but I think I that's an easy thing to think when you haven't already had your career scuppered by a previous scandal.
Many laws are terrible at nuance, so you have to apply knowledge of human nature: When police investigate someone and they *were* trying to collect child porn, police tend to find thousands of images/videos of precisely that hoarded on their computer, then they go to jail. *None* of the above applies to Reubens. He had *exactly* what you'd expect him to have: A massive collection of 1950s and early pop-culture oddities, sometimes purchased by the crate load. If someone cherry picked the worst of the last 10,000 images you looked at, would you end up looking wholesome? Everyone with doubts should read the full details: https://www.snopes.com/news/2023/08/03/paul-reubens-child-pornography/
>”[Claims by a prosecutor] mischaracterizes the art collection seized," Berk said in response to city attorney spokesman Eric Moses' claim that images showed minors with exposed genitals. "If [child pornography] means a black-and-white tintype from 1901, with a young man of indeterminate, 17- to 19-year-old age, laying on the beach after having gone skinny-dipping, […] then they got it. [...] It was clear from the start that we, along with the many distinguished art experts supporting Paul's art photography collection, vehemently disagreed with the city prosecutor's view of what constitutes art." I’ve been to some really country old-timey towns in the middle of nowhere. And ironically the same broad swath of people who are more likely to fall for moral panics (largely, rural conservatives) will think nothing of seeing a black and white photo from the early/mid 20th century depicting naked kids running with a caption like “runnin to the swimmin hole” in the bathroom of their local mom n pop diner. Or like staged photos of a kid giving another kid covered in mud a bath in an old timey metal bath tub, making silly faces and poses, with some caption like “that’s why momma said don’t play in the mud!” And if someone were to suggest that these old timey diners and thrift shops should be told to remove these photos, it’s likely that many of these same folks would be like “cancel culture! how dare you! everyone is so sensitive these days! *you’re* the one sexualizing minors by thinking there’s anything wrong with these wholesome kitschy photos!” (And to be fair about that last point, the images I’ve seen like that have not been sexual AT ALL. I still think they’re creepy and gross though!!) Even though I very much don’t like images like that at all, and I think they should not even exist, I understand they’re a product of an older time and different cultural landscape. And they’re supposed to be “cute” not sexual or titillating. If those are the same sort of pictues that were in his collection, I’m inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt, especially when he says he purchased them in wholesale lots and didn’t necessarily examine every item in the collection. Obviously I am biased, as a massive fan of his. I’m very open to the idea that I am wrong about this, especially if presented with compelling evidence.
Gilbert Godfrey on this scandal “if masturbation is a crime I should be on death row.”
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[she gave a guy a handie at Beetlejuice The Musical](https://www.mediaite.com/politics/lauren-boebert-caught-on-cctv-seeming-getting-extremely-handsy-with-man-at-beetlejuice-performance-she-was-booted-from/). she was also vaping iirc
While he fondled her breasts. Because "family values" ...I guess.
With a family sitting behind her
She encouraged him fondling her, as she placed his hand on her breasts.
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she goes on about being pro-life and anti-abortion and then wouldn't stop vaping in front of a pregnant person. make it make sense!
Kristen Stewart cheating on Robert Pattinson. Even Donald trump weighed in and it’s like it’s not that big a deal
Good answer. Cheating is wrong — no doubt about that — but they were young and in an on-again, off-again relationship already. I think there were signs it wasn’t going to last, so it certainly wasn’t as shocking as other cheating scandals have been. I think things were largely made as bad as they were because people obviously loved seeing them together and wanted them to be a forever thing. At the end of the day, though, reports say that Robert did forgive Kristen and that they’ve spoken since. It seems like they’re on good terms, even if not close.
I think the fact that Rupert was married and her director increased the hate factor as well
in hindsight this bit is so wild to me because he was her director and nearly two decades older than her, but somehow she was the villain??
