"Body Positivity" and The War on Children

There are two alarming, “self-confidence” narratives being pushed in the mainstream lately that are, as I can tell, indicators for severe mental health issues. I have noticed the majority of people who bought into each are at more risk of being either a danger to themselves or others. Although it’s apparent that the people buying into these narratives are hyper self-conscious, the narratives are still being peddled as “self-acceptance” and “body positivity.” I’m concerned that while on some extremely superficial level, these things might seem to promote confidence, they are more often promoting the polar opposite. The unintended consequences are far outweighing the marketed benefits.

I have to start by sharing a little background about myself. I’m spiritually androgynous. I say it this way to indicate, I don’t have any particular religion that I subscribe to that makes me think nudity or sexuality are inherently bad. I am pretty open minded when it comes to sexual surrogacy as it relates to mental health. I see sexual development as a crucial part of well being.

I’m also (and this is the most boring thing about me) attracted to both genders. *Yawn* I do not feel like it is any kind of building block for my personal identity. Generally, I don’t speak of it since this only seems pertinent to someone I am engaging with intimately. Since I am married to a man and monogamous, this plays almost no role in my life at the present moment suffice to say, I don’t feel in any way a sense of shame about this attraction nor interactions I have had with any of my sexual partners. I go back to this sense of sexual health that I feel I have developed in my adult life which I am very comfortable with.

*Photo from Desert Nudes, The Photography of David Winge available on Blurb

Last, and most notably, I spent several years of my life as a nude art model by profession. I look back on those times with very positive feelings, so I have nothing against nudists or nudity in general and specifically nothing against nudity in art. Thus, it would be hard to define me as a prude. One of the main things I feel like I gained from my time as a nude model was a perspective of myself as art. I stopped seeing flaws in myself and because of the kind of nude modeling I did most- in landscapes, I learned to view myself in nature next to a fallen log and a twisted limb without petty judgments. Nature is nature. I stopped looking at nudity as some sexualized moment, but rather a natural moment. After several years of nude modeling, with that shift in perspective, I stopped thinking that what I looked like mattered so much in the grand scheme of things. I loved how shapes fit into the context of background. Eventually, I became more interested in painting and photography than being the subject of art. I can see beauty in everything. I am not in any way a modest person, and I feel my perspective on beauty and the physical body is fairly healthy and balanced.

That said, I will explain why I am concerned.

I think scantily dressed people who are trying to use their bodies in a highly sexualized, fetishist or vulgar way around children- are just wrong. I know other cultures do it (think Rio carnival), but other cultures also have more children at risk. Many other cultures aren’t as inclined to provide for the safety and sanctity of children, particularly related to sexual sanctity. I’m not meaning to suggest there’s only one culture with what I think is unsafe outlook for children. Many are just as dangerous under the auspices of conservatism. However, it seems the more blatant the exposure of children to sexuality, the more likely certain cultures entertain children as “sexual beings” which they are encouraged to share such exploration with unsafe adults. Brazil just happens to also have the highest rate in the world of elective C sections which endanger the child birth process, because the women want to preserve the appearance of their labias. They also have more cosmetic surgeries than any other nation. I don’t think that’s a sign of good mental health on a risk assessment profile. Surgeries aren’t just cutting yourself up, they also involve other toxic medicines as well as health deteriorating antibiotics assaulting the body. Promoting an unnatural standard of beauty at high costs to health, is not indicative of well being or confidence. But coming back to the original point, doing a bunch of stuff around children that is sexual is not right, and a society accepting of it is likely a sickened society that doesn’t value or protect children. In those cases, children are the ones at risk of harm.

The second issue I have noticed pertains to what I witnessed going to Britney Spears Instagram page after the circulated “knife video.” But this issue at hand is one I see unfortunately more often than I’d like from people I have interacted with personally on social media. It’s not just selfies. It’s not just having a sexually provocative aesthetic. It’s fetishized selfies, self-exploitation. It goes beyond looking good and feeling good for oneself to a desperate level of need for validation from others, and it goes well beyond anything I have ever encountered prior to the advent of social media. And in some cases, with people I know who are self-exploiting, they also hate the people giving them feedback and find the feedback disgusting. So, once again, we come to a hallmark of borderline personality disorder, taken from the title of one of the most renowned books on the topic, “I hate you, don’t leave me.” And in this situation, these people are showing that they are willing to solicit their bodies for attention, but hate the kind of attention they receive at the same time. Worse, if self-harm is on the table for how to entice people or engender concern, then, a person might demonstrate self-harming behavior, or walk a fine line bordering endangerment while trying to pass it off weakly as art.

Britney Spears used to be a strong dancer and entertainer. While touring, she had teams of managers constantly taking her closer and closer to the edge of being pornographic in front of a generation of primarily, pre-pubescent girls who listened to her music and looked up to her. And now, she doesn’t have this “guidance” and has seemingly lost the plot of exploiting herself for the sake of influencing younger generations of ladies. She never got the memo of what was culturally going on there and how she was being utilized as a sex symbol for minors. She speaks of being on the receiving end of this influence as a child watching and admiring Madonna. She took it from there, flirting with disaster, always pushing the boundaries of sexuality which was being sold to little girls. Today, without those managers and PR people helping her to indoctrinate the next generation of children, she finds herself making untalented, un-choreographed dance routines, constantly pulling her panties down further and further when she’s “performing” in her house, like something that should be on an OnlyFans page or sold as a “girlfriend experience.” It’s a legitimate kind of sex work. It seems she’s not satisfied as she exposes more and more of herself on her own camera at home to the point it looks like, well, it looks like what it is. It’s a grown woman and mother, getting older, who has abused some kind of drugs, lost her ability to dance which now lacks grace or skill, has interests that she picked up that have no real meaning and don’t create value to the world outside of TikTok (soap ASMR and tiny foods prepared on miniature food settings) and absolutely zero sense of substance. Even her interest in spirituality seems to be to fulfill some kind of male fantasy and not any genuine connection to divinity whatsoever. This is a child who grew up without a childhood.

