I’m gonna go off piste here for a bit, but I have a point so bear with!
I don’t like directing people to gomi because I think the creator of it is highly problematic and anyone who posts something she disagrees with either gets their post removed or gets blocked from the site. BUT, for years, one of the main people on there with a big thread has been this American woman called Jenna who seems to have been raised in a religious setting, has since had some kind of awakening and is now absolutely obsessed with sex/being sexual - has photographed her children playing with her vibrator (“I cleaned it after use!!”).
Anyway, she is currently front page news on Gomi because she came onto her stories last week absolutely raging that people were suggesting she should maybe crop/censor photos of her topless prepubescent daughter.
She is of the view that it doesn’t matter if someone is using photos of your child for their pleasure, because they’re not actually physically coming to your house to abuse the child, ergo it doesn’t have any affect on the kid. Essentially, as long as your child isn’t being physically assaulted, she had no issue with child porn.
Obviously this woman is insane and at the extreme end of the spectrum, but I do wonder with influencers if part of their justification for selling so much of their personal life, is that they are lying to themselves and pretending that there is still a huge divide between online life and real life. Like, they can still have their own private lives and get all the benefits, as long as they post a cutesy photo of their kids in their sponsored outfits. what’s the harm eh, it’s paying the bills and the kids got a new toy! It probably starts with innocent thought like that, and then eventually down the line, you get this craziness of trying to justify that as long as there’s no physical paedophile in your house, then your kids aren’t being exploited.
Clearly the ODs are not at that ridiculous extreme, but I wonder if that is how it begins, and then before you know it, you’re posting pictures of your kids in the bath in exchange for a 4K sink…
Very long ramble and sorry if I derailed! Have just been really trying to get my head round the parenting influencers recently and I can’t understand it at all.