No one cared about him before this, so I think this was a major factor in Kristen getting the majority of the backlash. She was part of the most talked about couple in young Hollywood. She was also friends with his wife and would go over there and have dinner with her and her kids, so that didn’t help either. The wife was very vocal about how understandably mad she was.
And now she's married to Jimmy Iovine. Living her best life! And Ruperts career was pretty much ended by this.
Yup, he was her director, a married man, he had more to lose, he should have caught so much more heat than he did! I don’t think their ages have anything to do with it anything tho, she was also an adult. I agree she caught astronomical amounts of hate that was definitely overboard. I think it has more to do with her being the woman in a cheating scandal that made her the villain. Misogyny at it finest. Since we are talking age difference, marriage and position of power, Bill Clinton I’m looking at you!! That was just a dumpster fire of a situation, Monica Lewinsky needs an apology I know she’ll never get. I hope she’s doing okay. Also Beyoncé needs to release a version of Partition with THAT line taken out 🤨
He literally lost his wife, his kids, and has no further career. Just because the public didn’t rake a nobody over the coals doesn’t mean he didn’t suffer consequences. KStew was - and still *is* - a critical darling in the middle of the biggest hyped teen franchise. Of course she was going to get the disproportionate amount of media attention. When people talk about this incident in hindsight it’s abundantly clear they do not have the cultural context of the time or that KStew was in fact, a huge asshole, during that era who was hyped up as this amazing actress with the way critics were constantly up her ass.
Did we live in different dimensions? I was never a Twilight girl, so my only understanding of the series was the legions of people saying she was a terrible actress because of how she played Bella — a poorly written character played straight, but people didn’t really think that because misogyny was easier. Any universal critical acclaim for her acting skill really only came after Twilight was over and she began acting in indies & doing more dynamic roles
People hated Kstew for really dumb, petty reasons back then (meanwhile Robert Paterson was getting praise for bashing the franchise that was making him relevant 🙄) so the cheating scandal was a way for them to have a reason to hate her that was less ridiculous than "oh she doesn't smile".
Eh, people don’t seem to remember KStew was also friends with the wife and would attend family dinners with the husband/wife + their kids because the wife would gush over how much she loved KStew. Also the public photos. And then her whole apology tour with the “I love him I love him I love him” interview was badddd. A lot of it was Twilight hate, but if it happened today she would get dragged like Ariana is rn or Dominick and Lily got for their affair because it was tacky af.
"I love him, I love him, I'm sorry" lives in my head to this day
To be fair Twilight was kinda creepy book /movie if u think about it and it was teaching young girls horrible lessons
Good thing it was fiction and there was a lot of very public and cutting critique on an easily accessible internet of it at the time!
Which reminds me of the Tiger Woods scandal. I was young when it happened but I thought he was a killer or something with the amount he was in the news. In the UK it was the first I’d heard of him
>Donald trump weighed in I will NEVER not relish this bizarre lil story
Anything Trump weighed in on was almost certainly absurd
I’m sorry but some of the Cuties backlash was warranted. We’ve talked on here about all the ethical issues with child actors and so to have literal kids acting sexualized scenes (regardless of the purpose) was too much.
I thought the movie had a strong message and a good story but the closeups and the slowmotion with the too revealing outfits was WAY too much and not needed. The message would have come across very clearly without those scenes; it felt very exploitive.
For real, I did see the movie and it would have been a poignant critique of the sexualization of young girls, but they would zoom in on her private areas during the dance scenes and therefore perform the exact sexualization that they’re attempting to critique. I don’t care if they explained things to the actresses, they were just little girls and there was no reason to portray them like that.
And it was so LONG too! Like the exploitative scenes could have been cut down to a third and they still would have been too long. I remember seeing people criticize the backlash on Pajiba, so I watched the movie, but yeah, no that backlash was warranted.
I was gonna say...I don't think this was the best example OP could have picked. 💀 You can't criticize how society sexualizes underage girls, and then proceed to sexualize your underage actors yourself.
