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Sometimes, we cancel with a purpose.
I hate cancel culture. Everyone over the age of six has said something stupid on the internet. Those of us who grew up without it and then had it might be even more prone to it because we did not understand the permanency of said…utility.
But Chrissy Teigen crossed a line.
Over 10 years ago, Teigen said to Courtney Stodden, that she fantasized about her death. She regularly encouraged her to commit suicide.
If you don’t follow pop culture, let me give you a quick rundown.
Chrissy Teigen: hot swimsuit model, met John Legend on his music video set where they pretended to be in love, fell in love, married him, rode his coat-tails to A-list status. Courtney Stodden: Was the 16-year-old child bride of 50 year old Doug Hutchinson. If you suspect that there may have been abuse/grooming/all sort of badness involved, you might be suspecting correctly.
In 2011, Chrissy decided to be super classy when, whether having one too many and drunk posting on the internet or not, she posted, repeatedly to Stodden to kill herself.
Let that sink in. A child bride married to her acting coach. Clearly, there are issues. And Chrissy, a self-avowed feminist, took to Twitter to slut-shame and share with her the various ways she imagined her dying. She both publicly and privately shared her violent fantasies with the still 16-year-old Stodden.
While you might not like what young females do to manipulate men and you might not like promiscuity and speak out against it, I sincerely doubt that you are anything as twisted as the following descriptor:
Chrissy Teigen. Model. Feminist. Activist. Champion of women. Swimsuit model. Shamer of sluts. Accuser of child-brides. Hater of American-born abused women. Blamer of victims.
I’m surprised she didn’t tell Stodden that given what she wore, she was asking for it.
I do not like “canceling” people. I’m firmly against it. But Teigen has been asked, repeatedly, to answer for this. It has been ten years. Target sponsors her, she hosts TV shows, she has cookbooks, she’s the modern all-American young, cool, hip sexy mom.
It has been ten years, guys. TEN. Courtney is now an adult and has left the sham of a marriage.
But Chrissy Teigen still gets praised for being so “totally open” on her Twitter and “saying what she thinks” meanwhile we have a President who was banned because people’s feelings were hurt and the media accused criminals of killing police officers (didn’t happen). We have a new President with nice tweets.
But we still have the same old mean girl culture slut shaming when it strikes their fancy.
And I’m not here for it anymore. Sometimes when we cancel people, we cancel with a purpose. We cancel, not people, but their activities. I’d like for Twitter to suspend Teigen for blatant and chronic violations of TOS which she should not claim exception to. I’d like for Target to step out and say that this Nurses’ Week, they support women supporting women and that they will not allow a woman to bully a child, regardless of how they feel about them personally. I’d like for people (I’m looking at you Joy Behar, Beyonce, Madonna and Taylor “We All Have Crowns” Swift) to speak against it. I’m not saying to speak hatred. No. This is never the point and never the way to take care of these things.. But to speak against what it is and to speak against what has been done.
And to speak to true, genuine apology and commit to making amends to Courtney, but also to the girls who think this kind of brash speech is fun and cool.
She’s a damn mother. My mother would have…well, I can’t explain in words what my mother would have done. Regardless, I can say what all mothers know: adults should never bully children.
Be a mother. Grow up, Chrissy. Apologize, take your lumps. Do better. BE BETTER. If not for America, for your own damn kids who rely upon your sorry example to determine what good parents do.
Chrissy, you need to apologize and you need to do penance. Maybe work at a shelter for abused teenage girls? See if you can refrain from telling them how worthless they are for a little while?
Published in Culture
I don’t even know where to begin to try to unpack the level of cray on all sides here. And I don’t know anything about any of these people, but I always find myself wondering, when I read stuff like this, which is the cause, and which is the effect, of the extraordinary dysfunction and ugliness on display (I’m not talking about physical characteristics).
Then I remember watching “celebrities” fawn all over Harvey Weinstein for decades, and give Roman Polanski standing ovations for one or another award, all the while congratulating themselves (Meryl Streep, I’m looking at you) for being the only people brave enough to “speak truth to power” at the Golden Globe awards, (mere moments before Donald Trump sent his jackbooted thugs to round her up and ship her to Gitmo).
Oh, wait…
Still. What goes around comes around, and sooner or later, they start to eat their own. Tom Cruise and Scarlett Johansson have returned theirs (Oh, Meryl…..), and NBC has announced it won’t carry the awards ceremony next year.
Not woke enough.
What a bunch of rotten, nasty, poseurs all of them are. And I don’t believe they care how many lives they ruin as they stampede their way to the top.
Not surprised. There’s always been something very unpleasant about that woman, and not just her face. And she seems to have had a claque of media types cheering her on over the years.
Good grief! Glad I don’t live in that world. I couldn’t keep up.
Wringing that last dram of virtue signalling out of the Globes. I know that the Golden Globes have been out-performing the Oscars in viewership, but then so is the Indian-head test pattern.
For whatever cray there is (and there’s a lot…everywhere) it simmers down to this:
Popular chick on the internet who is of age tells teenager that she should kill herself. Both publicly and privately.
Now. We never know what kind of internal struggles people have. Sometimes people are promiscuous for reasons and sometimes children are groomed into becoming child brides and sexual objects for explicit exploitation on the Internet by their husbands.
…but whatever.
Let’s just chalk it up to “Hollywood Be Cray” and ignore the fact that they’ve not only encouraged child pornography, but have enabled/encouraged/emboldened/and endorsed situations where children are sexualized, manipulated, abused, and then mocked as if they had any expectation of control over it?
No. I think society has gone pretty far. However, Woke Culture breathes Outrage and exhales Social Consequence. So, okay, fine. Woke Society wants us to go back to the days of stocks and ridicule. They want us to go back to shaming and ostracization. But okay.
