Today, November 20, is Universal Children's Day. So let's talk about something that happened last week.
Because there was a brief moment last week when it seemed the world had become a slightly safer place to be a child. Two mega-corporations like Disney and Google decided to update their principles. The former did so with the aesthetic measure of keeping the Michael Jackson episode of The Simpsons , which pays tribute to an alleged child abuser, hidden on its new streaming platform. The latter, with the drastic tightening of advertising policies for YouTube channels aimed at children or that use children for profit (channels that, in practice, have been effectively shut down). On the third day, the girl from Stranger Things reappeared to restore order.
An innocent photocall featuring the entire cast of Stranger Things has once again highlighted the work many media outlets still need to do . According to these outlets, there was only one star: the little girl, whose name we at Postposmo have been unable to find or recall.
To get the news aspect out of the way, and quoting the most repeated phrase in all the articles on the subject: the girl from Stranger Things has entered puberty . They say that Eleven "has grown up," that she "has gotten older." The only truth we can allow ourselves in this matter is that Eleven is still fifteen.
Blame it on the media
Having absorbed the unnecessary (and obvious) clarification that it's wrong to call a child sexy, media outlets like Telecinco, 20 Minutos, ABC, La Vanguardia, and La Sexta have seen fit to reincorporate the young girl into their eternal and relentless clickbaiting race. They no longer talk about her in the shameful way some magazines did three years ago with the series' launch. But they continue to talk about her for reasons unrelated to the series.
The mere use of the past perfect (has grown) instead of the present continuous (is growing) speaks volumes about the despicable nature of the news coverage. That the issue of physical change is presented as a closed event (and shrouded in an aura of "surprising transformation") reveals the cynical and wretched state of a media that, shielded by the absence of objectifying labels on its reporting, has reopened the floodgates of headlines, articles, videos, and tweets about the physical appearance of a fifteen-year-old girl.
In its continuous descent into the depths of depravity, the television program Zapeando has reached new frontiers of moral depravity after commenting, with the same degree of vulgarity that is its trademark, on the clothing of a fifteen-year-old girl, even going so far as to speculate on the possibility that she has undergone cosmetic surgery.
An even more repulsive twist occurs in the so-called reaction articles, so used in practically all information fields. From sports to politics. The media, instead of saying that Donald Trump is stupid, echo "the wave of indignation on the networks", "the cascade of criticism", that "the fans are on fire" or even the languid "some users say”, to show that Donald Trump is stupid.
Thus, La Vanguardia deems it appropriate to quote a Twitter user who claims that the girl "looks forty and seems to have just come out of rehab." And nothing happens. The newspaper is shielded and absolves itself of any responsibility in an exercise of total adherence to the law and the journalist's code of ethics , which don't always align with those of ethics and morality (most of the time, when the very nature of the news event is more than dubious).
Telecinco, true to its usual reputation as the undisputed leader in lowbrow journalism, even dares to publish an article mentioning and linking to one of the few truly awful American news outlets with the audacity to run a headline like "The girl from Stranger Things doesn't look well." In the same article on Telecinco's website, where the network reminds us that the girl had to close her Twitter account in 2018 due to overwhelming criticism, we learn that some random person has created a meme comparing the girl to Britney Spears or Jennifer Aniston.
There is no one at the controls.
It's the parents' fault
Something is not right in the world when a fifteen-year-old girl has a jewelry company in her name and, more importantly for the case at hand, a makeup line (as dependent, like all firms in the sector, on what publications aimed at the female public say or don't say about said company).
Something is seriously wrong when a fifteen-year-old girl (with the complexion of a fifteen-year-old) is used as a valid showcase to demonstrate the effectiveness of these products in a video that has nearly two million views. The video is titled "My Skincare Routines."
Something is seriously rotten when we realize that this video was published as an exercise in transparency and an apology for the scandal caused by a first video in which the girl claimed to be applying her brand's products when in reality she was only rubbing her face with her bare fingers.
Blame it on the readers.
Don't stop there. Try it out. Open a new browser window and start typing the girl's name into Google. Here are some of the search suggestions (based on the most popular searches worldwide):
-"Age"
-"Boyfriend"
-“Marbella” (place of birth)
-"Height"
-«Pandora» (again, a cascade of images of a minor at the service of her jewelery products company)
If you add a verb like "is" to the noun, Google auto-completes the suggestion with adjectives. Guess what the other most searched adjective is, besides " vegan " and also starting with "v".
Nobody at the controls.
The media has two options when dealing with the obvious thirst for news surrounding the young protagonist of one of the hottest series right now: to engage or not. Those who engage do so out of fear that readers will take note if they learn about the story from competing outlets . At the end of the day, it all boils down to a hyper-capitalist logic whose authority is reinforced four times a year in the form of the General Media Study or the Comscore report.
Those who don't get involved are few. But they exist. It's a relief that media outlets like El País or El Mundo haven't dedicated a single line to this recent bombshell . Perhaps all is not lost.
As a society deeply involved in a constant and rapid process of overcoming its boundaries in all its areas (from the cultural, to the social, the technological and the humanitarian), it is deplorable that the minor who stars in Stranger Things has to come along to remind us (not her, but the world's response to her) of the stuff that strange things are made of.
We conclude the first and last article that this website will dedicate on the matter with a quote taken from the most infallible oracle and compendium of contemporary wisdom (with apologies to Michael Jackson):
"And children? Is no one going to think about the children? – Helen Lovejoy, The Simpsons