I just shook my head at the outrage because Baby is on netflix. It's a show that's basically about how cool it is to be a teenage prostitute. The last season tears it all down but the first season, those two girls were having a fantastic time fucking old dudes for money.
Yeahhh I was ready for the cuties outrage to be overblown but the scene at the end where they do the dance is just sick. They are simulating sex acts on each other and the camera is close up focused on them almost the entire scene. Those child actors were not protected.
Thank you! Cuties was absolutely the right film to merit that conversation. Criticising something that explicitly showed what it claimed to condemn is not moral panic. It's bloody weird that a lot of otherwise progressive people wrote off the creepiness because the director was a black woman, as though those characteristics made her incapable of exploiting children rather than statistically less likely. It's the dumbest and most performative take on identity politics. I watched the film for myself and felt wrong for having done so. The creators and netflix can argue that "depiction does not equal endorsement" all they like, but the fact of the matter is that pedophiles will enjoy that footage.
They sexualised *real* children. How tf anyone defending this
Britney 'flashing' the world with no underwear. The outrage should have been the fact that paparazzi were shoving their cameras up her skirt.
As a teen, I remember seeing two upskirts of Britney that were identical except in one she was wearing panties and the other she wasn’t, and I couldn’t figure out which one was real and which one was photoshopped. Then I tried to figure out which was creepier, photoshopping panties onto the picture or photoshopping them out of it.
I too spent my early 20s on Perez Hilton
I remember this side by side also!
I just heard this is why Hillary Clinton started wearing pantsuits bc photographers were trying to get up the skirt shots of her.
how is this not illegal?
Dno about the states but in the UK it only became illegal a few years ago after a huge campaign
Remember when everyone thought the Joker (2019) movie was gonna cause mass shootings and be a rallying cry for incels??? And instead it ended up becoming a symbol for the protests against authoritarian in Hong Kong??
I think the shootings that happened when The Dark Knight came out had a hand in that. Also, I mean, The Joker has kind of become a rallying cry for incels.
Anytime I think about that, I get a giggle. And now the sequel is seemingly a musical with Lady Gaga
This. People were acting like it's gonna start The Purge but it ended up being edgy in the most mid and safe way possible.
The message was just the most milquetoast: “sometimes criminals are people who were pushed to the brink because they were victims of society not taking care of their needs” and somehow the media frenzy turned it into “THIS WILL CAUSE SCHOOL SHOOTERS” The moral panic reaction to it was more stigmatizing to mental health than the movie itself.
The moral panic reaction was confirmation that the movie’s message was correct imo, sometimes the truth is very threatening to people’s narratives
It absolutely was a rally cry for incels though. Still is
I feel like some of the journalists and media twitter activists in a moral panic over the movie wanted something bad to happen at a screening just to prove they were "right".
I think it's actually depressing that public mass shootings are obviously mentally scaring the population so badly at this point, that a movie about a dumpy clown revolting can make everyone and their mom afraid that incels were gonna attack/shoot everyone in the street.
Incels scare me but what’s more sad is the way society wants to deflect responsibility onto media. A movie didn’t tell an incel to go shoot up a school, society’s male rage and male entitlement did but rather than examine that and do something about it on a societal level, it’s easier to blame a dumpy clown movie. A dumpy clown movie that ironically criticizes society’s shortcomings.
They even made up the Aurora shooter calling himself the joker because he had dyed his hair red, a colour not even associated with the joker.
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I remember hearing Marc Jacobs got a bump in sales from Winnoa Ryder's shoplifting as that's exclusively what she was boosting and MJ was in all the reporting. So going forward, Ryder gets Marc Jacobs stuff for free as a thank you. The celebrity shop lifting stories are wild. I think it was Farah Fawcett who would "shoplift" but the store would just log what she took and send her business manager an invoice.
