OMFG IF YOU COULD SEE THE SHIT I AM COMING UP WITH RIGHT NOW
okay it may not be as bad as I think it is as I am writing it but OMG I AM JUST GENERALLY FREAKING OUT. I have been writing in IM conversations for days and I'm finally trying to finish up one of the actual prose chapters I have to deal with and it is NOT BEING EASY. igh.
Honestly, I have no idea. I've been a habitual maker of silly polls since about a year after I got on LJ (so, like, six years or something) and I always had to have some goofy unrelated option at the end of every poll. it rotated for awhile, then narrowed down to "ninjas," "pirates," and "wombats", with an occasional squid or something thrown in. Ninjas and pirates are obviously overdone, but it wound up narrowing down to "wombats" mostly because it is a silly-sounding word and conjures up a cute image in my head. For awhile I tried to switch over to woylies (http://images.google.com/images?hl=en&q=woylie&gbv=2&aq=f&oq=&aqi=g1), which is also a cute Australian animal and which sounds better alongside "Kylie", but it never caught on.
Okay, so I'm ashamed to say I forget if I mentioned it and told you to ask me about it sometime (seems plausible) or if I mentioned that I'd seen some of it and you had a question about what's up currently. If the latter, I should note that I only watched some of it On Demand last season and none of it this season. Google tells me that this season's premiere opened with a woman who had two daughters in a pageant telling one of them that she was uglier than the other one and had a big nose. Nice.
If the former, I was likely thinking of the horrific emotional abuse that last year's poor winner in the 4-6 year old (or whatever) category was put through by her mother. I mean obviously all the mothers are overinvested, but there are a number of them who do seem able to understand on *some* level what their kids want and what they don't. But this woman... I mean, the kid was terrifying -- every smile she offered (and it always was an offering to the public, never a spontaneous expression) was perfectly lacquered, and everything she said, to the judges or cameras or anybody else, sounded like a little-girl robot. The rest of the kids were unnaturally polished too, but this girl was eerie in a way I can't really describe. But the really bad part was in the final episode, when she panicked onstage and broke for the first time. She ran offstage sobbing, and her mom first yelled at her to go back and then, when she wouldn't, picked her up and carried her bodily onstage. And then she snapped into the lacquered-smile perfect robot routine again. The same smile like her face had been pulled up and into on marionette strings, the same poise, the same everything, except she had been crying and terrified literally two seconds before.
And then the judges gave her the grand prize. Because they said it took "an extra special something" (I may be paraphrasing, I forget the exact words, but that was the gist) to "pull it together" like that. Meanwhile I was horrified by the whole thing, how absolutely unnatural it was for a five-year-old to be able to just shove her emotions underground in the blink of an eye like that, and how terrified she seemed of her mom's disapproval. I was really, really disturbed. It just said so much to me about the way that emotional abuse often plays out -- the way kids are like conscripted into this rigid family situation and how they learn to comply so early, in ways that I don't think the general population understands. It also reminds me of that horrible book "Spare the Rod" that circulates in some fundie Christian circles, which advises parents to abuse their children (there was a case a couple of years ago in which the publishers of that book were sued after parents beat their kid with PVC piping as the book advised and the kid died) [<--no seriously, triggers] and defends it on the grounds that the kids are incredibly well-behaved and will play quietly for hours on end without ever interrupting their parents or asking anything of them. OF COURSE THEY WILL, THEY'RE TERRIFIED TO FUCKING GO NEAR YOU.
Anyway. Scary home situation = kids who are scared = kids who don't "cause trouble" & are unnaturally compliant with adult authority (sometimes, anyway, depending on the abuse and on the kid) = no one picking up on what's going on.
::sigh:: ::end rant::
Edited 2009-07-30 19:24 (UTC)
Re: Toddlers and Tiaras -- here's my long rant on abuse of children, emotional & otherwise (triggers
Oh, my FB status was something like "This show is horrifying" and you left a comment that was like "Ask me about this later when I'm fully conscious." I think it was a week ago or so, which may be why you don't remember.
God, that really is terrfying. As for the rant--yer preaching to the choir, here :P
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slammerkinbabe) wrote2009-07-29 03:07 pm
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OMFG IF YOU COULD SEE THE SHIT I AM COMING UP WITH RIGHT NOW
okay it may not be as bad as I think it is as I am writing it but OMG I AM JUST GENERALLY FREAKING OUT. I have been writing in IM conversations for days and I'm finally trying to finish up one of the actual prose chapters I have to deal with and it is NOT BEING EASY. igh.
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i always love your polls.
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I keep wanting to write "Tantrums and Tiaras" but that is something very different...
Toddlers and Tiaras -- here's my long rant on abuse of children, emotional & otherwise (triggers)
If the former, I was likely thinking of the horrific emotional abuse that last year's poor winner in the 4-6 year old (or whatever) category was put through by her mother. I mean obviously all the mothers are overinvested, but there are a number of them who do seem able to understand on *some* level what their kids want and what they don't. But this woman... I mean, the kid was terrifying -- every smile she offered (and it always was an offering to the public, never a spontaneous expression) was perfectly lacquered, and everything she said, to the judges or cameras or anybody else, sounded like a little-girl robot. The rest of the kids were unnaturally polished too, but this girl was eerie in a way I can't really describe. But the really bad part was in the final episode, when she panicked onstage and broke for the first time. She ran offstage sobbing, and her mom first yelled at her to go back and then, when she wouldn't, picked her up and carried her bodily onstage. And then she snapped into the lacquered-smile perfect robot routine again. The same smile like her face had been pulled up and into on marionette strings, the same poise, the same everything, except she had been crying and terrified literally two seconds before.
And then the judges gave her the grand prize. Because they said it took "an extra special something" (I may be paraphrasing, I forget the exact words, but that was the gist) to "pull it together" like that. Meanwhile I was horrified by the whole thing, how absolutely unnatural it was for a five-year-old to be able to just shove her emotions underground in the blink of an eye like that, and how terrified she seemed of her mom's disapproval. I was really, really disturbed. It just said so much to me about the way that emotional abuse often plays out -- the way kids are like conscripted into this rigid family situation and how they learn to comply so early, in ways that I don't think the general population understands. It also reminds me of that horrible book "Spare the Rod" that circulates in some fundie Christian circles, which advises parents to abuse their children
(there was a case a couple of years ago in which the publishers of that book were sued after parents beat their kid with PVC piping as the book advised and the kid died) [<--no seriously, triggers] and defends it on the grounds that the kids are incredibly well-behaved and will play quietly for hours on end without ever interrupting their parents or asking anything of them. OF COURSE THEY WILL, THEY'RE TERRIFIED TO FUCKING GO NEAR YOU.
Anyway. Scary home situation = kids who are scared = kids who don't "cause trouble" & are unnaturally compliant with adult authority (sometimes, anyway, depending on the abuse and on the kid) = no one picking up on what's going on.
::sigh:: ::end rant::
Re: Toddlers and Tiaras -- here's my long rant on abuse of children, emotional & otherwise (triggers
God, that really is terrfying. As for the rant--yer preaching to the choir, here :P
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