
I love Pink. I love her music, I love her strength, and that speech she made about her daughter at the VMAs still brings a tear to my eye.
But on Monday, Pink learned the hard way that not everyone is going to love everything she does. When it comes to sharing photos of kids, what’s cute to a besotted mum might not be cute to all five million of her followers. Posting a picture of your young children near-naked on Instagram is going to get you in trouble these days. It just is.
The photo that got Pink in trouble is gorgeous. Her kids, Willow and Jameson, are entranced by a pelican. There’s this wonderful naturalness to it. Nothing styled. But Jameson is only wearing a t-shirt and Willow isn’t wearing much either.
I know Pink said she didn’t notice her son’s genitals were showing, but other people did. Of course they did. Yes, it’s a bit creepy that people would be looking closely enough to make judgments on whether or not he was circumcised and then share their opinions. But that’s going to happen. You post a photo on Instagram, you are inviting people to react. You can’t control what they say, or how nasty they get.
When you show your kids near-naked, you will get reactions, and a lot of them won’t be good, and they will hurt, because it’s people saying things about your kids. But you can’t be surprised.
You can delete the comments, but the memory of them lingers.
“There’s something seriously wrong with a lot of you out there,” Pink wrote on Instagram yesterday, after seeing what people were saying. “Going off about my baby’s penis? About circumcision??? Are you for real? As any normal mother at the beach, I didn’t even notice he took off his swim diaper.
“I deleted it because you’re all f**king disgusting. And now I’m turning off my comments and shaking my head at the state of social media and keyboard warriors, and the negativity that you bring to other people’s lives.”
Top Comments
Any parent (regardless of celebrity status) who posts images of their child online is negligent. Digital privacy is a gift that we should be giving our children. What sort of message are we sending our kids? That it’s okay to post photos of others without their consent? By the time they are 10, children born in 2019 will have thousands of photos posted online without their consent by the people who are supposed to love and care for them the most.
I foresee huge lawsuits in the next few decades when today’s children reach adulthood and realise the full impact of their parents’ actions upon their career and personal lives.
Incidentally, given the frequency of dumb crap Pink and her husband put up on social media about their kids (the instance of taking their kid out in public with hand, foot and mouth disease - and proudly photographing it for the 'Gram - springs to mind), I can't help but think this is all engineered attention-seeking and a ploy to come up with material to sanctimoniously clap back to.