It's high time we discussed how female child stars are over-sexualized.
Millie Bobby Brown was 12 when she became a star due to the smash hit Stranger Things. She received praise from critics for her acting skill and was nominated for two Emmy Awards and two SAG awards. She was one of the youngest nominees ever.
In 2018, she landed on Time's 100 Most Influential People list and became the youngest UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador appointee.
Basically: she's crushing it out there and when she turned 18 on Saturday, she had plenty of reasons to celebrate!
However, when girls turn 18 and become adults, there's a creepy, darker side to the event that's compounded heavily when those girls are also in the public eye.
Some of you may remember similar "countdowns" when Mary Kate & Ashley Olsen turned 18. These disgusting things pop up on social media and track how long it will be until the girl/star turns 18 years old. A Reddit sub "NSFW" teased that it would open only when Brown turned 18.
It teased “This subreddit will open when Millie turns 18, which is February 19, 2022" and already had 6,000 members, despite having the full name obscured to keep people from finding the sub.
So why would this subreddit exist? According to one user, “[It’s] to post sexual pictures of her the day she turns 18. It's a sub solely dedicated to sexual pictures of Millie, who is currently a minor, until next week but they have a sub prepared already with thousands of subscribers.”
The sub has reportedly been banned after fans reported it to administrators of Reddit.
On Instagram, Brown posted some photos of herself in a blonde wig and the comments that flooded in were sexually explicit and lewd.
One fan noted on Reddit, “Poor girl’s been sexualized ever since Stranger Things took off."
Another tweeted, “I cannot believe I have to say this once again but stop being fucking creepy and weird about Millie Bobby Brown.”
Brown is not the first to have her birthday "counted down".
Matilda star Mara Wilson worried about just this for Brown back in 2017. She wrote an essay for Elle that gave insight to her own experiences after becoming a star at just 5 years old.
“Even before I was out of middle school, I had been featured on foot fetish websites, photoshopped into child porn, and received all kinds of letters and messages online from grown men," Wilson wrote.
Her body, she added, was "discussed" as she moved into puberty.
“I wasn’t worried about her. Not at first. It’s my nature to worry about child actors. Then Millie Bobby Brown turned 13. Last week, I saw a photo of her on Twitter, dressed up for a premiere. I thought she looked like a teenage girl," wrote Wilson.
“The caption, however, read that, at 13, she ‘just grew up in front of our eyes.’ It had been tweeted by a grown man,” she explained. She then noted that she "felt sick" and "furious".
“What’s really at play here [is] the creepy, inappropriate public inclination to sexualize young girls in the media. Commenting on a child’s body, whether in a ‘positive’ or ‘negative’ way, in a sexualizing or pitying way, is still commenting on a child’s body,” she stated.
A Reddit user also noted, “This has happened for every female celeb as long as I can remember. They always just wait, counting down the days, hours, minutes and seconds until they can ~legally~ sexualize a child and it’s fucking foul.”
“Were you around for the Olsen Twins turning 18? Radio talk show hosts had countdowns for it, there was TV spots for it, and I remember distinctly overhearing my grown male family members and towns folk talking about it like they were talking about waiting in line at a deli for the fresh cuts," explained another.
The same thing happened to Emma Watson when she turned 16, the age of consent in the UK. She, too, has spoken about the predatory treatment she had to deal with after turning 18.
“I remember on my 18th birthday I came out of my birthday party and photographers laid down on the pavement and took photographs up my skirt, which were then published on the front of the English tabloid [newspapers] the next morning.
“If they had published the photographs 24 hours earlier they would have been illegal, but because I had just turned 18 they were legal."
Emma Watson
Natalie Portman has also spoken about being sexualized.
At a Women's March in 2018, Portman said: “A countdown was started on my local radio show to my 18th birthday — euphemistically the date that I would be legal to sleep with."
“Movie reviewers talked about my budding breasts in reviews. I understood very quickly, even as a 13-year-old, that if I were to express myself sexually I would feel unsafe and that men would feel entitled to discuss and objectify my body to my great discomfort,” she said.
The list of stars and celebrities to endure this kind of treatment goes on and on. And I have to hope, to expect, that this will change.
The post Gross Creeps Started A Countdown Down To Millie Bobby Brown’s 18th Birthday appeared first on The Mother of All Nerds.
Gross Creeps Started A Countdown Down To Millie Bobby Brown’s 18th Birthday
Source: Pinoy Inquirer News
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