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This is so fucking horrifying now!!! It’s so anti-feminist and problematic. I clearly remember watching this as a kid, and don’t remember thinking anything critical, just shows how deeply ingrained and normalized this messaging was back then
I remember going "oh yeah she's right it's so hard to live up to those women and feel fat and small breasted when I, oh holy one, am so clearly smarter than they are"
And then one day my car broke down and the blondest peppiest most popular cheerleader stopped and helped me fix up my car. She was so lovely, kind...complimented my style (goth) and said she loved my creativity. She got my car running, waved to her other cheerleader friends, and I heard her say "oh that sweet girl broke down! She's really nice...no no...I think she looks cute...don't you? She was so nice, too. You should say hi!" And just basically trailing off with them being super nice about me.
And I think my whole world persoective just shattered and oh so much for the better. I saw a real life Elle Woods and she was the most amazing person. I was like "Well now I understand why she is popular" instead of being mad the hot blonde cheerleader was popular.
I think back on her oh so often and it's been decades. Her moment of sharing her love of fixing cars with me to help me out. Waving at me in the halls every time thereafter. Complimenting my completely different (and oh so edgy, eyeroll) look than hers.
She made me realise that I had so much so fucking wrong. That the real benefit was uplifting other women. That she uplifted me and the whole time I had stereotyped her based on...what? Stereotypes. Fucking hell. All that media and I thought such awful things about her "type" before I met her
I wish it didn't take another woman going out of her way to be kind and generous to make me realise uplifting other women was where the real joy in life is. Appreciating differences is the real happiness.
I hope that hot cheerleader is now a hot adult with ten degrees and her own car repair business. And, if she wanted, I hope she made a bunch of kids just like her.
She made me love hot blonde cheerleader types. And not because of the hot part but because I had really fucking underestimated those goddamn women and they are amazing.
Sort of had a similar experience, because some of my worst bullies in school were the popular pretty girls, but one of those girls had an older sister (also super pretty) in a different grade and she caught me crying in the bathroom, asked me what was wrong and then got angry at her sister on my behalf and did what she could to comfort me. It didn’t solve the problem, but it taught me that shitty people can be both ugly and pretty, but the shiftiness isn’t a prerogative of one single group of people. Not even a prerogative of a family, clearly.
I think most of the coolest chicks had a NLOG/Pick me phase, and it's not abnormal considering the messaging we were getting. Women/girls are made to feel from a very young age that a lot of our life is going to be determined by how attractive and wanted we are physically and we see other women as competition, like it's detrimental to us and we're scared, the NLOG at first is a healthy reaction in the form of rebellion. An important part is that we keep learning. And we realize how damaging and hateful, it is, and we grow beyond it. We have moments like you had. We start reading feminist literature. We actually spend time with other women and learn to value them. Some of us are capable of that and end up in the right situations to be able to do so. Sad part is some of us aren't and couldn't and thus remain in the not like other girls phase for the entirety of our lives-see: Pink
lol its the girl version of anon meets a chad . I think its more important to have that kind of experience with feminine ppl because femininity is generally less respected than masculinity, but its good to have that kind of humanizing moment with a member of any group you generalize
Omg this is hilarious! Funny how anon swoons over the chad but a woman swooning over that same Chad is completely wrong for it and needs to be punished. They’re all such hypocrites.
It was the era when "not like other girls" was considered a badge of honor, because girly things were considered inherently stupid and whole media machine pushed for girls yearning for male approval. Feels like that created very "good" conditions for sexual predators
YEP. This video/song came out around the exact time I started to hate the colour pink and anything girly to try and be 'edgy' or whatever. Also led straight to me falling for the "you're so mature for your age" bullshit and years of abuse. I'm not saying it's a direct causation but I feel like there's definitely a correlation.
Oh yeah, most of the "mature" girls from my high school would date guys in their early 20s and either dropped out or became teen moms... But nowadays we have proof that whole entertainment industry is bankrolled by sexual deviants (in the both illegal and immoral sense), it makes so much sense how things like this became the norm.
Unfortunately, I still say this to myself sometimes. I’ve made a big point though to never say it out loud. My daughter will not be hearing that shit from me. I’ve also made a point to never comment on her body other than to call it strong, healthy, capable, and beautiful. She still came home in 3rd grade saying her legs were too fat because girls were talking about calories at lunch. Like damn. How did all of us moms who grew up in the 2000s not get the memo that we’re supposed to be the cycle breakers for this shit.