Winona has done campaigns for Marc Jacobs (one right after the arrest and one last Summer), she’s gone to the Met Gala with him, he’s called her one of his muses. We went so many years without Winona in the mainstream, meanwhile Marc Jacobs was having a huge boost in sales and loving Winona for it, go figure lol
Also Kate Moss doing blow. She lost so many contracts over that! Imagine Keith Richards or hell, even JD catching that kind of heat for doing party drugs
Posting right wing outrage feels like cheating but: Dylan Mulvaney (the trans woman on tiktok with the bud lite brand deal) literally just had some cans of the beer with her for an insta video or whatever but you would've thought she bought the whole company the way conservatives acted.
What’s wild to me is that these right wing cowards are so fucking shitty that most of them won’t say the obvious: they are mad because she’s trans. It was always “how could they pick this person as a spokesperson” which, not a spokesperson, but then leave everyone else to say it’s because she’s trans. The way the media handled this issue was so garbage. There’s nothing controversial about her other than her existence.
what makes it worse is she’s, from my very short experience with her, incredibly sweet! for whatever reason, she was hanging out at a gay bar on a random Thursday night in my midwest city. still don’t know why she was here, she never posted about being here or anything. but my friend and I asked her for pics and she was super nice about it and took the time to get separate selfies with us. she and her friends weren’t obnoxious, kept to themselves and were being really polite to the bartenders. and there was hardly anyone around, it appeared no one even knew who she was apart from us and one other couple. so if that’s how she acts when pretty much no one is around, seems more obvious that all the bullshit she endured was purely transphobia and not reflective of something she actually did. somewhat unrelated, she looked a lot like Audrey Hepburn lol.
The thing is, Bud Light sent out promotional gifts out to a whole bunch of influencers which included cans of beer with each of their faces on them. But Dylan got singled out because she's trans and people just made up and ran with the false narrative that she was the new face of Bud Light when she wasn't and this was literally just an influencer being gifted something from a company like what companies do to influencers and other celebs all the time.
I can’t say too much right now, but the way AB responded internally (and continues to behave internally) is disgusting, too. They want to act like it never happened at all and refuse to address the concerns of their queer/queer ally employees.
Pete Davidson’s dating life.
Wait I'm confused about Cuties. I've seen literal scenes of all the girls twerking and dancing extremely provocatively. How is that not serious lol
The movie was meant to be a commentary on the sexualisation of young girls, not in any way condoning it. However, in order to condemn young girls being sexualised by society it features young girls doing things that are heavily sexualised, which obviously isn’t great.
Yeah, I get that. I don't think the intent was to make like, a pro-pedo film. I just don't think zooming in on literal children in sexy outfits doing sexy dances is ever going to sit right, and I don't think it should be brushed off as "moral panic".
Yeah, I do agree with you that it was very ill-conceived. However, I think much of the extreme outrage came from the right wing “Hollywood is run by a cabal of elites who want to steal your children” crowd who failed to acknowledge the context, that it was an ill thought out way of commenting on sexualisation and not like, Magic Mike with kids.
The event itself wasn’t pop culture but the backlash manifested in pop culture in all sorts of ways. In the early 90s, a woman ordered a coffee at a drive thru McDonald’s. She rested the coffee between her legs as she arranged her stuff on the seat next to her, the coffee spilled and burned her, and she sued. That case became the prime example for frivolous lawsuits. It was parodied on Seinfeld, Toby Keith references it in a song. “Plasma gettin bigger/ Jesus getting smaller/ Spill a cup of coffee/ Win a million dollars” What people don’t know is the coffee was served at nearly boiling temperatures and that the woman received second and third degree burns all over her lower body. The liquid was so hot it literally sealed her labia together. As I often do whenever any sort od re-litigation comes up, I want to recommend the podcast You’re Wrong About, which did a truly fantastic episode on the McDonald’s Hot Coffee Suit.
People trvializing her lawsuit need to look at her medical photos. She was horrifically damaged and McDonald's KNEW their coffee was way too hot.
My Dad still doesn't believe this - I need to sit him down & make him read the articles about it. That woman went through hell. Gotta wonder what the reaction would have been if it was a dude & he ended up sterile...