There’s a clear connection between the two issues I described. Children who have been robbed of their childhoods are also robbed of meaning, and they grow up to influence the next generation of children to then have even less meaningful lives and less of a childhood. Gradually all become more overtly sexual because that’s all they can feel and connect to. It’s like these people are numb everywhere else that doesn’t engender sexual feelings, and they are chasing the sexual high in every activity they pursue.

As many of these people become more culturally influential, they attempt to thinly muddle the distinction between art and pornography as justification, trying to say they are of equal value. They veil the distinction between body positivity and depravity. PR people likely told Britney through her career that exploiting her body for the sexual pleasures of others was bold, brave and positive. The masses then parroted that message. She could then ignore the “haters” who pointed out that what she was doing to herself was exploitative.

When you pull back the curtain, you find many entertainers today have this in common: they tend to hate the people who love them most and idolize them.

Lizzo is another example of this love/hate dynamic. Feeling demoralized by the actions of self-exploitation, using her body “positivity” campaign to gain attention of others, she delights in demoralizing those who want her attention. I have heard for several years how “bold and confident” Lizzo was because she was willing to completely bare her less conventionally beautiful body for public audiences. One Google search on “Lizzo confidence” reveals pages upon pages of this bullshit, including how one I guffawed at claiming Lizzo’s confidence is “triggering.” Then we discover, behind the scenes, she wants other plus-sized ladies, ones looking up to her most, to demoralize themselves for her entertainment. I don’t think her bizarre banana predilection comes from a place of wholeness and self-confidence. This is a classic demonstration of how hurt people hurt people. The desire to diminish others comes from a place of smallness.

As I continued to scroll through Britney’s Instagram I stumbled on a video she shared (it wasn’t her content) with a caption about how this video summarizes how she feels about people, presumably her fans whom she claims to adore and be so thankful to. The video is a comedy clip depicting an airline stewardess demeaning passenger after passenger as they exit from the plane. I get the sense that these “icons” of “body positivity” hate the people who pay attention to them, and I don’t think it’s far fetched to imagine that it’s because these icons hate what they do to themselves to gain that attention. It’s also not surprising that the only people that believe them when they claim to be self-confident are children. So, they put the majority of their attention on convincing children in hopes of finding validation, but children are clearly worse for the exposure.

It’s a vicious cycle, and one we must protect children from. These kinds of influences and exploitation are devastating to children. We need to start early in sheltering children from these influences, and we need to see this as a grave issue of importance to the future of civilization. We need to protect children from slippery slopes of depravity and cultural demoralization. It’s the parent’s job to remove her child from the street where the culture bus might collide.

“Karen, you can’t shelter kids from the real world.”

I’ve been called a fascist and worse for safeguarding my children from filth and depravity. If the “real world” has become consumed with giant sex parties and orgies, it is your duty as a parent to protect your kids from Sodom and Gomorrah. Take your kids away from that world and instruct them not to look upon it as you separate yourself from that life.

I see the culture bus going off a ravine when it comes to children. And those who speak out against it or work to correct it are being mislabeled as “haters,” “bigots,” “homophobes,” “prudes” an/or “religious fanatics,” of which I am clearly none of the above. Speaking as someone who stands next to many of you in this fight for the sanctity of children who happen to be religious or heterosexual or people who are more modest about nudity, I am obviously none of these things. But just because you are, perhaps, one or more of these things, doesn’t make you less objective about it. Objectively speaking, you are on the side of well being in your stance to shield and safeguard your children from sexual depravity and exploitation.

Protecting children from drag shows is not the same as shielding children from the work of artists during the renaissance. The child-exploiting mob are not a new renaissance. It’s laughable they would compare men, scantily dressed in fishnet stocking spreading their legs in the face of children to men hundreds of years ago dressed in layers upon layers of garments to portray women in a performance of William Shakespeare. These modern drag queens are adults who had their childhoods stolen from them, sadly, who want to impose that on future children to validate their own lost childhood. They come from a place of self-loathing, lack of value or depth, and from emotional deafness. They are destitute when it comes to healthy sexual development. I rebuke anyone who tells you this has anything to do with nature, health, acceptance or self-love.

Furthermore, the perpetuation of the mutilation and medication of children, the chemical castration, the poisoning of children, even the notion of children being born in the wrong bodies or any of this emotionally divisive idea that children of either gender be polarized as masculine OR feminine rather than whole with both their masculine and feminine traits in perfect, beautiful balance and harmony, is Human Centipede level annihilation which we should all look upon with horror. Trying to “celebrate” this or label this as some sort of “affirming care” (rightly, denial based destruction) of children by these same sickly adults whether it be their parents, peers, influencers on social media, school teachers, counselors, legislators, social commentators, corporations and the plastic surgeons is a violation to the sanctity of life itself.

We need to call this all out for what it is. We need to do it NOW!

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