Billboard made a bad joke on Oct. 30 and the Internet lit up in collective ire.
It started when a paparazzi video of Kim Kardashian West and her daughter North was released to the public. In the video, North and Kim are walking to North’s ballet class and the toddler says to the paparazzi, “I said no pictures!”
Understandable, right? The girl is just trying to get to dance class without being photographed. We all can relate. North is adorable, unafraid of paparazzi and dresses better for dance class than I do for most special occasions.
However, of course, when the Kardashian Wests do something, it must be reported on. And Billboard took the joke way too far when they tweeted a picture of North licking a lollipop with the caption, “The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree…”
The tweet has since been deleted, but if you can’t visualize it: it’s a joke comparing North enjoying a lollipop to a sex act that her mother happened to perform in the infamous sex tape that was released without her consent in 2007. When her mother was a consenting adult in a relationship. North, by the way, is two years old.
The even more confusing and disgusting thing is that North didn’t even have a lollipop in the video. Billboard chose the picture from a separate occasion to back up their objectifying comment.
Once the magazine realized how much they’d messed up, and how angry people were getting at them, they sent out a tweet saying that the comment was not meant to be sexual. It was about how North’s disdain for the paparazzi takes after her mother, who’s been known to do things like keep her head down when being photographed. People were not, however, moved, and continued to tweet at Billboard telling them that sexually objectifying a baby is never okay.
Billboard eventually replaced the sexualization of North with a sexist comment: calling North “sassy already.” North is not anything “already.” She is two years old. She can probably barely feed herself. Who are we to say she wasn’t just annoyed at the dozen cameramen pointing giant lenses in her face? No one, especially not two-year-olds, wants to be harassed by strangers.
You may say that this is just a part of life when you have parents as famous as Kim Kardashian and Kanye West. And you would be right: the child of less-famous parents who was maybe slightly less well-dressed would probably not get this level of media attention. But we’re lying to ourselves if we think for even one second that Billboard did not make the disgusting “joke” due to the collective vitriol we seem to have toward her mother, Kim Kardashian West.
Kim (May I call her Kim? I feel like I know her) is a highly divisive figure. Wars have been started over feelings much weaker than peoples’ feelings toward Kardashian West. Depending on whom you ask, she’s either a feminist icon or the very epitome of anti-feminism, the paradigm example of what’s wrong with the world. She’s so beautiful that people have long wondered whether or not she’s been surgically enhanced, and have long said she comes off as ditzy and uneducated and — the big one — she has somehow built an empire off of it. And it all started with a sex tape.
The sex tape. The sex tape that she recorded with her then-boyfriend Ray-J, who released it without her consent after they broke up. The sex tape that she then took control of, buying it herself so that she could make money off of it. Taking the ultimate betrayal and turning it into something that is not only gives her profit, but strength.
The issue is split among feminists. There are people who support the Kardashians and people who look down upon them and then write bitter thinkpieces about it. I’ve tried many times to put myself in Kim’s position, wondering what I would do if my hypothetical celebrity ex-boyfriend was particularly mad at me one day and decided to release our most intimate moments for the world to see. And I cannot think of a better response than what she actually did. Actually, dare I say it, I cannot think of a more feminist response.
There are plenty of reasons to hate Kardashian West: you hate seeing the rich get richer, you hate unbridled capitalism, you hate reality television empires, you hate ridiculously beautiful people, you hate Kylie Jenner’s Instagram and think that somehow reflects on her sister … whatever. I also hate Kylie Jenner’s Instagram, so if you do, we should talk. I have a lot of opinions.
But Kim Kardashian owning her sexuality is not a reason to hate her, and definitely not a reason to objectify her daughter who is not even old enough to have feelings for any other gender. And what Billboard’s tweet (and the millions of people who clicked on it) says about the way we treat women in society is something far more disgusting than a sex tape.
Another terrific article. Very well expressed. Well done.