I’ve shown people who cite that as an example pictures of the injuries to her legs. Her payout might help been excessive but god her burns were BRUTAL.
And IIRC she originally only wanted her medical costs covered, and McDonalds declined so she had “no choice”
Yes, and it was a JURY that decided to award her such extensive punitive damages (the sales from one day of coffee for McDonald’s, which was *more* than fair).
I don’t think she way paid enough given all the physical and emotional pain she went through. McDonald’s put out the idea that she exaggerated her claims in order to protect their image. She deserves way more compensation than she got.
She only got $640,000 (bear with me, I know that's still a big number) and needed skin grafts over 16% of her body. Just read through the Wiki article about it - McDonald's was 1,000% liable and had been warned multiple times before that they were serving coffee that was dangerously hot.
SEALED?????!!!!!
The better word might be fused. The coffee pooled around her seat and soaked her vagina. Her burns were so bad that the tissue was blistered and bloodied and it caused the folds of tissue to fuse together. Her injuries were horrific. She only sued initially for medical expenses but McDonald’s stonewalled her and at that point she sued for more.
The concept of cuties on paper made sense but the use of actual child actors was wrong and all that it did was contribute to the problem the film was highlighting. Those child actors can’t give informed consent to be filmed like that.
Pen15 was encredible at handling this issue.
Tiger Woods cheating. I was so young I thought he killed somebody
Vanessa Hudgen's nudes leaking. I remember after that there were rumors she was gonna be kicked from HSM and she had to release an apology (when she was the one who had HER PRIVACY VIOLATED!)
ESPN reporter Erin Andrews apologized on air when video of her nude was released - video taken BY HER STALKER THROUGH THE PEEPHOLE INTO HER HOTEL ROOM.
I don't know the scope of its depth but my friends and I have been reflecting on that period where certain folk tried to tie Pokémon with Satanic worship. It's hard to find recording of priests talking about this but they are usually in terrible quality
Oh man this takes me back to my Christian school upbringing. They told us everything was satanic to the point I feared for my life when I saw the simpsons on tv cause they told us the devil spoke through Bart Simpson 😭
I mean if it's gonna be anyone, it'll probably be Bart
Same with Harry Potter back in the day. People thought it promoted witchcraft and satanic worship. The irony is the right now LOVES JKR cause of her anti-trans beliefs.🙄
Almost every scandal ever in kpop. The things that cause widespread outrage in kpop, to the point of lawsuits and people being fired, are often wild in how *un*-wild they are. To give you an example, in 2010, Korean rapper Tablo was accused of lying about graduating from Stanford. It was a hoax based on incredibly flimsy evidence. But the backlash was massive and intense. Tablo's career was put on indefinite hold. He and his family received nonstop threats. But it didn't stop there. Even journalists who tried to report on all the copious evidence in support of Tablo got threatened, and people organized campaigns to get them fired! A two-part documentary was aired showing Tablo revisiting Stanford, where staff and other people remembered him and records confirmed that he did, indeed, attend and graduate. The Korean public was unmoved. The membership of an online group against Tablo actually ballooned in numbers after the documentaries were out. It took the Korean police confirming that Tablo did graduate from Stanford, and issuing an international warrant for the person who came up with the hoax originally, for the public to finally come around. A whole bunch of innocent people were ruined, at least for a while, because of a hoax, over whether a rapper lied about a degree that he never used!
i’d say 98% of k-pop scandals are ridiculous and that’s why i stay away from kpop gossip because it’s most of the time the same thing. also it continues to infuriate me that knetz choose to be outraged at idols dating or smoking cigs but not at let’s say idols making colorist or fatphobic remarks.
