Unthrown Punches

A small story:

I once heard Margaret Cho tell a story about being booked to do standup for a convention of…well, I forget exactly but let’s just say it was early old-age white men who definitely voted for Trump and get mad when someone has their pronouns in their bio. Whoever decided Margaret Cho was the correct emcee for their gathering may win the award for “Least Understanding Of Assignment.”

She did a few jokes; silence.

A few more jokes; now the silence was hostile.

As she told the story later, she thought, “Well, if you don’t like me, I’m going to make you hate me.”

I like her comedy but am no huge fan; I doubt I can tell you a single one of her routines. But this moment, in this story about absolutely bombing onstage, I remember. While I am hugely conflict-averse in the meatsphere, online I have experienced this feeling, this joyous rush of knowing that I’m right, they’re wrong and I’m about to guarantee that, somewhere, strangers are shouting.

Reader, I give you the past weekend.

For over a decade, I have written across multiple formats about how dangerous, stupid and selfish it is to use your children for content.

“Wait; I’ve read about your daughter for twenty years.”

Yes!

What color is her hair, currently?

What are her hobbies?

What are her weaknesses, her demons?

How did her potty-training go?

You know an outline and feel free to assume I have moved some of the lines of that outline around to grant her more privacy. From day one, my rule with writing about her was, “Any story that features her, she will prevail over me, over her father, over that recalcitrant cow’s heart.” She doesn’t get embarrassed, or outed. I wrote about her for ten years on the blog and never included a picture. From the time she was five years old, she knew that if someone came up to me in public and starting yammering about my former life she was to walk about six feet away from me, within sight and sound but not next to me so this stranger could, as one person once did, turn to her and say, “And you must be her daughter; did you know your mommy was a movie star?”

The punches I have not thrown in my life…

Anyway, I am on record, for over a decade, with my feelings about exploiting children and yes, if they’re on your public social media account, you are exploiting them. They cannot consent and you are profiting, either monetarily or through headpats from strangers and I’m not sure which is more repellant. When I said that Heather “Dooce” Armstrong was being reckless with her children, her parasocial poodles came lunging for me. “You’re just jealous!” is the battle cry of the parasocial poodle. Because I didn’t actually stop maturing in middle-school, I leave them to their lip gloss and slam books.

This past weekend, I noted a content creator I happen to think is particularly egregious because, well…

Okay, here’s how I think of it. I adored my mother-in-law. I have asthma. My mother-in-law was addicted to cigarettes until the last day of her life. Every time we went to see her, she would sit next to an air-purifier in a room with open windows, both for my sake and our daughter’s sake. I’d still need my inhaler at some point. I never got mad at her because she became addicted before we know what we do about what nicotine does to the brain, how it rewires for its own comfort. When I learned a few years ago that science has discovered a gene mutation that makes quitting smoking — already harder than kicking heroin for some — nearly impossible, I thought of my mother-in-law. She was doing a not-great thing because she didn’t know better. If you’re over a certain age and you smoke, I take that attitude. I mean, I’m going home but I’m not judging you.

If you’re 24 and smoking, I’m judging you, because all the data is right there and you’re still choosing to do something with no upside.

The person I clowned this weekend is a rampant narcissist who is exploiting his twin toddlers, which means he began this bullshit after we as a society already knew what has happened to children on reality shows, what images have been found on the dark web. He has continued to give his children to strangers for money or headpats as the rise of AI has promised us that any image we upload is now fair game for anyone to do anything with.

He does not care.

Commence the clowning and lo, the poodles arrived and, shocked as I am to say this, they have actually grown more unhinged.

Here are some responses:

“They are amazing daddies!”

“I love this family!”

“These men are awesome parents!”

“We all prayed for these babies!”

“At long last, have you no dignity?” in 2024 would be answered by “SHUT UP, KAREN.”

A disproportionately large part of our brain is taken up processing the visual and our input is weighted accordingly; as Queen Elizabeth II famously said, “The public has to see me to believe me.” People are less engaged in the common activities — fraternal organizations, clubs, faith gatherings — than ever before. We have smaller families, if we have families at all. The human body is not designed for combat; we have no exoskeleton, our nails are not very strong and our teeth are meant more for eating than defense. What has always kept us alive is living within small bands of people who, through familial ties and custom, look out for each other. We’ve lost that. WIthout being able to put our finger on why, we feel adrift. Capitalism, being capitalism, helped create the problem and is now selling a crappy solution back to us.

“Those are great parents!”

Maybe.

Maybe not.

They’re definitely exploiting their children.

Can you love your child and exploit them?

Yes.

But the more interesting element to me — the darkest part of the psychic bruise I advertently found — is the collective inability to understand that social media is fiction. Same as HACKS, same as BOB’S BURGERS, same as CANTERBURY TALES. The difference, the dangerous difference, is that our lonely and overwhelmed brains are telling us otherwise. These children will never know when their parent’s choices now will show up again later in their lives. Maybe it will be never, or maybe it will be a call from the FBI because an image was found on a thumb drive; maybe it will be some vicious high-school rival weaponizing their parent’s ad for the anti-thumbsucking nail polish.

Maybe it will just be them, as adults, telling their own children that if someone walks up and says, “I remember seeing you in your diapers!” to walk about six feet away.

There is no, not one, upside to putting your children in the public sphere and, unlike the content created by these people, what you just read is real.

Guess it’s time to make some folks hate me.