The Horror of Katseye

[FanOfGailDines]

If you haven't come across Katseye and this post means you see one of their videos I apologise. The songs are ear worms the videos are sex shows.

They are young girls themselves that have been groomed into this industry. They are then, in turn, grooming vast numbers of children. It is a trail of bread crumbs to Only Fans and the like.

Their videos also present drug taking as sexy and cool and have trans content that is kind of an extension of all the dressing up as sex objects.

They are wildly commercial and have many partnerships with companies that sell children's products: TicTac, Mattel, Lush, Gap.

I'll stop now but I could write a book on all the wrongness of Katseye. My daughter's friend went to the concert in Dublin and was thinking that she would be surrounded by teenagers but found that actually there were loads of children in the 3Arena, some as young as six.

You can watch Hootie Fruttie or Pinky Up or Animal or Gnarly YouTube.

This is the music and dance that is forming the idea of what it means to be girl today.

My 19 yo just came in to ask why I was listening to Gnarly. She tells me it isn't aimed at children... I agree with you OP, it's porn, pure and simple.

My children still come across the influence of Katseye even though they have parents who are paying attention. Also, as someone pointed out, it takes time to get your head around the implications of all this and many parents have very little time free. Also, it is hard to be counter cultural. To be worried about your children watching/ listening-to/ copying Katseye is counter-cultural as has been made clear by this thread!
My problem is with the reach of the Katseye machine. It is a cynical exploitation of children and the market that comes with children and it is an exploitation of those members of Katseye and their talents. It is a ghastly machine that is searing porn images in children's brains when they are forming their idea of themselves.
I don't blame parents. I wish more parents were on their guard against cultural forces like this though.

I didn't realize Katseye was that sexual. I am only aware of them because I'm into kpop, and they are posted about in kpop places being also from Hybe, one of the biggest kpop companies right now. This group is Hybe's foray into a more American/global market. It sounds like they made them way more sexual than their female kpop counterparts (that said i'm mainly into boy groups).

But on the children topic, kpop is targeted heavily at children, so I assumed Katseye was as well... they are certainly talked about in kpop spaces and they perform on some of the korean music shows with other kpop groups. Children and young people who are into kpop would be easily exposed to this group.

That's interesting. I don't know anything about Kpop aside from an awareness of the Kpop Demon Hunters phenomenon. Many of the local children went to K Pop all Stars show where they were in Ireland and they do Katseye songs too.

https://entertainers.co.uk/shows/kpop-all-stars

My family was in a shopping centre in Cork yesterday and there were kites designed by children hanging up. Two of them were Katseye themed. One was lovely little pictures of all the girls in the band with their names and the other was more stylised. The pictures of the girls were cartoony and sweet. It is just that many children have access to the internet and will be able to look up the awful music videos and/or girls replicating those dances on social media.

A young woman dressed in skimpy school girl clothes with her hair in bunches doing suggestive dance moves, singing suggestive lyrics and staring suggestively at the camera? Britney was 16/17 when the video/record was released. Okay, yes that’s wholesome.

Oh please.

If you think this is new please go and watch Christina Aguilera’s Dirrty video and then report back.

I loved it as a young teen and have managed to become an acceptable member of society.

People used to panic like this about Britney Spears and Madonna and every other female popstar. Chill.

Again, the 'horror' is that Katseye has huge numbers of children (6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11 year olds) copying their mannerisms and outfits and expressions and dance moves. If you picture a seven year old doing the dance moves or watching the video from Gnarly or Pinky Up or Hootie Fruttie I would think that you would agree that this has the potential to put that child at greater risk of being looked at and treated in a way that is not alright for a girl of that age.
Also young teens who were watching Dirrty have gone on to be 'creators' on Only Fans. My argument is that these cultural influences, by degrees, make it more socially acceptable to do something like sell videos of yourself for money. This does not seem liberating to me.
I don't think this is new. I think it was awful, is awful but Katseye happens to be the band of the moment and also I am talking about primary school children specifically.

https://www.childrenscommissioner.gov.uk/resource/sex-is-kind-of-broken-now-children-and-pornography/

I was 10 when Dirrty was released. I was even younger when "I'm a Slave 4 U" was released. I used to do the dances in the playground with my friends.

I turned out just fine.

Listening to pop music is likely not a major contributor to women end up as sex workers.

Some people just don’t care about the sexualisation of children 🤷‍♀️ it’s a sick world and people are happy to turn a blind eye if it makes them selves feel uncomfortable about having to step outside the narrative written by companies whose aims are far from wholesome.

I feel so sorry for kids these days, they have no protections in place at all for them. And you’re up against a brick wall of you’re trying to safe guard your own against this grooming.

I eat a burger and fries from a fast food company now and again. I don't think it has harmed me in the long run but fast food like this has really had a terrible impact on the population at large. I don't think we can make an argument from a couple of personal experiences.

Children today have a lot more access to internet-connected devices than you would have at ten. That makes a difference too.

And the fact that most boys at university age say here in Ireland are regular porn users also changes the landscape of risk and expectations.

https://nakedtruthproject.com/take-action/

Our culture makes it so much easier for sexual predators to prey on vulnerable girls. I'm not going to 'chill' about that.

Have you seen the documentary series about the making of Katseye? Its a cynical money grab to de Korean Kpop for a wider market and those poor girls are trapped in vicious contracts, thousands of miles from home or legal advice.
Their dance style and videos are no different to most Kpop. Awful and porn influenced, but standard for this market aimed at young girls.