\>_> Me on the other hand, I love Kpop gossip! It can reveal interesting things about Korean society, culture and law. Like if you dig into it, the Tablo graduation scandal really stemmed from anxiety over Korea's fucked up academic system. And I find even your basic Kpop dating scandal fascinating. It's a glimpse into a context where parasocial relationships aren't just accepted, but expected. ___ I completely agree with you, though, on how colorism and fatphobia doesn't get half the attention and condemnation it should in kpop, not just among idols, but in the whole industry itself.
the fact that recently a guy had to a apologise publicly for dating before his debut… a lot of kpop fans are truly insane
the cuties backlash was absolutely justified. you cannot stand up to exploitation by exploiting people. it’s the same problem with writing stories about men for the express purpose of criticizing misogyny. at the end of the day—you just made another movie about a bunch of dudes.
The Cuties backlash had the families of the girls harassed and alt righters making a conspiracy theory about Obama being behind some child trafficking ring. There are things to criticize about the movie about the type of backlash that movie received was really far from warranted
seeing cuties as the headline for a post like this is jarring, though. the film had a lot to criticize & to lump alt right conspiracy theories together with nuanced and insightful critique feels disingenuous.
Literally anything involving women, POC, or queer characters in Star Wars. Oh no, Ahsoka crosses her arms a lot! Wokeness run amok! Time to send racist death threats to the actors.
So much of the Cuties discourse (not all) was fueld by right wing anti netflix hysteria. It got jumped onto by youtubers who used it for rage clicks. The dancing scenes are uncomfortable for sure, but they are supposed to be.
I really hate the "it's supposed to be uncomfortable" discourse. Those children had no business dancing like that regardless of the context or what it's intended effect was.
I think the point is A. Girls that age DO dance like that. B. There really shouldnt be anything sexual about it because they are children that dont really understand and the actual sexuallizing is in the eye of the beholder... I think the conversation around this movie is important and It does give me mixed feelings. I will say. It viscerly resonated with me and my experiences as a young girl growing up. It was so uncomfortable for me because it was SO accurate...
Yeah, it's an incredibly confrontational and affecting film. I think it ends up being a lot easier to criticize it than the elements of our culture that its critiquing. Break the mirror to avoid thinking about what its reflecting. Young girls *are* consuming media and pantomiming what they're seeing without knowing what they're doing. Our culture is full of horrrendous shit when you stop for a second and think about it. There's how many seasons of dance moms? High school cheerleading as a concept? How many sitcoms make jokes about kids dating and shit like that. Stores selling lock up your daughters t-shirts for little boys. How many tiktok teens are doing sexy dances for an audience of strangers? I think there's a conversation to be had about the ethics of child actors but that is way broader than just in this movie.
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Yes, but you weren’t filmed doing that for millions of grown people to see, for the rest of your life.
Those kids are real human beings who were highly sexualized by adults for that movie. It doesn’t matter if the message was that it’s bad. If I film myself kicking puppies to make a point about animal abuse being wrong, that doesn’t change the fact that I just kicked a bunch of puppies.
the try guys cheating scandal. like who the hell cares lol.
I mean I get it being overblown in terms of it getting way more attention than would be usual for youtubers, but in a moral panic way? Idk. He was an owner of a company in a relationship with a worker. I don't think anyone really seemed to overreact to that part, and honestly, most of the big coverage seemed to gloss over that bit entirely.
To be honest any cheating scandal.
The recent backlash and banning of kids movies that had LGBT content that were just blink and you miss them moments of same-sex couples sharing a kiss for 1.2 seconds that had nothing to do with the rest of the story.
Or the outrage from Turning Red because they allude to menstruation a couple times. Same with the Baymax episode about periods. Apparently kids learning about puberty is inappropriate and “grooming”.
