Ohio to change child exploitation law after 9-year-old performs in drag

Good.

So are child beauty pageants now banned?

He's a terrible dancer (2:37 mark).

Excellent news

R2 they should be

[quote]Jerri Measley said: ‘Jacob is just a guy who likes to dress up and dance and feel pretty. It’s kind of like Halloween every time he has the opportunity to do it.’

[quote]She claims critics ‘grossly warped’ her family’s intentions. Measley does understand why people are against her son performing in a bar, but says that is the only place for him to explore drag culture.

Too fucking bad, Jerri. Drag culture is sexual and it's meant for adults. If your son likes to wear dresses and feel pretty, feel free to get him involved in age-appropriate cosplay convention stuff where he can dress like his favorite Disney princess or whatever. No child should be collecting cash tips from adults for dancing in a goddamn bar, FFS.

Good for Ohio. Bad enough that Afghanistan has 'dancing boys' for grown men, it doesn't need to be a worldwide trend.

Agree, R6. Why can't he dress up, dance and "feel pretty" at home? Mom basically admits that the audience of grown-up men offering cash are a necessary ingredient to her son's "exploration".

I'm sure there are plenty of little boys who have/would like to put on their mum's make-up and and a sparkly dress to perform in front of the family and why not? kids performing songs and dances and plays at home is entirely normal. My dad even put a curtain up across the beam in our living room so one half could become a 'stage' when necessary (we were all girls, a boy in a dress may have been less welcome admittedly).

But performing for grown men in a bar is not normal, not at all. Why does he need to 'explore drag culture'? can't he just be a boy in a dress singing a song for his family? I feel like people's ideas of what is normal or acceptable has become seriously distorted these days.

Sign the kid up for children’s theater, for a dance troupe, for ballet, whatever. There are tons of outlets for creative little kids that don’t involve dancing a in a bar for adults.

This is just more of the recent acceptability of children in bars generally. It seems like breweries in particular attract parents with young children. The last time I was around extended family one of the cousins said they had recently taken their baby to a Widespread Panic concert! When I told them how inappropriate I thought that was they said, “We put earplugs in his ears!” like the biggest problem was the child’s potential hearing loss.

It's sad that these kinds of laws are needed, but not surprising given how few parents actually care about their children.

R10 they are not interested in their kid being "creative". They want to $exualize junior and set him on the road to earning money for them.

If he were a girl, he'd have his own show!

There's a snide article in the Guardian about this. They try to frame it as conservative push-back, with a heading about a 'Republican' wanting a change in the law, but have to concede at the end that a Democrat they quote also supports the bill on the grounds of child protection. Also some odd phrasing suggesting that the boy himself 'sparked the ire of local politicians', as opposed to the adults who are exploiting him as facilitating all of this.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/apr/20/ohio-boy-drag-queen-law-children

^^ Because you know, making sure that people know you're woke is obviously more important than child protection, which is just for right-wing conservatives....or something.....

What about protecting children from receiving puberty blockers/hormones and undergoing genital mutilation surgeries while still a minor? Where are the Democrats standing up against that?

No R17, I don't think anyone's standing up for that, yet. When the lawsuits start coming in in a few years everyone will conveniently forget they supported these medical experiments on children.

R18, oh, THEY might forget but the Internet never forgets. That is going to be fun. Spotlighting all the people - both celebrities and regular folks - who forcefully supported medical experimentation on perfectly healthy children.

I'm sure he's a nice kid and I wish him well. That being said, I'm just not a fan of children in adults spaces. I want to return to a time where there were genuinely adult only spaces. It's gotta be frustrating to go to a bar/club and want to let loose, but feel pressured to censor yourself because there are kids around. The whole point of these places is to have an atmosphere that isn't so censored, where you can be a little crude/ wild (within reason of course ). In the past there was probably too sharp a division between children and adults (speak only when spoken to, etc ). Now the pendulum has swung too far in the other direction and people want to involve their kids in everything. As r11 pointed out, it's just out of control!

I think it's part of the way in which the demarcations between adults and children are getting much fuzzier. It goes along with parents wanting to be their children's friend rather than setting boundaries, but also the way in which children and young people are treated more like agentic adults in some ways - expected to have greater awareness of the world, while adults take forever to grow up compared with previous generations, acting as 'kidults' into our thirties.

I really feel like we need to remember that children aren't just little adults and it's we who need to draw the boundaries since they can't, and that we can't just throw away everything we know about vulnerability and the need for child-protection. This of course links in with the transing of children that is being discussed in another thread - the idea of a pre-pubecsent child as self-knowledgeable, agentic, and 'consenting' to serious medical intervention in this way is concerning.

Baby June

I really don’t see a problem with this.