Keeble

"the bird"

left wing bird, online and trying this " alternative social media" thing again. recently unionized barista. Weekly wikipedia streamer. ❤ @proxy ❤30. Avi: me!

last.fm listening


Keeble
@Keeble

i wonder how much of the massive growth (at least as far as i can tell) of babyfur within furry has to do with the 80s-2000s incredible rise in 24/7 media towards kids, with marketing towards kids under like 8 being essentially its own gender silo with associated marketing having its own stereotypes and idea about what being a Kid™ was. When it comes to the social, psychological, cultural and behavioral aspects that society siloes us into, to most tv companies operating this long ago most early childhood media is distinctly made for any gender, effectively flattening a lot of media for children into having one gender, the ChildGender. Bluey is a great example of this--the surprise that a lot of adult bluey viewers experience when realizing bluey is a girl dog is because she is not showered in american gender reveal party-esque gender signifiers the way that many actual irl girls are by their family. This mirrors blue from blue's clues--also a girl, but very distinctly not marketed towards only girls, and along with bluey a rare example of girl-as-default/neuter-gender in media rather than the default man/boy-as-default. This came across in the presentation of nick jr, too: If you watched nickelodeon back in the day (and possibly now; im a bit disconnected from kids media these days) they made it feel like being a kid in the 90s or whatever was the best possible time and way to be alive, that being a kid and embracing play was the right way to be. But, its marketing was usually at both boys and girls, as evidenced by, say, fairly oddparents or spongebob always having both ads for stereotypically "boys" toys and "girls" ones; same with shows targeted at younger kids. These identities were both apparently subservient to the greater meta-gender of Being A Kid In A Commercial.

Of course, nobody can achieve the artificial joy and aspirations our media shows us. nobody's childhood can be like that childhood from the commercial. all things considered my childhood was pretty okay and i remember bursting into tears around the time of puberty at a black-and-white commercial for kellogg's rice krispies showing a family making rice krispy treats together to the tune of the Israel Kamakawiwoʻole ukulele cover of somewhere over the rainbow. And its not like i didn't do that exact activity with my family at points during childhood, but i was never going to get the implied Perfect Memory shown in the commercial thanks to buying Great Products™.

Add to that the whole "not getting to be queer" thing and these sort of commercialized memories have another, unintended meaning--to have the media assigned gender of "child" is to be free from the constraints of sexuality to a certain degree. The swing of acceptable deviation from gender norms is SLIGHTLY bigger within childhood bc of the heavy element of play and fantasy thats contained within our idea of what childhood as a construct is. What might at 6 still be read by a family as their son acting cute might get them clocked as queer by the time he's 9 or 10. Its hard not to feel rejected when you grow up queer, and its easy to mentally contrast this with the life shown to us in the commercials. There, being a kid is the best thing ever, with no real earned responsibilities, where fun and joy is paramount (and it comes from things like kool aid and hawaiian punch and cocoa puffs and happy meals and brightly colored, molded petrochemicals). And the pre-7 era of childhood offers a retreat of sorts from gender and sexuality.

The bright primary colors of kidcore aesthetics are not so much a result of actual childhood but a personal reclamation of the aesthetic signifiers of early-childhood-as-a-form-of-aspirational-gender that most of us were exposed to who grew up in the west in the era of hypertargeted mass media. Despite being a product of capitalism—an attempt to get emotionally manipulative children to beg their parents for plastics and hyper-processed foods, often quite literally designed by the same people who came up with how to market cigarettes to kids—it is surrounded with the aesthetic signifiers of being an escape from capitalism. products that aid in childhood aid in play, in growth, in just being you. And yes, this is insidious and addictive, but something like babyfur or kidcore is a really interesting unintended consequence of the proliferation of this kind of marketing when everything else moved away from this sort of fantastical themed space that so much of even non childhood public life became in the 90s (i.e., an American suburban dweller in the late 90s has a decent chance of primarily in public only going to locations intentionally designed by a corporation to be themed to look like something else, from a 50s diner to The Idea of Italy). In some ways, the connection to kidcore aesthetics is related to the more widespread nostalgia for colorfully themed indoor places/experiences: 90s movie theaters with neon lights everywhere, bowling alley carpeting in intersecting flaming zigzags or whatever, the entire existence of a place like fry's electronics.


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