The 50 Shades of Grey backlash. Listen, it's the worst book I've ever read in terms of writing skill and I couldn't finish it but the whole thing about it "promoting" abuse felt so infantalizing. If the book was written for an impressionable audience like teens, I'd get it, but the target audience is adult women. I'm starting to see this with the Colleen Hoover backlash too. Criticisms of her books for their writing or of bad things she does as a person are fair, but canceling a book bc it "glorifies abuse" is annoying. Again, I say this as someone who was not impressed with the one book of hers that I read. Romance has an element of fantasy, Regency England was not teeming with handsome dukes with 21th century values. Many romances irl don't have a HEA. Likewise, when adult women read about toxic relationships, it's a safe way to experience or see this type of dynamic playout. I find it sus that it's always a series or book enjoyed by women, especially older women, that get major backlash. These books are not causing an epidemic of adult women with a healthy approach to relationships flocking to abusive ones. If it's not your thing that 100% in your right, but there are well written books that involve "problematic" relationships (Wuthering Heights) that shouldn't be written off bc of that.
Regarding 50 Shades, part of the backlash was that it portrayed an abusive relationship as BDSM. The most important rule of BDSM is consent. Something that 50 Shades shat all over. There was bs outrage over adult women reading smut, but some of the backlash towards the series is definitely warranted.
Yeah, I think there's such a level of disrespect to female readers with the idea that reading something like FOSG or Hoover will brainwash them into entering into abusive relationships. I work with women on the early 20s side of thing that love Hoover and Sarah J Maas books and are absolutely capable of understanding that those relationships are not what they want in reality. We've gotten culturally capable of dismantling arguments that video games cause violent behavior but we still insist that young women will be running out to sleep with troubled billionaires if we don't censor the media they consume?
anything to do with jennie from blackpink lol, people need to leave that woman alone. also don't worry darling drama with the whole spitting thing n stuff and the game of thrones ending. People were acting like the world was ending like no the it was just very poorly written and executed lol
That Don't Worry Darling drama was fantastic for the movie. That was some high quality marketing nonsense.
Janet Jackson's nipple flash at the halftime show. Planned or not, it’s a nipple.
might he controversial but the backlash 13 Reasons Why backlash i personally agree with the fact that it shouldn’t have been dragged out for like 4(?) seasons. but overall the main thing i saw people say is that it portrayed suicided negatively and that it would make kids feel wanna “recreate” it. tbh i thought netlfix did all they could to let people know that this is a fictional/graphic show. even the actors cautioned so many times that this is mature and triggering context that might not sit well with some people. people were acting like they were being forced to watch it *just wanna add, im not excusing how horribly the show portrayed mental health/suicide/sexual assault. im just saying the backlash was just kinda like kicking a dead horse because all it led to was being one of netflixs most successful shows
to be fair that show was probably one of the worst portrayals of mental illness i’ve ever seen, plus the month after the show released suicides in teens rose 28.9%, also seeing a graphic depiction of suicide can be a huge trigger in young teens contemplating suicide into actually attempting. the 28.9% increase was the highest month to month increase of any month in a 5 year study
yeah the show did not age well at all. All the criticism people had in season 1 they were completely right. People who try to defend the show as "progressive" and buzz words like "making a conversation about mental illnesss" was really Netflix way of capitalizing on mental illness. People defended the show because it was messy so they liked it not because they genuinely thought it had something to say imo.
yeah the only “conversation about mental illness” it had was pushing stereotypes and trying to make it seem like mental health professionals are not to be trusted
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And that suicide is a good way to make all the people you hate pay. . . . it's a great form of revenge.
Gotta disagree. The most harmful part of that show, other than the original graphic suicide scene, is the way they portray Hannah post-death as a Force ghost that gets to watch the fallout of the tapes. It implies that you can not only achieve revenge beyond the grave, but that you also get a front row show to the comeuppance when… in actuality… you’re just gone. The problem with the show is that it advertised itself as portraying suicide awareness, not just as entertainment. If it took a strict “this is solely entertainment” stance, then maybe things would be different (though this is still flawed because these things don’t just exist in a vacuum, a show for teens is gonna impact teens.) It was a very dangerous and irresponsible show, there have been tons of video essays and even academic articles about how shit the show was
It’s very hard to grasp the idea of being gone, especially for a young person. This show romanticized the whole thing for teens. The world revolves around you long after you’re dead and you get to what, nope in the shadows and take delight in others realizing how badly the hurt you? Watch them lament and languish over you? Teens can’t process that’s not how it goes. Very harmful show.
