Not sure who I’m writing this for or who but will share it anyway
can I maybe humanise piper Perri a bit?
Well post this scene she had a kid. Split with the dad. Got into a new relationship. 25 years old.
She left said 21 month old son in the care of her boyfriend. Returns to find the child hospitalised with multiple suspicious injuries and severe internal head trauma.
She started a gofundme to pay for his treatment. Trolled of course because porn star. The largest contributor was funnily enough an adult site.
Son didn’t make it. She requested his organs be donated so he could live on in other people. His death meant three other kids had longer / better lives.
The boyfriend went to court. Gave conflicting reasons as to how the injuries occurred during interviews then settled on the old fell down the stairs response. The cause of death noted as shaken baby syndrome.
That’s what I see when I see this meme. A mother whose kid was killed but had the grace and heart to use her son’s passing to help other kids live. One day these kids will see the meme and not realise they’re alive because of the choices of that woman.
She had sex on camera with some black guys in a taboo scene which plays on the white male insecurity fetish, which we now use as a shortcut to mean being taken advantage of. Weird, huh.
Anyway. Julienne, I hope you’re doing well.
In case this is ever useful for someone to read:
It is OK to just put a child down and leave the room if you can’t handle them for whatever reason. It doesn’t make you a bad person. Just leave the room, get some space and call someone for help if you need it.
Update: was not expecting a meme/prank about porn to generate such a thoughtful and valuable discussion about child safety and cultural attitudes to parenting. Thank you Piper Perri.
As a parent of two young autistic children, breaks are very important. You will parent better and they will react better
Your advice isn’t bad - breaks are good and a few moments of crying aren’t so bad, but shaken baby syndrome has some serious problems as an explanation of the injuries it gets used for:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC381308/
Their conclusions are remarkably similar to those of Donohoe, who found that “the evidence for shaken baby syndrome appears analogous to an inverted pyramid, with a very small database (most of it poor quality original research, retrospective in nature, and without appropriate control groups) spreading to a broad body of somewhat divergent opinions.”
Reviewing the studies achieving the highest quality of evidence rating scores, Donohoe found that “there was inadequate scientific evidence to come to a firm conclusion on most aspects of causation, diagnosis, treatment, or any other matters,” and identified “serious data gaps, flaws of logic, inconsistency of case definition.”
The problem here is that the story about a shaken baby has taken hold, and so anyone who has actually beaten up a baby can grab onto it and lie and say they shook the baby, they just lost control, they didn’t intend any harm, and it makes them look less evil.
And obviously you can’t trust the account of someone who may be lying to cover up what amounts to infanticide. Reading the account above it’s clear the boyfriend was changing his story to cover up something horrific that he did. “Fell down the stairs” is another common one but it sounds like a cover up. Shaken baby syndrome still has popular credibility so it gets used.
The other side of this problem is that there may be reasons why children have internal haemorrhages that aren’t related to abuse, but which then get blamed on shaken baby syndrome. Innocent grieving parents have been sent to prison and told that their actions killed their baby. They may even have believed it, until their conviction was overturned because a real expert was brought in who was able to demonstrate that it was all bullshit. Those are the cases that were overturned in time - child abusers don’t do well in prison.
Another negative effect of the narrative around this questionable diagnosis is that parents are taught that they are a danger to their children because of some heretofore unknowable impulse to shake their child to death. I can tell you I had plenty of moments when I felt like I was losing my mind from the crying and sleep deprivation, but doing anything that might hurt my child never crossed my mind, not once.
When I was a new parent there was no end of bizarre, sensationalist bullshit bombarding us from all sides telling us all the ways we were destined to hurt or kill our kids, most of which was just designed to sell us crap we didn’t need. In this case a lot of this is sensationalism that sells tabloids and the services of forensic “experts”. New parents don’t need more sources of anxiety, so I think we should reserve these kinds of warnings for problems that we actually know are problems.