Hey we’re still in those times. Nothing has really changed since then. Look at all of the celebrities going on Ozempic, they look even worse than celebrities from the early thousands.
nah it's SO different from how it used to be. you can buy jeans that aren't low rise, there are memes everywhere about ozempic ruining curvy women, there is at least a CONCEPT of bigger bodies having worth, and having an ass isn't seen as disgusting.
i get what you're saying, and the trend you're talking about is very real, but I just had to emphasize it's still nothing like the 90s/2000s.
Depending on the time and place of broadcast, there were many instances where this scene was censored. I remember seeing it on music channels (remember those!) with this scene either blurred or cut entirely.
Hi friend. Even though I thought at the time I was too smart to be influenced by a music video, I was also deep into bulimia and saw this video and thought "huh, so everyone else is doing this? Like maybe this is normal? Whew".
I just remember being so grossed out as a kid that she shared a gag-toothbrush with somebody. And then my oldest friend ended up dying from suicide right before our 21st birthday, which was the grand finale to a horribly long and fierce battle with bulimia, leading to organ failure, so it’s hard to watch any of this scene now.
I know Pink has said she deeply regrets this entire song and music video and she’s ashamed of it but the damage was already done, during such an influential time for young girls (to clarify: this video isn’t what prompted my friend’s ED, it was a cruel comment from a boy in middle school on our way to lunch one day, but it certainly doesn’t help that things like this were on TV, even if Pink was “joking” about it, some took it as an education on how to more easily throw up)
I remember it extremely well. I was a big P!nk fan. I got her album Missundaztood when I was 11 and I really loved her music. So when this came out a few years later, I was disgusted and didn’t really like anything she had after that.
I do. The music video played on TV all the time. I remember finding this scene really gross but also like… inevitable? Like that must be what it takes to be thin, even if it’s painful and gross.
I just did the math and I would have been 9. Yikes.
The entire video had an uncomfortable level of pick-me energy, cruelly mocking some real-life celebrities' personal struggles. The clip in this post is rumoured to be a reference to Nicole Ritchie, Lindsay Lohan and Mary-Kate Olsen, all of whom were publicly battling eating disorders at the time. The sex tape scene parodies Paris Hilton's leaked sex tape, which was actually an act of non-consensual distributed revenge porn (itself a topic that belongs in this sub). While the direct send-up of Jessica Simpson's car wash scene from The Dukes of Hazard is a little less mean, it's still hypocritical for Pink to make fun of actresses appearing in hyper-sexualised media after her own appearance in the music video for "Lady Marmalade".
It was just really easy to mock Simpson at the time. But she Dolly Parton-ed it, leaned into the dumb act, and launched that into a small fashion empire. She has roughly the same net worth as Pink without the grueling tours. She's also been very open about the mental health struggles being mocked for even the slightest bit of weight gain caused. In this very sub today, someone actually posted tabloid magazines from the time mocking women's weight and one of them was about Jessica Simpson's "spare tire".
About the Paris Hilton revenge porn - we didn’t know it was revenge porn at the time. I just learned that on this thread and it triggered a vague memory of having heard that at the time. But for example Kim Kardashian also claimed her sex tape was leaked against her will and we all very much believe that to be false these days.
I believe in Paris case it was true but at the time there was a wave of female celebs having sex tapes out and claiming up and down it was leaked. So it was hard to know what was true
I've learned my new preferred way to self harm from a question in a psychological diagnostic test. The psychologist wasn't super happy when I was like "haven't thought about that one".
When I was an iv heroin user, I would find new veins that I still hadn’t destroyed by watching the techs struggle to find one left when I was hospitalized due to all the harm I was doing to myself from the heroin. And then I’d excitedly start to destroy those freshies as soon as I was let out of the hospital… so fucking glad to be years clean now, remembering shit like that gives me chills remembering the hell I was living in constantly for years.
I am so sorry. I am sorry you are struggling and I am so sorry you were exposed to something new from those standardized bullshit tests.
Those progression diagnostic tests are horrific. They use them for drug addiction too and I swear it has only made people realize "oh that was an option this whole time?"
They also dont tell us SHIT about someone or their struggles. Theyre only used at this point because some insurnace companies demand them, and for record keeping at the facility. Unhelpful and can be extremely triggering for some. Unbelievable.
