Rarely do I see things and get taken aback by them. For the most part, the stuff that is gonna shock has already shocked me, and all this new school stuff (two girls, one cup) is just too gross and too out there to actually garner any kind of impact from me. But every now and then I have a flashback to something that stood out to me as a child, and I decide to explore it again as an adult to see if, perhaps, my mind is playing it up a little bit. What I often find is that my mind is actually DOWNPLAYING it. That is what happened when I rediscovered Laura Branigan’s Self Control, and that is just what happened here, today, when I finally remembered the Tubes video for She’s A Beauty. A video that, realistically, ingrained a certain sexual deviancy in me, and I was only a witness to it. What about the poor kid that was actually IN the video? The worst part is I think I grew up slightly jealous of this kid, and completely unaware of just how terrible all of this shit was for a little kid to experience. I think. I mean, I don’t know because I didn’t experience any of it until I was an adult, and even THEN, it STILL fucked me up. Anyway, on to examination of The Tubes: She’s A Beauty.
So you are either old like me and remember this video, or you are young, and don’t. For those who don’t, and for those who think they do but probably don’t have an accurate memory, here it is:
See, what did I tell you? Where should we even begin right now?
I am feeling so many things, but most of all I feel dirty and confused. I understand that a great deal of songs from the 80’s dealt with strippers and porn stars and such (cough cough) but the main thing I am walking away with here is that this video is about fetishism, and for some odd reason, chooses to feature a young child in it, as oppose to, you know, a teenager or grown man, which would STILL convey the same message of the song. So why a kid? NO, SERIOUSLY, WHYYYYYYY????!!!! Don’t read this if you are looking for answers, because I have none. I am asking YOU! Granted, we could say it is playing up the images a young man has in his head of ideal women as a child, and also playing up the sexuality women possess and how we deconstruct that as a gender. But if you said that you’d be a pretentious idiot. We shalln’t look that deeply into something so shallow.
Also, did anyone else notice how much the singer looked like Flint Lockwood from Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs? Seriously.
Compare the above pic to the second frame of the photo below to see just what it is I speak of.
I am so glad someone caught a frame of that S&M dominatrix choking that kid out. Why? Because WTF is that??!!!
Told you.
Anyway, if you are looking at the above pic, I want you to go left to right, and count to twelve, frame by frame. Do you see that twelfth picture? Here, let me explain. It is a shot from the video where the young boy is being choked out by a dominatrix, while he watches two feral women go apeshit in a cage in front of him. Now if you actually watch the above video and see the scene I am talking about, you will that the billy club slips for a second, in that EXACT scene, the dominatrix really chokes the kid out. I didn’t read this anywhere, I noticed it while watching this video in abject horror. In that scene, I want you to look at this kids eyes. There is a genuinely palpable sense of terror in them. Not fear, mind you. TERROR.
And here is the real kicker, the kid is dragged from sexual scenario to sexual scenario on this “ride”, and the levels of dehumanization of women in this video is pretty much unparalleled (except in every rap video ever featuring the word “club”), and all the while, this poor little boy can be seen getting traumatized about fifteen times, worse and worse. Wait, was he a fucking orphan they found on the street before the shoot, or did this kid actually have parents that okay’d this shit?
Shown: Parenting.
I like to think “orphan” for obvious reasons. If you, as a parent, need money so badly that you would allow your child to star in something this fucked up, I hope you choke on your White Castle burgers you are inevitably going to invest that very money in. And please, don’t even get me started on the parents of kids who star in shit like this. My point being, unless someone was walking along with that kid, every single shot, and telling him EVERYTHING he was seeing was wrong and fucked up, he is now probably some sexually deviant sociopath who skins women so he can make a sweater that he wears to dance around his Mother’s grave.
Did anyone else notice how shiny the mermaid’s breasts were?
So anyway, watched this video earlier today for no good reason, and was appalled at just how overt it was. Not because I am conservative, or because of my strong feminist leanings, but because there was a fucking kid involved. And though finding out who this kid in the video is and where he is now is proving to be difficult, what I did manage to find out was interesting enough to me. The song is about a time the lead singer saw a sign that said “Pay a dollar and see a naked girl” in San Francisco, and he went, payed the dollar, and yanked it to some naked chick in a booth. Yes, you read that correctly. The song is f*cking literal. He is telling himself, in hindsight, not to fall in love with that San Fran stripper. And apparently, some time between the song being recorded and the video being made, he decided to incorporate a child and make it all that much more messed up.
Simple enough, but I just wanted to share with you what I genuinely thought after seeing the video today, which, is, seriously, how messed up must that kid be now? Truth is, the search ends now. I don’t even want to know.
The post Can We Take A Moment To Discuss How Messed Up This Kid Probably Is Now appeared first on Remy Carreiro.