I don’t think that harming babies because you’re frustrated is an excuse, whether it’s shaking, beating or whatever. I agree with you that there shouldn’t be a distinction in law and definitely agree that new parents need less anxiety foisted on them. As others in this discussion have pointed out, there is a huge implicit expectation in our culture for parents to have zero limit to their patience. Combine that with the suggestion that you might randomly flip out and kill your baby and you have a recipe for yet more anxiety, if not disaster. Letting people know that it’s OK to just leave the situation for a few minutes to calm down recognises parents limits and offers a release valve to parents who have been told that there shouldn’t be one. It won’t make a difference to anyone who is simply cruel or falsely accused of child abuse but that’s not who the original comment was addressed to.
I think a combination of reasonable laws/justice and reinforcement of common sense for new parents would be really good.
I understand the comment comes from a good, conscientious place, but from context it’s clearly talking about the shaken baby thing, which I think is misinformation that originated in a moral panic and has never really been demonstrated to be a thing.
And I agree that frustration absolutely isn’t an excuse but that’s really my point, I think you need to have something deeply wrong with you to shake a baby in the way that “shaken baby” actually means. Like as a new parent I remember seeing a demonstration by a nurse on this topic, and the way she shook that doll’s body was obviously intended to be shocking, but it’s not something you do just because you’re frustrated. It’s clearly violent. Like, I can confidently say I don’t think anybody in that room needed that demonstrated any more than they needed to be told, “Remember, don’t repeatedly punch your own baby in the face.” If you’re gonna do that then no amount of warning will change it I don’t think.
Wow. No kids here. But this is absolutely not the narrative I’ve picked up through mostly American media. In the back of my mind is this pull that essentially says that if a baby is awake—especially if they’re being frustrating—it should not be alone.
The wow is because 1. I wasn’t even aware I felt that way, and 2. because it’s in conflict with what sounds like helpful advice.
You leave your baby in a safe place, usually their bed. They will survive the time you pipe down.
Yeah, there’s a totally inflexible cultural expectation of parents to be there for their kids no matter what, with no regard for bedrock emotional and psychological limitations or even common sense. Incidentally, I think this is why so many people are shocked and appalled when they become adults in the big bad world and discover that it isn’t devoted to them. It’s a tough gig for the best of us but if you’ve been brought up with an illusion of god-like figures who can unfailingly be summoned at all times to protect you from everything then I think adulthood is a wake-up call that probably never ends.
Ow, well that hits me right in the childhood hah.
I think it’s important to note that this kind of parenting not only sucks once the kid reaches adulthood, but can be actively abusive to the kid as a form of control tied to an expectation of ownership. By being the one to meet every one of their child’s needs, the parent can make that support very transactional and conditional in private. I’m thinking of a particular model of parenting common in rural Christian communities in the US, which is echoed in “parent’s rights” rhetoric.
In that environment, not only is a parent expected to meet every single one of their child’s needs, but a child is also expected to not have needs their parent can’t meet in the moment. If they do, too bad, they don’t and are really just being ungrateful of how hard their parent works to raise them already. Children are isolated from each other in highly car-centric communities where their only way of seeing another kid is by asking to be driven, which allows a parent to decide who their child interacts with. Boys are expected to be especially unemotional, so even things like suidicidality and SA are swept under the rug and the child has so few other people to bring that to other than their parents. Girls get their own flavor of emotional negligence that I can’t speak to but I think few would be shocked at the themes of reproductive control inherent there.
As an adult this has all sorts of knock-on effects, one of which can be an overinflated sense of how much the outside world will serve them - but the reverse can be true at the same time, one can also learn that the outside world will never rise to meet their unmet needs, which makes relationships pretty difficult among other things. It can also lead to alexithymia as one learns to only feel how others expect them to feel.
I’m a parent of four, at least two of whom are autistic, and I can confirm. A child is almost never in danger in their crib; and if you are unsure of your ability to control your anger, they are potentially in danger in your arms.
American popular media has a fairly rosy and tidy view of kids. Even when they’re portrayed as difficult, they’re still lovable scamps. And, to be clear, kids are great; I love being a dad more than almost anything I’ve ever done.
But they’re also very difficult; and no matter how even-keeled you are in normal life, you find yourself in a pretty dark place when they’re still crying and you’re on your third night in a row with only two hours of sleep. Sitcoms never show the end of the frayed rope.