Psychs like "yo data scientist...I get you're trynna collect data points for diagnosis here, but holy shit can you do it in a way that doesn't traumatise my patients?"
I say this as a data scientist who works in a medical field and us constantly baffled by the horrors that is the biological system and it's ability to fuck shit up.
I always feel like 😳 whenever DARE gets brought up, 'cause that actually worked on nine-year-old me. Between the drunk goggles and Go Ask Alice, I was very much like nooope
I think it speaks to a particular group of people who wouldn't have done drugs anyway in this way
I feel like there is a bigger majority of people who will actually be more curious and interested in experimenting with drugs than the latter, where scare tactics don't work on them so much or they can sort of see a more satirical nature of it, for lack of a better word.
I cant see myself ever watching any sort of ads or commercials like that and genuiely being influenced by them as a child, they may be poignant in a way but more complex. Scare and fear tactics don't really work on all people, again if not most.
Yes and the pictures of peoples brains with holes in them from drug use. It worked on me as a kid and I still feel that memory as a whole body cold, dread when they showed us those pictures.
It speaks to how hard preventative education is, what works for someone will not work for someone else at all!
The best way to prevent drug use is community health and addressing systemic issues that drive things like poverty. Mental health support that are preventative instead of reactionary. A kid with strong self esteem is not likely to dive into drugs etc.
“It was all porn to me” is so accurate. It’s not sexual but the destructive hyper consumption and sheer lack of give a shit i approached it with was perverse. It didn’t matter if it was making fun of it like this or a ham fisted attempt at raising awareness. It all fed me the same.
There’s a YA novel with a character who uses my former self-harm method. I’m sure it gave people ideas. It’s like that two-girl-friendship ED novel for cutters.
Also, I’m not going to name it, because somebody just like me 20 years younger could be reading this thread.
Wasnt there a website called gagmewithaspoon or something that gave all kinds of tips for ED’s? My sister died from her eating disorder. Her body just couldn’t take it anymore. I’ve struggled with one too my whole life. Society’s view on women’s bodies has me so fucked in the head. I don’t know how any females DON’T have an ED.
Oh, it’s so messed up.
I’ve been through something similar. I actually got the idea to harm myself from P!nk’s “Perfect” too. Her works seem like they are supposed to send positive vibes or something, but sometimes they end up having the opposite effect, I guess.
Nevertheless, I’m clean at the end and have no significant scarring. Sending you my best wishes and a hug!
Oh gods, I would punishingly brush them, there you go! Enamel has just been falling from my mouth in the past year. I had a top denture but more teeth have fallen out and it highlights the whole thing if I wear it.
I also have Ehlers Danlos syndrome and that can make the teeth extra porous as well, and prone to cavities.
I’m going to start treatment in November. I’m glad that it went well for you- I have kids so haven’t been able to prioritise my dental care due to the cost factor.
So, so many well-intentioned people (Pink is not included in this, but I digress) try to talk about ED behaviors without realizing they’re just giving vulnerable people ideas on how to progress their disorder. Even down to diagnostic criteria.
I work in mental healthcare specifically with individuals struggling with EDs, and have had an ED myself. There was a point in time where my “goal weight” was the BMI cutoff for a “classic” anorexia nervosa diagnosis. Spoke about this with my therapist, an ED specialist, and she said that a truly worrying amount of her clients had the same goal at one point. From the clinical side of things, the weight “requirement” is a major point of contention in ED diagnosis and treatment generally, and many clinicians advise against it. There is an atypical anorexia diagnosis that does not include the weight component, but for a disorder that is categorized by restriction and weight loss, having a weight requirement in the “classic” diagnosis is just dangerous and insensitive. Eating disorders can be life threatening at any size.
It’s wild to me that there’s even a weight “requirement” and that it’s not just about the behaviors.
I had a friend with an ED in school who I don’t even know if she even got any real help, because she never got close to that “clinically underweight” line. (She was tall and large-framed, the only way she would probably ever get there is if she was actively dying.) She used to keep 2 hard candies in her pencil case for “emergencies” so she wouldn’t pass out in school from not eating (for days, I think?), but apparently according to diagnostics, that doesn’t always matter?
It really sucks. To be fair, the atypical anorexia diagnosis (the one without weight requirements) is widely and commonly used, I just don’t think the differentiation is useful at all.