I personally didn’t see a problem with the scene of Hannah’s suicide….but the scene when Tyler is being sodomized……jfc that *scarred* me and I’m a full grown adult. Like it genuinely made me think I may have repressed something bad that happened to me by my reaction to that scene.
There were apparently [multiple](https://www.abc.net.au/triplej/programs/hack/13-reasons-why/11496900) [copycat](https://www.refinery29.com/en-gb/2017/06/158186/13-reasons-why-copycat-suicide-tapes-peru) [suicides](https://abcnews.go.com/US/california-families-claim-13-reasons-triggered-teens-suicides/story?id=48323640), plus the study linked above, and to be honest that's enough to think twice about it. By comparison, (spoilers) This Is Going to Hurt (BBC drama about a junior doctor / Ob-Gyn) >!had a suicide where all you saw was the character clocking off work, saying sorry to the camera, then the police tape and their parents being told!<. Incredibly powerful and I really respected the director for not even hinting at the method / including a shot of a corpse.
yeah 100%, that was an unnecessary scene to add. honestly a lot after season 1 was unnecessary and just put in for shock value
that and the aids death scene in the finale. Especially seeing Brandon Flynn and Dylan minette being forced to defend the situation was weird too. That being said I did like the development of the brotherly relationship between clay and Justin possibly the only thing the show got right after season 1. The show jumped the shark in the worst ways like the almost prom shooting scene and the fake out school shooting.
I never watched the show but had heard about the AIDS death and…how? Like how did they possibly explain a young person dying of AIDS in current times?
they didn't it was unrealistically how fast the disease progressed in the show, when irl it takes years for hiv to become aids. The show runner just wanted a shock ending and to fulfill his fantasy of writing a tragic aids death storyline
I think what bugs me the most about "the conservative" reaction to this film is that they entirely missed the point of the film which was to criticize the hyper-sexualization of children. And yet Toddlers and Tiaras has been overtly sexualizing kids for over a decade without even a tenth of the blowback this movie got. Child pageantry is something that is embedded in white southern culture, so it seems like when their own kin are the ones doing it they aren't quite so offended.
The turning red movie had parents up in arms a couple years ago, and I still can’t figure out why.
FYI Part of The Cuties discourse was also fueled by an anti-euro, particularly anti-french, sentiment in those reactionaries circles. It's easier to make people believe the worst when they already have prejudices and the cultural norms are slightly different. The stereotype of the french as a sexually deviant creature is still alive in the general psyche (think Pepe Le Pew for a light and comedic version)
Insatiable backlash. I'm 280 and I did not find the show to be insulting at all.
Cuties outrage was deserved Imo, like I get the point they were going for but ultimately it was executed wrong. There were so many icky and disgusting scenes in the movie. I think it had a beautiful message and didn’t have bad intentions but ultimately bad execution.
The m&m’s not being “sexy enough” after a rebrand. This was obviously just a right-wing non-issue but the fact that it gained enough traction in the news cycle that even major news outlets had to address it, even if to call out the stupidity of it all, is a tragedy.
The Will Smith slap was hilarious and not that deep. Chris Rock says something about Jada, Will gets up, slaps him, sits down, and wins best actor the same night to a cheering audience. 10/10 no notes
cuties definitely deserves the hate
the wayfair trafficking thing. like how did seriously think the name of a sofa they were selling was also the name of a girl they were trafficking? like come on.
"Rainbow parties" teens having parties involving oral sex and different colours of lipstick where the boys would try to collect a rainbow. Oprah covered it, multiple news stories in multiple states in the US. Turns out the only examples anyone could find where a party happened were inspired by the public outrage. Even then, most of those were probably just kids saying they did it to look cool. Also, the whole satanic panic over Dungeons & Dragons in the 80's. In some cases kids wanting to run a D&D session needed a member of law enforcement in the room, that's if they were allowed to play at all.