An off-duty Border Patrol agent was reportedly ordered to pay $220,000 in restitution on Friday after he accidentally started a 47,000-acre wildfire at he and his wife’s gender reveal party https://t.co/RZgLN32l7d
— The Daily Beast (@thedailybeast) September 29, 2018
Since I use this blogging platform largely to share online links and embed twitter posts, I can hardly condemn social media as a concept. But as the saying goes: Nothing can be made foolproof, because the fools are so ingenious.
Although I suppose it’s some kind of progress when, if a tween girl must be pimped out to support her family, it’s done through virtual reality. Allow me a ‘kids these days’ moment over a world where Buzzfeed and Netflix collaborate on a documentary series “Inside The World Of Teenagers With Millions Of Followers”…
Being an adolescent is inherently awful, but the best thing about it may be the complete lack of shame teenagers feel for the things they love. The breadth and depth of their fandom — say, for some online influencer with millions of underage fans — might be perplexing for those of us older than 18, but it makes perfect sense for teens who love whatever they love with their whole being…
Danielle Cohn is one of those teenage curiosities that most of us old enough to vote (have you registered yet?) don’t know much about despite her alarmingly potent online popularity. At the wee age of 14, she already has a startling 2.6 million Instagram followers and 11.2 million on an app called TikTok. (You might know TikTok better as Musical.ly, the app where the youth lip-synched and bopped around in front of their phones in 15-second video clips. It changed its name to TikTok in early August.) Cohn’s videos don’t exactly sound worthy of millions upon millions of followers: They’re largely just her, in full hair and makeup, lip-synching in front of her camera phone and a bright ring light, shaking her hips and smiling wide. And yet.
Cohn looms large online, but in person, she is teeny tiny. Her Instagram is, like a lot of young girls, seemingly curated to make her appear older, but in person she just looks like a pubescent girl with a remarkable amount of hair extensions. When I met her earlier this year, she was living in the Studio City neighborhood of Los Angeles with her mom, her brother, and a gray puppy named Silverpom who was suffering from an eye infection. She and her family are from Florida, but moved to LA so Cohn’s career as an influencer could really take off, and eventually be parlayed into a Hollywood career, as attempted by so many internet celebrities before her.
Cohn’s burden is twofold: Not only does she have a hungry and demanding fanbase to appease, but she’s a significant part of her family’s financial backbone. There’s online popularity to maintain, but also new clothes to buy, agents to compensate, and of course, the family rent to pay through her live events and sponsored posts…
Ultimately, there’s nothing explicitly sexual about Cohn’s act online, nor is there when she shows me how she makes one of her videos in person. She mostly mugs for the camera and flips her hair and points and cocks a hip and acts out sassiness. It’s a reminder that our anxiety about a girl like Cohn being sexualized comes only because we, as adults, are sexualizing a child. I believe her when she says her work is chaste…
And now I am, in my own small way, part of the problem (am I wrong to assume kids like Cohn attract as many older male followers as they do other young girls — or that the platforms monetizing them don’t really care?) Excuse me while I go find a new onion for my belt…
seaboogie
Thank you for the open thread, AL. Not going to twist my head any further with this. In Sonoma we are experiencing the platonic ideal of a nighttime quenching rain for the second night in a row. Coming up to the anniversary of our destructive fires, this is so welcome, and such a balm to our collective psyche.
Major Major Major Major
Interesting and perhaps enlightening parallels (or dystopian cyberpunk near futures) can be seen in Japanese ‘idol’ culture.
Zach
JFC. Kavanaugh’s 1983 “Beach Week” letter is a shot-for-shot remake of Always Sunny in Philadelphia’s “The Implication”… without the irony.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/02/us/brett-kavanaugh-georgetown-prep.html
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MZ1lc6KASWg
Someone, please, cast a young Brett Kavanaugh and one of his dopier sounding buddies and make a parody of the Always episode quickly.
Aleta
Short dog story, nyt. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/03/world/australia/dogs-max-member-of-the-family.html
ascap_scab
So, what happens when she turns 18 and she is not the cute prancing girl she is now? Do the “Roy Moore’s” tune out? Out of money, does the family move back to Podunk-a-ville? Or do they go full porn in the valley?