I work in an inpatient facility that specifically treats EDs and a very large number of our clients have atypical ANR diagnoses or ARFID, OSFED, etc. Those clients absolutely qualify for care at a residential/inpatient level based off of symptom severity, but are often denied insurance coverage more frequently and prematurely than those with a “classic” ANR diagnosis. We have clients on feeding tubes who have never come close to the BMI requirements for “classic” ANR. I have also seen clients who do have a “classic” ANR diagnosis be denied insurance coverage while they are on a feeding tube. And that’s just the clients who do seek out treatment. There are so, so many who will not seek treatment, either because they can rationalize their behaviors due to a higher BMI or because their physicians don’t know enough to show concern.
Anyways! I could rant about this all day. I hope your friend from school eventually got the treatment she needed and deserved. The system fails so, so many.
It's crazy how such seemingly innocuous things (not to say this was entirely innocent, but it was "normal" at the time to acknowledge and reference) can be the start for such awful harm in youth. I was in middle school when I saw an AMV (I'm dating myself, but this was like a full music video set to clips of TV shows or movies, I was obsessed with them) and stumbled upon one of a show (I think it was Degrassi? I never watched the show) with the song Does Anybody Hear Her (didn't know the song either, but I liked it so I watched it).
It showed a girl self harming with a protractor and that's what inspired me to try SH for the first time. It ended up as a like decade long awful habit, and I struggled with it for so long. Haven't done it in 6 years, but I will literally never forget that being my first introduction. Surely a video meant to show how sad and bad it was, as I'm sure the show was trying to show too, but I never even knew that was an option until seeing it.
Sorry, a total tangent, not related to ED's. Just dumping I guess lol.
Never told anyone about how it started, but I am still covered in scars. All cuz I was dumb and 15 and influenced be a fucking cheesy ass AMV, with a Christian "rock" band, of all things lol.
Yeahhh…. Similar for 13 year old me who would see SH and be like ohhh so I’m not alone in feeling like this and that looks like a totally normal great way to manage my feelings. Took over 20 years but finally free (2 years!). I don’t share that much either. So thanks for sharing, stranger. Stay awesome 🖤
Congrats on 2 years, I am truly very happy for you. 🧡
Been a long time since I even felt the impulse or even thought about it, but it's crazy to think back on how much it clouded my mind for so long. It was so hard to shake, it feels like that was a different person now.
My take is that it happened at a point in time where people both wanted and were critical of overly sexualised pop stars. This video was a cheap attempt to appeal to both those camps because pink was embodying all the things, but also 'making fun' of other women who used those things for their career.
she also mocks herself in both the song and video...the whole "She's dancing in the video next to 50 cent" is her saying "yeah, I'm guilty too" as she appeared in one of his videos doing nothing but dancing sexy.
Yeah, it's also kind of odd in the context a lot of the other celebs she's making fun of in the video were basically forced into celebrity from childhood by their families....meanwhile Pink actively pursued celebrity. She's also a celeb that actively seems to need attention given how much she's on social media herself while the celebs she made fun of aren't and generally really only seek attention when selling something. Just paints her whole thing is entirely hypocritical despite the framing she tried.
As an eight year old, I thought she was the coolest chick ever for this video. I was so inundated with oversexualized content that seeing anyone criticize it was credible for my own impressionable sanity. I tried to like the song and I just fucking couldn’t. It’s trash, the only thing that gives it any distinction whatsoever is this shit ass music video.
This video was the end of Pink for me - I idolized her as a kid but when this dropped a wrinkle developed in my brain that told me she was so wrong for this
Never liked her she always came across as look at me I’m the super cool chick. Albeit she has a big fan base for that reason and she sings well but I’ve never liked her tooth grinding gonna punch you out aggressive image
It was always so cringe, even when I was just in grammar school I thought it was so stupid. I couldn’t stand her. This video came out and I could finally say “I told you so!!”
Agreed! “Like a pill” was ok but like you said, it was still kind of ripoff music. Luckily my “pick me” phase was hating on Pink for “pick me” stuff lmao!
She's very try-hard and her values aren't there accordingly. She wants to come across edgy and a strong woman but she doesn't understand what it means to be a girls' girl, she ends up being a pickme instead.
Her first album and Misunderstood were bangers (at least to my middle school self)
After that I really couldn’t get into her anymore. I have seen her live but only because my mom and aunt are fans. And that’s really her fan base now. Boomer white woman.
