Infantilization: A Gen Z Crisis

because I'm an evil genius and you're just a kid a stupid kid [Music] hey what's up infantilization is a term that often has been used for things it generally emerges from the field of psychology to describe a form of abuse in which a competent adult or young adult is treated like a child these days it's become an increasingly popular buzzword to describe a vast array of phenomena in this way doing this series of videos has been super difficult for me trying to pin down how to talk about infantilization but I've noticed it as some sort of cultural thing and I guess the way I'll start is through talking about this Tick Tock so do people not understand that I'm just a girl what do you want from me I'm supposed to go to yoga classes Day drink with my girlfriends in a cute Cafe get massages get my hair done get my nails done and that's it that's supposed to be it like give me a break I'm just a girl I'm supposed to just walk around go shopping and look cute and that's who told us that we needed to work to work so there's about five things going on with this Tick Tock and I want to start by wondering is it satirical or not I don't know the other content from the Creator and I don't want to make this whole thing a investigation into who they truly are really couldn't be bothered with that I'll just observe the tick tock on its own Merit to me it seems like it has to be satirical to some degree I mean I cannot personally believe that Jazzy Baby whoever this is is this invested in this idea that girls truly should not be working in fact it kind of seems to me like something akin to a type of satirical Tick Tock that I did a year ago in the summer I don't think God put me on this Earth to work hard I think God put me on this Earth to be an excellent vibe to have Immaculate taste and um I'm starting to feel weird about that one too the thing is who is the satire for who is it meant to be about so some people found this Tick Tock to be enraging online for a number of reasons this Twitter account who tweeted it out seems to find it problematic from a feminist angle a reduction of the supposed female experience to mirror consumerism and beautification a type of no thoughts head empty girliness that almost mocks centuries of work done by activists and theorists to rebuke the ways in which society deems girls weak and ineffective at real labor existing instead to be besides strong productive men essentially as Commodities to signify their worth come on Stacy have waited my whole life to hear you speak don't you have anything relevant to say don't ask me I'm just a girl if a man said these things about women that they're supposed to be shopping and not working that they're supposed to stand there and look pretty we would obviously react by deeming him a barbaric misogynist who dehumanizes women on the other hand this seeming satire play leads some to think it's a subversion of work culture similar to The Tick Tock that I made it plays on this idea that work is kind of dehumanizing as it stands in this society and that maybe we should just like not work hard which is a subversion of a common quality that everyone seems to everybody seems to want to work hard you know and it's funny to be like I'm not meant to work you know Jazzy Baby doesn't quite say any of that but the context of this kind of sentiment in tick tocks like hers or the overall I don't dream of Labor Trend or the Chinese lay flat Trend can lead people to pretty easily associate her Tick Tock as being in line with those sentiments which have grown popular among young gen Z and Millennial crowds suffering from mental health crises and growing dissatisfaction with the state of our late capitalist global economy then again what if she's satirizing that some replies have wondered what if instead her point is that this sentiment is so ridiculous that through this type of blackpilled ironic meta humor one can see just how pathetic and undaunting current young Generations are filled with young people who don't actually want to do anything about the world's problems but instead are actively participating in their own infantilization surrendering their agency and upholding exploitative systems that cater to the privileged and lazy in order to affirm their own sense of humanity while they benefit from the inhumane labor conditions of marginalized people again it's impossible to know her intentions but just from watching this video and seeing the Bevy of very online reactions to it you can kind of get a sense for the messiness when we talk about the idea of infantilization there's all these ideas of Youth and gender that crash into each other so much so that a video that seems to be some type of satire or conversation about it turns into some sort of Illusion like a rabbit duck illusion just like this ambiguous image and much like ambiguous images these pieces of ambiguous content get interpreted differently depending on your own social biases here's one thing I've noticed about the topic infantilization can be both a way that the oppressor views the oppressed and a way that the oppressor displays themselves the oppressor infantilizes the colonial subject as French doctors did toys mcgrebby people in the 19th century describing their symptomatic of some biological differences which make them less civilized and More in need of order and guidance simultaneously it could be the way white women utilize their own performance of innocence and emotional Purity to infantilize themselves when under scrutiny for participating and exploiting people of color but when infantilization is self-perpetuated who is the oppressed best and who's the oppressor and when is the infantilization actually infantilization when are we treating someone like a child in a derisive way and when are we just resorting to cuteness and Nostalgia and things that are comforting when we allow ourselves to play video games and wear silly clothes when we question the harshness that we are given from exploitative systems and speak in favor of softer living amidst Global pandemics recessions and fascist political movements are we really treating ourselves with dismissal of our own agency or are we giving ourselves Compassion or is