I haven’t ever shaken or otherwise harmed my children. But I have often been horrified by the dark intrusive thoughts that come into my mind at 3am; and four kids in, I’m much more comfortable with leaving them in bed.
My wife and I joke about this all the time — how the hell can we become more like Daniel Tiger’s parents!? We swear right off-camera in the other room they’re ripping a massive bong or something to remain that chill… And Daniel, that kid is perfect, listens to reason all the time, and pretty much never has a tantrum!
Just once I want to see Daniel lose his shit followed by the parents who are exhausted trying to hold it together. I want a realistic portrayal of parenting and childhood tantrums. I want to see the parents break down and over-punish or say something wrong but then retract and come back and say sorry, etc.
That being said, we take our own deep breaths, try our best to comfort our kiddos when we can and ensure that all their needs are met. And when all else fails—gas, diaper, food, play-time, teething, checking for cold symptoms, holding them in a low-stimulus room, etc. — we give them a little time to try to calm down or take a nap. On the flip-side, we’re not fans of the CIO method and aren’t just going to let them go on and on for a half hour or more. A reset after that tends to reveal whatever the problem is… But anyway, we’re still learning.
Yeah, I’m often amazed at how the closest thing to realistic anger I’ve ever seen Daniel’s parents fall into is when Daniel used his dad’s sock to make a puppet. And the closest thing to a real tantrum that Daniel himself has ever had was when he was…like, over-exhausted or something?
Same with Bluey. That dad is setting expectations way too high.
we’re not fans of the CIO method and aren’t just going to let them go on and on for a half hour or more.
That never worked for us either. The kid definitely escalates. Resets work way better.
Bandit models a lot of good parenting, but he’s way too much of a pushover to be an actual role model. Also, I’m sure you’d look like a super parent if people only got to see your absolute best moments.
Oh, that’s a good point. My nine best dad minutes every week probably compare significantly more favorably to Bandit’s than a randomly-selected nine minutes.
Bandit has unlimited energy and a team of well-slept writers. He’s a good role model as long as you realise he is as unrealistic as any other cartoon animal.
I hear you fellow dad. I doubt anyone wants to admit it but we all have limits to our patience, kindness and responsibility, especially, like you say, when deprived of sleep and getting screamed in the earhole for long periods of time. Kids (and especially babies of course) don’t understand that. A couple of times I’ve been so strung out and stressed that I’ve had to put the baby down and go outside and beat the earth with a stick. This was much easier to do, having previously been given the advice by a midwife. It’s too easy to think you should have infinite patience, which is why I think things can go tragically wrong in some cases.
Trampolines work wonders. Even one of the little ones. Jumping rope is good too, if you’re good at it. Your leg muscles are your biggest muscles and engaging them will burn off the most stress hormones the most efficiently.
No kidding. My outlet is a long bike ride, but that assumes my wife is home and not also feeling at the end.
+1 here, bike rides are just the perfect way to cool down. Somewhat heavy sustained physical activity just takes you away and drains from any anger
I seriously can’t wait to go out for a guilt-free bike ride!
Since I get the feeling I don’t want to look it up.
What were the alleged ”liberal media lies” that “ruined” this girls life?
she sounds like a really cool person and it’s awful that happened to her son
this joke isn’t making fun of her or saying she’s a bad person. people can like porn like this without being bad or racist people.
but i’m glad you told us a bit about who she is. porn stars and sex workers do something really kind, in a way, because they are providing something people really want, but may not otherwise get, which is also a fundamental human need. i hope one day society changes and we glorify sex workers for being valuable members of society and i hope one day being a porn star is completely a choice and doesn’t have to be disentangled from “late stage capitalism” or extremely unequal wealth distribution or whatever you want to call our current era. People who star in pornography, if not forced to star in it due to poverty, choose to become slightly public figures, in a strange way, and should expect possible jokes like this. this joke is not making fun of her, it’s making fun of the play on words. it sucks she was trolled for a gofundme, however, and perhaps this joke should be seen in that context as therefore being unfair.
did the boyfriend get convicted? is she doing alright now? i hope she’s doing well too. there are between 3-6 parents out there who owe everything to her right now and always will.