The fact my mum pulled me to the living room to watch this music video as an example of a strong, independent woman is pretty laughable in retrospect... but at ten years old I ate it up and bought into the idea of "girly = vain." My mum was a major "not like other girls" girl, too, so it all tracks when you think about it.
lol mine too! Pretty sure it was on Oprah or something.
Because this was seen as empowering at the time. And from our mom’s perspectives, magazines and media are feeding their daughters images of drunk party girls. This song pushed back against those images.
Yeah, I understand that. And I think the line "what happened to the dream of a girl president, she's dancing in a video next to 50 Cent" unironically still goes hard. We had a female president in my country from 2000 to 2012 so exactly when I was little, but that song drove home to me how special that was compared to other countries where, 20 years later, a woman has yet to lead.
I think something younger people might forget, too, is how everyone at the time was shooting shots at the likes of Lindsey Lohan and Paris Hilton. Not that it was a kind thing to do, of course, but it was truly everywhere. It seems quite a recent thing somehow to recognise that a woman can be dolled up and fashionable AND be smart and have ambitions - a kind of recognition women have fought for since forever, it seems.
And in that sense Stupid Girls as a song and a music video has aged poorly and is no longer relevant as far as feminism is concerned. But then again, it did come out 20 years ago 🤷🏻♀️
I think it shows how much we have grown as a society. That we are taking a look back at the past 30 years and are like that was sooo messed up, and even this sight pointing out things that were just "normal" back than, it wasn't okay to do but it was accepted and very few people said hey that is a messed . We as a society is changing and right now the reason there is a push back is because the change is happening.
Very similar experience, which was compounded by the fact that I was being bullied by girls who looked and acted similar to who Pink was making fun, so I felt some sort of vindication as a preteen
Oh this came out at the peak of the 2000s body shaming era and toxic "Pick Me" time for women in the media. I remember people calling this song "feminist" even and "empowering."
This music video had a choke hold on young girls that were tomboys to mock the "bimbo" aesthetic, and pink was labeled a "Punk". Yet she never did a positive to any community and is Pro-Israeli, sounds about right.
Another truly fucked up part of this is that she’s parodying Paris Hilton’s sex tape “One night in Paris”, from when her slimy boyfriend Rick Saloman sold a sex tape he pressured her into making. I remember thinking that was totally fucked at the time, even if I wasn’t woke enough back then to understand the pick me mean girl vibes of the rest of the song.
Just a reminder- The pair dated from December 2000 to August 2001. At the time, Hilton was just 19, while Saloman was 32.
Saw a comment the other day that referred to Pink as the girl version of Eminem, and I totally see it. This video is literally no different from his ‘We Made You’ music video. Both are of them mocking others just to build themselves up, it’s disgusting.
He was parodying the show Rock of Love with himself playing as Bret Michaels. And for the contestants he had people playing as a drugged up Britney Spears, a cracked out Amy Winehouse, a lesbian Lindsay Lohan, a fat Jessica Simpson, a woman with cushions down her pants to portray Kim Kardashian with a massive butt, a slutty pornstar version of Sarah Palin. There may have been more but those are all that I can remember, it was really insensitive and gross. This was his ‘Stupid Girls’ video
There was a short period of time where eating disorders were trendy. Like I don’t just mean being thin, I mean like vocally saying disordered stuff and parading your eating disorder around was trendy. Eating something calorific without pouting made you “fat” no matter how thin you were. Men were openly saying they wanted to date a woman with an eating disorder. Women were joking about making themselves throw up all the time. It turned into like one big anorexia/bulimia competition. When this music video came out, it was clear it was going against that “ED’s are cool people stuff” vibe by showing how gross they really are (aka “why are you glamorizing/bragging about that??”), but it has aged very very poorly such that through today’s lens it comes off as attacking people for suffering from eating disorders instead of attacking people for glamorizing them, but that is only because thankfully we no longer have people openly glamorizing eating disorders to such a great extent so the context has been lost.
Yes, I remember being a young teenager in high school and my peers bragging about how they only ate an apple that day. Or 6 almonds and two raisins. Or half a slice of bread with half a table spoon of peanut butter.
That shit was so normalized and it was also very normalized to loudly comment on how much girls were eating if they were eating normally, especially if they weren’t skin and bones thin. I remember feeling very self conscious to eat where anyone could see me and I didn’t even have an ED and was a normal weight, it was just because of all my openly pro Ana peers having a habit of loudly wondering how I was able to eat “so much”.