something else hold that thought let's talk about today's sponsor green chef nothing quite makes you feel grown up like being able to prepare a nice meal for yourself and your loved ones thankfully today's sponsor is green chef with green Chef you can expect elevated fare of a consistent top-notch quality featuring premium ingredients and sustainably sourced produce green Chef has always got new varieties of different food recipes every week you almost never get no you just never get bored not almost you never get bored with green Chef's good food plus it makes cooking easy things are cut out for you things are prepared for you in good measurements so you are able to cook well for yourself when you don't have much time when you don't have 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the ambiguous nature of infantilization as a term that gets used from everything from K-pop debates to I don't know Euphoria discourse it's something that I wanted to root out my own definition of one of the ways I started was by asking my audience what they think infantilization is and examples that they notice of it in real life many of the responses talked about infantilization as connected to ableism particularly from their own experiences one reads I'm autistic and I get infantilized a lot I've been to doctors who treat me like a regular 21 year old and then if I mention I'm autistic they start using a baby voice I was always seen as the cute and innocent one in high school the other kids will be shocked if I understood dirty jokes or express any interest in Romans or sex a trans man who says he experiences a level of infantilization from within the trans Community helps bring forth what seems to be a collectively agreed definition from the demographic watching my videos intentionally or unintentionally being coddled for just existing which as another comments or puts it means being treated in a way that implies helplessness and rubs you of your autonomy sometimes the effects of this can feel relatively harmless other times they can feel humiliating one commenter a 35 year old woman with autism described at length the kind of violation that she's experienced I try to tell people all the time you can just talk and act normal to me I may react a little slower sometimes need a bit more time to process my thoughts to answer your questions correctly might make a weird noise sometimes when thinking really hard that you can just ignore but please just treat me as to anyone else people don't give me privacy just enter rooms in my home without asking picking up my stuff putting my plushies asking if I view them as my children stuff that makes you go what the [ __ ] and opening hours Etc also they're talking about me with me standing next to them or answering questions for me which feels extremely degrading and when I tell people I want to speak myself they tell me I can't because I'm autistic simultaneously infantilization can be described as a tool one can use to abdicate themselves of responsibility the term is used sometimes to refer to phrases like boys will be boys or the treatment of mass Shooters white male Mass shooters that is when Peyton Gendron was arrested for the 2022 Buffalo mass shooting the Associated Press referred to him as a white teenager which differed from their description of police brutality victim Michael Brown as a black man years before despite the fact that both texts were referring to a 18 year old this point comes from a choice 360 article called we must stop infantilizing white Mass Shooters and treating bypoc youth as adults which takes a stance against both ends of uneven treatment of Youth dependent on their identities this phenomenon and its different incarnations clearly represents something different from the aforementioned phenomena one describes a treatment of oppressed people by the oppressor the other describes a treatment of oppressors by oppressors the phenomena are so Divergent that they must necessitate different terminology and yet we use infantilization as a term for both often times this is because infantilization is not merely treating someone like a child but of stratification to uphold social order it's not merely about who gets to be a child it's about who has to be a child and who cannot it is a mechanism of assessing agency to uphold a narrative we've talked often on this channel about the thin line between diagnosis and determinism in our conversation with Noah Sampson we discussed how there's a reality to people having different brains with different dispositions and how having certain types of brains in our society is an inconvenience to our efforts towards fitting into that Society but that the label of having a bad brain that needs to be fixed with medication is ultimately wrong-headed it's an effort made by Society to act as if the way things are is the way things ought to be that our systems are natural and fantalization of the autistic represents a choice forced on those who wish to participate on Society on society in society if the goal in life is to succeed at this game of going through school the normal way and getting a job the normal way and living life the normal way quote unquote and where to note that there are folks who are set up from birth to not be able to succeed at this game this particular game with its particular set of social norms and rules these people who are often because of their biology setup to just look at the world a different way be a little bit different then we're to think their natural circumstance is the problem they haven't been screwed by Society they've been screwed by their own brain and thus they represent beings without agency children they are to be pitied coddled and then distanced from infantilization has always been Tethered to marginalization in the book fathers and children Michael Paul Rogan analyzes how the parental relationship becomes a thematic backdrop for the colonization of the Americas and the genocide of indigenous peoples he writes that in white narratives natives were the children of nature the sons of the forest they were children because of their unrestrained impulses and because they remained unseparated from nature Indians in the white view had never severed