To pull on one thread of your very sad story: the shocking displays of racism in seemingly all black/white interracial porn is beyond disgusting. I think it plays a big part in perpetuating racism in younger white men, because in their very formative years, seeing the type stuff I’ve scrolled past? It can seemingly only work to turn men on if it plays on racism. And some of them lean so hard into this that it’s just outright racism. But when people are scrolling porn, they’re not in their right minds. So if they have those racist inclinations, or they just grew up almost never interacting with any Black people, it only serves to pile racist stereotypes and conditioning into their brains. It’s disgusting.
I remember reading something about interracial pornography being the latest iteration of racial anxieties that originated in America as a byproduct of slavery.
In a country without a history of slavery interracial videos still play off racial and sexist stereotypes.
the small benefits of being gay i guess
I dunno. I’ve watched vids in this genre when the lady performer is someone I’m already interested in seeing. They don’t make me feel insecure or engender racism in me. But then again, I was already an adult when broadband internet became a thing. And true broadband, fast enough to allow instant streaming, was still years after that. I can see your point for kids growing up with it though.
Yeah, I definitely mean more now. When I was a kid, we didn’t have just huge scrollers of porn. You had to look for what/who you wanted. Now, in this time of “maximum engagement” and algorithms, they will put popular stuff in front of you, hoping to get you watching. It’s gotta be where a lot of the incest interest comes in, too. And the more inflammatory they make the titles, the more they can put you onto specific niches of taboo pleasure, the more likely it is they can get you to click and keep clicking. So they will put like “I SHRED my INNOCENT little sister’s VIRGIN PUSSY” or like “four HUGE DICKED black men VIOLATE this young pristine WHITE PUSSY”
Like…ew. What the fuck.
Just another example of how the internet has been weaponized and bastardized from the early days.
An in-depth probe was done by the BBC. Both parties seemed satisfied in the end.
Classic…
Username checks out
I’ve watched that video over and over and over again. The librul media has gone too far! (Well tbh, once I finished the first time, I didn’t have the energy to watch it again.)
I need to know: Is that parenthesized bit a big exaggeration, do you mean you didn’t want to anymore, was it very long, or are there actually people for which porn takes on some infohazard-like quality where they can’t stop themselves so much that it’s actually exhausting? It’s not really your shame but all these cryptic allusions everyone here is making make me feel really out of touch.
Though the only erotic things I’ve ever seen take at least some mental work to classify as porn, this does make me wonder how the taboo on this topic causes people and their experiences to be locked in 1-sized bubbles, because they only ever share these kinds of allusions and assume it’s the same for everyone else.
TBH, only being able to watch it once is a bastardization of some joke I heard on that TV show Home Improvement. It was something about the wife making fun of the husband, who was a middle-age man, for not being able to go multiple rounds in bed. It was so dumb. It stuck with me all these years and I make these dumb jokes WAY TOO often.
What if we cancelled cancel culture itself? We just need to paint cancel culture as problematic, sexist, racist, transphobic, homopho…
…oh, it often punishes minorities way more than the non-minorities, and some on the far-right have figured out how to exploit it to cause leftist infighting.
I fucking hate what they did to that poor girl.
Yeah they shafted her pretty hard.
Those accusations were a real gut-shot.
This always makes me laugh. Anyone seen the aftermath of searching this IRL?
I fucking hope so.
I’d need a second towel for that 🤌🏽
This is funny, but 100% of Trumps supporters know who she is. You don’t campaign that hard to ban porn if you’re not miserably addicted to it.
I didn’t catch it til I read your comment. Is there that much crossover between trumpets and the conservatives trying to block pornography?
Yeah, it’s a major part of the Republican “Project 2025” plan for if Trump wins in November.
Not only are they promising to uphold the First Amendment and all forms of free speech, they are also promising to ban porn because it is “too offensive”. Very coherent stuff…
And yeah, most conservative men have a porn problem and their desire for a ban is a desperate call for a nanny state that will protect them from their own sex drives.
Tired of politics as usual? Lemonparty.org!
can you stop i’m not clicking on that