Based on this thread as I know naff-all about Katseye, I watched a video from a young gay man who went to a Katseye gig at the last minute who was shocked by how young the children were and that they consisted the majority audience. He made an interesting point that a lot of the kids there were in K-Pop Demon Hunters merch, not Katseye. Indeed the mums next to him said their kids weren't specifically Katseye fans, they just loved K-pop and it sounds like they thought it would be cutesy pop gig, not something very sexual and with swearing.

This is not necessarily bad parenting, but the way that everyone is enabled to live in an absolute media/social media bubble - and we haven't adjusted to that yet I think in many ways. Our parents probably had a lot more of an idea what we were listening to and the nature of what we were into. Now it might be easy to see your kid watching K-Pop demon Hunters and you just absorb 'Oh so this is fun and aimed at kids';

I find it really strange. there is so much increased awareness when it comes to child safeguarding and yet there seems to be a total blind spot when it comes to how sexualising children makes them less safe and is just wrong and horrid and going to lead to crappier sex in the future.
This is such a bizarre world. That at some point I might have to explain to my children that strangulation is dangerous and just a thing that has become a trend because of people watching extreme things online. It's all very off. Lots of weapons in the Katseye videos.
Have a look at Pages 7-9 about Pornography in Ireland. The popular titles. This is the mainstream stuff.
This report is by the Sexual Exploitation and Research Policy Institute on Pornography and was submitted to the parliament here.

https://data.oireachtas.ie/ie/oireachtas/committee/dail/34/joint_committee_on_arts_media_communications_culture_and_sport/submissions/2026/2026-05-13_submission-sexual-exploitation-and-research-policy-serp-institute_en.pdf#:~:text=•%20Pornography%20consumption%20in%20Ireland,The%20pornography%20industry's%20business%20model

Ermmmmm probably every girl group or any kind of music artist for that matter are sexualised to an extent in their videos and live performances, it keep people talking not just watching and listening. It is what is it. Multiple celebrities have only fans etc. there have been many people in the same industry who have groomed others and pedo’s; whilst it doesn’t make it right they have money so as such they can do what they want and some things will unfortunately get swept under the carpet or erased from their timeline to an extent.
I genuinely think they are a group of young girls who yes were selected from a bunch of other women based on their singing and dance moves and I’m sure their looks too. They sing, the dance, someone else makes their music, like a lot of people now a days. The children like it. Actually some of their songs are catchy.

Have you ever seen the spice girls?

I think I have more issue with the young girls of Katseye that are in awful contracts right now.
And if you don’t vet the stuff your kids are into and take them to a gig, that’s on you.

My teen (a huge little mix fan) finds Sabrina Carpenters music and performances vile. 😆

(I also struggle to find anything Little Mix that comes close to the constant sexual references that come from the likes of her tbf)

The Spice Girl comparison might be like being nostalgic about the good old days of Playboy as compared with the violent dark porn clips of today's world. I don't think the Spice Girls were good for childhood but I think that the Katseye product is a much more malevolent force in children's lives.

I think it's really concerning how these young women were and are being treated. They are pushed beyond the brink mentally and physically. There is almost always one member of Katseye who has an injury and the documentary showed one very advanced dancer who broke her foot and another that needed surgery. What are they doing to them?!

My tweeny daughter likes them and their original content was far more innocuous, but has become far more risqué since the youngest member turned 18 - which is disgusting in itself.

I don't think the 'it is what it is' way of thinking about this is alright when it comes to children. If you watch Gail Dine's TED Talk below, at 5 minutes into the talk she explains better than I can why this is something we should be taking seriously. She interviewed a man who was in prison for crimes against his step daughter and he said, "The culture did a lot of the grooming for me".

Girls are trained at an early age that to look 'hot and sexy' is something to aspire to and then that makes it much easier for ill intentioned men. Grooming gangs would be an example of this.

But that is bad parenting. They bought tickets to a concert that is aimed at much older people for their young kids based on a misconceived assumption that all K-pop is the same. K-pop demon hunters was aimed at children. Katseye aren’t. That’s on the parents and nobody else. If people want to give their kids access to YouTube, Spotify, tik tok etc then it’s their job to police what they look at and have access to. It’s disingenuous to blame the band for lackadaisical parenting.

I'm not blaming the band or totally absolving the parents, I agree, they should have done their research, yes, but I think that it is something people haven't got their heads around yet as it's been a major shift from, say, sitting around watching TOTP together, to everyone with their head in their own device and own, separate, cultural worlds. We need to make this shift to really understanding that just because something's aimed at kids, that doesn't make it suitable for kids and I suppose that message is still seeping in.

I did make a conscious decision to understand what my kids were into, but I kind of missed the 'worst' of this as mine are mid to older teens now and fortunately very uninterested in social media or mainstream pop culture.

Katseye don't make porn though. They are a pop band. There was a similar drama about Sabrina Carpenter.

The fact that parents buy concert tickets for their small children without at least googling the band is bizarre to me. It's totally on parents to moderate what their children watch. I wouldn't look at Katseye and think "yep, that looks suitable for my 6 year old" but I also don't think we need to ban them because some parents are crap.

"And you’re up against a brick wall of you’re trying to safe guard your own against this grooming."

How so? What is stopping you from safeguarding your children?