?BillinGlendaleCA
@ascap_scab: They’re already in The Valley, so they’re halfway there. Snark aside, I assume they’ll try to get her into films on the other side of the Hollywood Hills.
OzarkHillbilly
Well maybe you should redirect some resources from your attempts to “infiltrate” the Black Lives Matter movement and put them into investigating actual, you know, violent people?
OzarkHillbilly
@OzarkHillbilly: Oooopps, forgot the linky: Charlottesville: four members of white supremacist group charged over violent 2017 rally .
OzarkHillbilly
Butbutbutbut what about the explosion in teen pregnancy caused by consequence free sexy times??? Huh???
OzarkHillbilly
@OzarkHillbilly: Forgot the linky again. I think I needs more coffee.
Australia on track to wipe out cervical cancer within 20 years
Debbie(Aussie)
@Aleta:
Nice doggy, sad tale ?
Debbie(Aussie)
@OzarkHillbilly:
Isn’t this wonderful news! Only 1 in 1000 will die from cervical cancer by 2034. Good news!
?BillinGlendaleCA
@OzarkHillbilly: That was pretty big news here in LA since 3 of the guys that were arrested were local.
OzarkHillbilly
@?BillinGlendaleCA: I’m now reading the ProPublica article: Racist, Violent, Unpunished: A White Hate Group’s Campaign of Menace
I nominate that last for understatement of the year.
Central Planning
@OzarkHillbilly: we are doing our part here. All of my kids (boys and girl) have gotten, or will get, the vaccine.
And, I’ll have to ask my younger kids (13/15/17) about tiktok to see if they use it. If they do I suspect it is to watch, not create.
JGabriel
ProPublica via OzarkHillbilly:
And yet an unfortunate and oddly successful record when it comes to enabling it.
OzarkHillbilly
@Central Planning: You must be some kind of elitist libtard rubbing your scientifically backed up medical procedures in our faces.
Just One More Canuck
@Central Planning: it’s offered through my daughter’s school here in Ontario
RAVEN
Yo! Now the task is to adapt to double peripheral vision. If I turn my head to look at the rear view mirror instead of looking out of the corner of my eye I see a single image.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Just One More Canuck: Yes, but everyone know that y’all up there are Godless Communists. Our Conservative Betters have assured us that these shots just encourage wanton sex among the youth.
Mary
I now feel somewhat vindicated about my seemingly irrational hatred of gender reveal parties.
OzarkHillbilly
@Just One More Canuck: The dangers of socialized medicine!!!
OzarkHillbilly
@RAVEN: So you’ve got a diagnosis? Or just a “Idaknow….”
?BillinGlendaleCA
@OzarkHillbilly: St. Ronald of Reagan warned us about this.
OzarkHillbilly
@?BillinGlendaleCA: Without his prescient foresight we would have been condemned to a life of good medical care at a decent price. The horror.
Central Planning
@OzarkHillbilly: weak sauce. You didn’t include socialist.
OT: Firefox on my iPhone isn’t saving nym/email. Anyone else having that issue?
Ken
@Central Planning:
This is the point in the summer comedy movie where you find the fully-equipped recording studio in the basement.
Just One More Canuck
@?BillinGlendaleCA: @OzarkHillbilly: the revolution is coming, one jab at time
@Central Planning: it’s been an issue for a while – Alain and Samwise’s Human are working on it
Raven
@OzarkHillbilly: yup
Dave
What is a gender reveal party? Does it require a fire?
Tarragon
@Dave:
It’s a public reveal of fetus gender including to the parents. It’s a thing now.
Usually it’s done by color and exposed by releasing balloon cutting a cake or something.
As for the second part, what doesn’t require fire?
Just Chuck
@Tarragon: Only thing new is the (godawful) name. I remember “It’s a Boy/Girl” parties when I was a kid.
Darrin Ziliak (formerly glocksman)
While I liked reactive targets back in my plinking days, Tannerite wouldn’t have been my pick because of what happened in this incident.
My targets of choice were shaken up cans of skunky beer from the bar I worked at.
The price was right (free), and they went up like baby grenades when hit with a .22 pistol, much less anything larger.