Over the weekend, The Daily Beast Live published a video of TV personality Jeff Schroeder blasting Balenciaga, the fashion company that recently released an ad campaign featuring little girls holding teddy bears in bondage gear. His rant is worth watching:
Schroeder is right in more ways than one. It is true that the mainstream media has published stories on this issue, it is true that most of the columnists and TV hosts said the right thing, but it is also true that considering the sheer hideousness of the ad – which included a print copy of a Supreme Court decision on child pornography – the outrage was severely muted.
Over at The View, the hosts condemned the ad as merely “distasteful” and “ugly,” with one of them complaining that the ad was “badly timed” because it “played right into the hands” of those of us who also condemn drag shows for kids, and it was “a dangerous time to give credence to those kind of insane takes.” In other words, this ad was bad because it was bad for the pro-LGBT community and seemed to prove the point of those condemning the sexualization of children.
The mainstream media insists that conservatives condemning the sexualization of children is a nonsense moral panic – that none of this is as bad as all that. Of course, most outlets have to say that, because they’ve leveraged much of their credibility into defending drag shows for kids, child drag queens, explicit how-to sex education for kids, transitioning children, and vile entertainment. Thus, it is difficult for them to express the appropriate moral outrage demanded by Balenciaga’s vile ads because a) many of them don’t feel any outrage to begin with and b) many of them probably recognize the hypocrisy in condemning Balenciaga while defending pornographic books written just for kids.
