Mothers who pimp their daughters out on Instagram. How does this ever get done?

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Link to a New York Times article from February. Probably pay walled, apologies.

Instagram is apparently introducing changes to reduce 'inappropriate content', so this article has been reposted.

How does any mother reach the point of running an Instagram account for their daughter (very rarely for boys apparently) where the preteen girl poses and dresses up in swimwear, dance clothes etc etc? Watching the obviously paedophile likes and comments roll in? What would go through a woman's head to make this OK?

A Marketplace of Girl Influencers Managed by Moms and Stalked by Men https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/22/us/instagram-child-influencers.html?smid=nytcore-android-share

Oh that is just so perverted it's hard to believe it's real.
The article wasn't paywalled by the way.
It's an extremely distressing read.
I don't understand how child protection laws can't be enforced to stop this blatent exploitation of the young girls involved.

The article is paywalled for me. What is the benefit to the mother of doing this? Does Instagram pay out for the number of views the way that YouTube does? Or is there something nefarious happening behind the scenes? It can't just be for 'likes' surely?

It's for money, yes. Thinking about entry points, women who have become used to being on Instagram themselves, perhaps following 'influencers' and seeing them having apparently incredible lives, looking up to what they are doing, perhaos thinking this is an aspirational career for their child... and also getting likes, finding that 'family' content gets more likes... I can kind of see how that can shade into putting pictures of your pretty daughter up and getting lots of approval... and in chasing the approval, get more and more into dressing them up. Until you have your 9 year old in a bikini and lipstick getting explicitly sexual comments from men.

I suppose I wrote that because it's so hard to think about women just deciding to exploit their daughters. But that must happen too.

I've often been uneasy about some mothers and they way they behave around beauty pageants and very young children but also some of the dance competitions and very young children.

We seem to have stymied society into not being able to voice our qualms readily because we don't have general agreements about childhood, what constitutes exploitation etc.

Here’s an archive link to the article:

archive.is/DTi4u

Have a watch of Dad challenge podcast videos on you tube - He talks....... a lot (and he also talks a lot!) about parents who use their kids for clickbait/money online and why its an awful thing to do.

Yeah, I think this is how this kind of thing gets under the radar for most of these mums.

Just look at what goes on in competitive dance, with quite young girls. In many, maybe the majority of cases, these kids are wearing highly sexualized clothing and performing sexualized dances.

The mothers seem totally oblivious, and think this is just what dance is about. That these outfits are just so you can see the girls are dancing and moving properly. If anyone questions this, or points out that in more traditional studios you don't see that kind of thing, they say that those people are perverts for imposing sexual ideas on kids.

They are totally blind, and so no wonder they are equally blind when it comes to this Instagram stuff. No surprise a lot of them are modeling dance wear and are dance themed accounts.

I suppose some people are just less sensitive, less aware of social implications. And then society is making it harder for these people to see when boundaries are being crossed, after all there are dance schools full of it so it must be normal, right?

But what gets me is that as a general viewpoint we have never been so open about the existence of the sexual abuse of children. Crowds out on the street shouting the odds about 'paedos' at the drop of a hat. And yet the power of socialising girls to present as hyperfeminine and for the external gaze is so strong that it's being ignored that in this context hyperfeminine equals sexualised, and the external gaze is paedophile men.

We know there are women who abuse children, and women who ignore abuse of their children by men in order to maintain some kind of relationship with these men. I guess there are more who will do a version of that online.

I sometimes think that women who will sacrifice their kids for men may be more common than we might realize. I might not have said that a few years ago, but when I look at all the friends of my children there are a few whose mums have pretty much done just that in one way or another. More than I'd have expected to encounter.

I've also thought, there is something going on with the sexualization of kids and especially girls, on the one hand, and the crazy mobs after paedos on the other. I remember maybe 10 or 15 years ago an academic getting that treatment after writing about the sexualization of girls - but he wasn't saying it was a good thing, he was reporting a cultural phenomena. It seemed to me like a kind of displacement.

The sexual revolution has a lot to answer for IMO - it's created a sort of unstable ship that rocks back and forth ever more crazily.