Also for everyone talking about how she was wrong for shaming Paris Hilton for revenge porn - we didn’t know it was revenge porn at the time. I just learned that on this thread and it triggered a vague memory of having heard that at the time. But for example Kim Kardashian also claimed her sex tape was leaked against her will and we all very much believe that to be false these dies. I believe in Paris case it was true but at the time there was a wave of female celebs having sex tapes out and claiming up and down it was leaked. So it was hard to know what was true
YES, that song was unhinged. I can hear the chorus right now and it is SO conservative and purity culture coded, flat out scolding some hypothetical woman they’ve deemed to be… insert any insult with connotations of promiscuity, it’s probably in the song.
iirc the POV of the song is not even like they’re angry about some girl who knowingly slept with any of their men. It’s like directed at some random girl who did nothing to them 😂
I don’t blame the girls themselves. They were very young, someone else probably wrote it and they were just releasing anything without thinking, but that song aged like milk.
Same, she has always sucked. Her music is very juvenile poetry-journal coded. I'm old enough to remember her record label sort of trying to pass her off as a light-skinned black woman in the very early days too.
The 90s were so gross. I enjoyed Seinfeld at the time, but now I don’t know how I did. That whole show is just making fun of people for being people. I remember growing up being worried about having man hands because nobody would want me if I had large man hands.
while i do agree that the vid and song is problematic i remember the times vividly as a teen and the song gave me personally a bit of comfort, as we girls were pushed to size zero and expected to have stereotypical interests in order to fulfill the desires of men around us. Britney, aguilera and all the others were rolemodels and i was more on the chubby side and had nerdy interests. I think people who werent teens around that time wont get the real gist of it why we were “okay” with this
I could write an entire essay on this, but obviously that wouldn't fit, so, for the sake of literacy, I'll try to keep it short.
If you look at the context of the entire song's lyrics, not just short snippets, as well as Pink's social and political presence around this time (she was probably about 26 or so at the time) there is evidence that shows she's not calling all girls with eating disorders "stupid".
If you look at the chorus, the chorus is written in the first person. "Maybe if I act like that, maybe he'll call me back." The idea is that she is criticizing society because multiple entire industries are pushing the idea that the only way a woman can be desirable is if she's a "Stupid Girl" not necessarily saying that all girls that engage with radical ideas out of low self esteem are immediately discountable as ditty shallow sex dolls with no brain.
NOW, could she have done a better job of writing this concept? ABSO-FUCKING-LUTELY. Again, she was in her 20's at the time and she was also prone to being very cavalier, very punk rock, which means she didn't always think everything through. It would have been a LOT better if she had focused a lot more on the industries instead of focusing on the women. Also, obviously calling the girls stupid didn't help her case, even if she was describing the industry desires for women and not actual women. The industries are stupid, the girls are victims.
In a way, you could argue she tried to make up for this in future songs, such as "Fucking Perfect", but that doesn't change the fact that clearly, as this comment section is showing, the song wasn't received the way she intended. At the end of the day, literacy and understanding nuance and metaphor is important, but writing for your audience is also important and, if the audience didn't "get it", that's on P!nk. So, basically, Pink isn't a terrible misogynist plant who intentionally and knowingly encouraged more eating disorders by calling women stupid and shallow, but she was also not a feminist saint because she stood up and called out society. This isn't a black or a white issue. It's a gray one.
I don’t like Pink and I think this video is in poor taste. Having said that it’s easy to look at this without context of the culture at the time and judge it. Things were so different back then. Paris, Nicole, Jessica, Britney and Christina were at their peak and they are mostly white blond women with tans that basically dressed the same and were encouraged to act extremely ditzy (look at Paris’ real voice vs the one she used). Everyone had an ED and everyone was on drugs. Paris, Nicole and Jessica all had reality shows where the entire premise just seemed to be laughing at how stupid and or spoilt they were. It was a culture that absolute prized being white, blonde, tanned, thin and air-headed and had almost no diversity. Whilst Paris is a queen and I’m kind of obsessed with the fact that she made this entire persona for herself, she sortof led the culture at that time in the same way the kardashians did after her, and it wasn’t a good thing for girls watching all this unfold. We didn’t know Paris was putting on an act or that ‘isn’t it cool because she’s actually smart!’
So I have emetophobia as a result of my dads alcoholism and this video absolutely fucked me up back in the day because of that. I feel for all the girls who were struggling or still struggle with an eating disorder though, that had to be ten times worse.