I’ll put on my bonnet.
I wonder what would have happened if Stoddard had actually killed herself. Would Tiegen have been charged with any crime?
Do you think she should have been?
This looks like a whole lot of overreaction to me.
Chrissy Teigen seems to be a truly wretched person. I remember reading about how she regularly tweeted things to Trump like “It’s been a week since I told you that I still f***ing hate you.” I’m not a therapist, but I suspect actual mental illness.
No, we don’t. At least the tweets weren’t very nice a few months ago when I was using Twitter more.
I never heard of either of them until I read this.
This seems to be the heart of the issue.
“We shouldn’t lynch anybody” is the appropriate response to lynch mobs, but there’s a separate justice system. Saying we shouldn’t lynch anybody doesn’t mean that nobody deserves execution. Ah, but Twitter et al have their own internal impartial boards who moderate this. People I trust slightly less than this option to buy a bridge I got from Dr. Fauci.
This sounds like straight up harassment, and the sort of thing that our legal system ought to take care of.
I don’t know if it is lynch worthy, but it is vile and something that is destructive.
To. A. Child.
Let’s all remember that these are the same people who want to be offended by Epstein. So, fine. Epstein and Clinton. And Polanski and Allen.
Are we offended or are we not? Are they kids or are they adults?
Because you are male. Life is different for women and budding women. As a father? How would you feel about someone cheering on a celebrity who is encouraging your kid to commit suicide?
Yeah, sorry, I was using lynch mob as an analogy to how cancel culture works, not advising the death penalty for this particular offense.
Ironically, in your second link Courtney says this: “but I’m a woman now and it’s time for me to put my big girl pants on…”, while in the first she has “come out” as “non-binary.”
Is there anything of value that Twitter is contributing to society?
Yeah. They’ve also decided that Bisexual Visibility Day is now Bisexual+ Day. You know, for everyone other than people who identify as gay.
…I don’t make the rules.
I don’t even know how I know about her. I can’t think of anything she’s actually done by way of work. I think I remember her mostly because I find her so physically unattractive I’m constantly amazed she’s considered some sort of beauty.
Hollywood has its own brand of crazy . . .
Which reminds me: I once used the old Indian-head test pattern in a video I produced for our church, and one of my cow-orkers asked me to take it out because she didn’t understand why there was an Indian on it and she thought it might offend people.
Occasionally I see worthwhile discussions, learn some things, and see people being kind to each other.
But not that often.
You may be right. If women and budding women are as weak-minded as you suggest, we may need to re-think many things about our society.
I would expect my daughters to be sufficiently strong-willed to ignore an obnoxious statement like Teigen’s. She behaved like a jerk, without question. But I think that the world worked better when we followed the “sticks and stones” rule.
I think that you will be unable to find an effective line, when you start to police obnoxious statements by jerks. I think that this has already happened, and is a significant part of the problem that we now face with so-called “cancel culture” and the stifling of legitimate discussion.
When I first became aware of Teigen’s name my weird brain thought the actress from Dallas was making a comeback. She’s Charlene Tilton. I’ve never seen anything productive out of that couple. Her husband made racist remarks about Trump and/or his supporters at one point. It’s sad seeing them in advertisements when they both should be treated like pariahs.
I was sorry about her miscarriage. It’s painful to go through but I don’t know if it dampened her support for Planned Parenthood one bit.
I did not know there was Bisexual Visibility Day. Apparently we need to see them? What does a bi-sexual look like?
The only way to see them is for them to be visibly different which is problematic for the just-like-everyone-else messaging.
Ah.
I see you have never been bullied by girls. As a girl.
Let me explain something to you that you may not understand: female bullies are the epitome of social evil. They find ways to not just say mean things (which is fine, delete it, ignore it, block it, whatever) but to insinuate that into your life. They work through ostracism and influence. Of course, no girl is going to instantly think, “Oh noes! Chrissy Teigen told me to kill myself! I must!”
That is one of the lamest retorts ever, but is fairly typical of certain generations and, sadly, many men. Sure. Words hurt. Sure, we need people to be resilient. However, cyber-bullying and female bullying is one of the wickedest, most evil, soul crushing, horrid things out there. Girls don’t just say mean things. They aren’t like boys where they’ll just walk up and punch you.
They destroy your social circle. They find ways to harass you privately. They kick you when you are already down. They find your weaknesses and prod them until it is unbearable. Then they stop. Then you gather yourself up and think that it’s over. Then, they hit you harder and with more people and make you a pariah.
The whole “sticks and stones” concept was a lie, has always been a lie, and was always a convenient excuse by the parents of bullies to shame the victims of their antisocial offspring. I’m not saying that we need to tiptoe around everyone, but there are certain social standards that should be understood: one is to not have adults bullying kids, whether or not you think the kid is overly sensitive. Telling someone they should kill themselves when they’re already pretty clearly abused, mentally ill, and generally not okay is not just unconscionable, it’s actionable and illegal in many states. Can you control someone and make them kill themselves? No. Should we police talk? Maybe not a lot, but I think it’s fair to hold adults accountable for the abuse and damage they do to children.
And “sticks and stones” holds exactly no one accountable.
Depends. There’s plenty of them, they just don’t talk about it because being on a sexual preference spectrum isn’t de rigeur any more. Unless you’re Pansexual or Panromantic or Omnisexual or…queer or genderqueer or…I don’t know what the kids are using today. I can’t keep track of it. Much like lesbians, bisexuals just aren’t cool anymore. But this is a topic for another post…
Right?
The sticks and stones concept is what keeps us free, even if not true in every sense of the words.