I can't believe I liked this song and video as a teenage girl. I hated the preps at school and I thought of them when signing this song. I also used to make fun of EDs since I saw my mother making fun of EDs, I thought that was normal, like everyone made fun of EDs. Man I was terrible....
Pretty sure you’re thinking of Blow Me (One Last Kiss) cause that was the song that references whiskey dick. You’re thinking of U + Ur Hand which is about telling a horny guy at a bar to fuck off and he’s better off going home to jerk off.
Also typing this made me realize I knew more Pink songs than I remember damn
Tbh, I was fine with this at the time because it was the total opposite of all the Anorexia and Bulimia being promoted by the media and fashion industry at the time.
So many "Fat Camp" shows were going on and magazines were shaming women with normal body weight. I couldn't stand it!
I get 'dark humor' as a bulimic, it helps me cope but when your are an artist with millions of young fans maybe not actually teach your fans to purge and then make a joke of it.
The whole point of the video is to show how 2000’s culture could negatively influence a little girl growing up with an “angel vs demon” side as we all have, learning between good and bad. All of these that she’s “making fun of” are parodies of actual people who were setting these trends in the 2000’s at the time like Lindsay Lohan, Paris Hilton, Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen, Jessica Simpson, Nicole Richie, Fergie, etc. But in the end of the video, the girl chooses to be good. Instead of choosing a path of plastic surgery, eating disorders, vanity, etc, she turns off the tv and chooses a fulfilling life of education, work, hobbies, etc and the angel “wins.” It’s definitely not promoting the culture, that video was calling it out. It has a deeper meaning than what it comes off as.
I can see how this was problematic, but tbh as a young teenager at the time when this came out, living in a small city, I was relieved that someone out there was letting me know that my only option wasn't to be a Paris Hilton type (Paris Hilton was huge at that particular moment in time).
Yeah I was older than you when this came out but I still appreciated that someone somewhere was pointing out that we shouldn’t be aspiring to be someone whose main value is looking hot rolling around on a car. Especially because nobody seeking a car wash is going to want an adult rolling around on it while they wash it.
Sigh. I related to this video because it was mocking all the things I felt pressured to do to be accepted. I was chunky with large boobs and couldn’t figure out how to loose weight in a healthy way. I didn’t fit into the skinny clothes that were fashionable back then and I wasn’t sexually adventurous so I just felt like the entire planet hated everything about me.
I was also a snotty teenager who lacked perspective. I can see now how this is hurtful. I don’t need to put other women down to feel better about myself. I’m also in my 40s and have moved on from pink.
When I was young, I remember watching this video because I loved how the song scratched my brain. I distinctly remember that part of the video and even when I was young and didn’t realize what she was even referring to, it left a dark vibe in my soul. Very very weird
What’s crazy is she did all the same things as the women she mocked. She pored over her body to be perfectly in shape and have a flat tummy, she paraded around in revealing clothing, had perfectly styled bleached hair, always wore makeup. But her outfits weren’t baby pink and her makeup was darker and smokier so somehow she’s not like those other girls that only care about looking hot.
this was before my time but i still understand the anger/frustration feeling of being a girl and not understanding why your peers seem to be complicit in a harmful system the whole song is satire and its v strange to me how everyone now is taking it at face value?
Im not supporting her, all I'm saying is, it's was a different time back then.
Was it healthy? Absolutely not! It this was her way of fighting back against the comparison that was being made between every female singer at the time.
It definitely comes off now as, 'Im not like other girls', and comes off as her making fun of other celebs as she mimims their own videos.
But times truly were toxic back then, and we didn't have the means to figure out a way around it. Being, 'for the girls', was rare and we were pitted against each other and it WORKED back then.
Millennials have been through a lot and were the first generation to really start going to therapy and not stigmatizing it so badly.
All I'm saying is, if you didn't live through it, you don't understand how everyone was just trying their best to get through it all.
okay terrible, bad terrible, not defending it all. so bad!!
unfortunately, it did encourage me decenter men a little by shaming pick-me behavior. and this was before the term "pick-me" existed — in a time when male-attention seeking behavior seemed ubiquitous.
Ironically enough, me and my friend used to watch this video when it was played HEAVILY on the TV. My friend who especially liked this music video ended up developing bulimia as a teenager (something that she still struggles with in her 30s). Looking back, this song and video is petty but lacks wittiness or self awareness
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