the maternal tie this narrative much like the infantilization of mcgrabby peoples by French imperialists served infamously as the justification for civilizing populations people of color have always been framed as needing guidance needing to be saved from themselves it's not that the white imperialists had a thirst for profit and a willingness to commit atrocities in Pursuit Of satiation The White Man's Burden was to sacrifice his safety and to donate his wealth to those willing to play by his rules willing to buy into his narrative the influence of this narrative on today's politics is not to be downplayed not only do they make up the foundation of American foreign and domestic policy grounding suspicions of China in a quest to protect our youth casting suspicions upon uncivil black and brown populations and invading oil hot spots to liberate poor peoples from themselves this way of thinking still holds influence even within leftist thought popular leftist narratives can be infantilizing towards the working class suggesting that they simply need to be educated by smart upstanding teach teachers so that they can realize what their lives are actually like Paolo frieri describes thinking which chooses naturalizing narratives of human incapacity as sectarian it is sectarian because it separates itself from humanization in pedagogy of the oppressed he says the rightest sectarian who have previously termed a born sectarian wants to slow down the historical process to domesticate time and thus to domesticate men and women the leftists turned sectarian goes totally astray when he or she attempts to interpret reality in history dialectically and falls into essentially fatalistic positions this distinction this key distinction is a huge part of a problem that we experience as people who want to change things we want to imagine a better world one where we can liberate ourselves from Bad systems but we inherit so much sectarianism even in the process of recognizing all this we get our news and our discourse from Corp social media apps run by fascist sympathizers we favor the content most popular within their algorithms we get our foundation of education and socialization from the same Society we seek to deconstruct it's no wonder we are so often self-hating in our practices we haven't reconciled the dehumanizing concepts within us maybe that's a conversation for another essay what's relevant here is how this distinction shows how fluidly infantilization can go from the ableism my audience describes to the self-infantalization that oppressors utilize it's the same thing it's dehumanization this is what freity speaks about when he says the oppressors and oppressed must both be liberated they are both engaged in the process of dehumanization the oppressor seeks to gain power from this dehumanization the oppressed are abused in this process and left powerless neither are allowed to be fully human in order to maintain the structure of power when autistic people are are vandalized they become seen as aberrations they are to be pitied and forgotten about the message is that we don't have to think about our society our system or our own proximity to the struggle to live a successful life in a broken system they have nothing to do with us we are normal we have agency they have nothing to do with Society society's natural this is the way things are the disordered get put in a system of Reform they'll go to special ed get medication and then if they work hard enough they might even go back into the regular World finally normal quote unquote normal when white Mass Shooters are infantilized they become seen as aberrations they are to be pitied and then forgotten about the message is that we don't have to think about our society our system or our own proximity to this tendency for Mass violence they have nothing to do with us we're normal we have agency they have nothing to do with Society Society is natural this is the way things are the perpetrators get put in a system of Reform he'll go to jail for a few days get therapy and if he works hard enough he might even go back into the regular world because he's normal now a crucial distinction we internalize is that the mass shooter and that the police system that infantilizes him argue his exceptionality in bad faith and are simply portraying to others that he is childlike mentally in order to avoid the consequences of his choices oftentimes this is demonstrably true sometimes it isn't but it's always dehumanizing infantilization is commonly observed as a tactic of abuse you don't know any better I know what's good for you similarly a kind of self-infantalization can also be used as an abuse tactic I don't know any better I'm just like this I can't control myself whether or not an abuser truly believes these things in both cases and fantalization is used as a process to justify the abuse and exploitation of other people all for the sake of achieving some type of success a common thread in both forms of manipulation is a question of agency I asked my audience if they knew anyone who infantilized themselves one person said they often do it as a way to appeal to straight men as a way to lower expectations or as a way to escape the difficulties of day-to-day life another described an old friend who was coddled by their parents and and married life later on essentially put off all critical thinking to her husband there are deep questions to ask here Beyond vague reactionism about kidults a term used Often by right Wingers to describe Millennial Tendencies to be interested in Disney and other childish things enjoying a kids movie wearing a Hello Kitty shirt or even baby talking isn't necessarily being a child or childish in the same way that a child enjoying watching Rated R movies cursing and talking about stocks or something is not automatically them being an adult human experience is too complicated to beat yourself up over Nostalgia and silly moods self-infantalization kind of like The Tick Tock from earlier reveals an uncomfortable gray area and how we talk about people who are oppressed or exploited at what point do we draw the line between acknowledging someone's victimization and disputing their agency the Montreal filmmaker Lily Alexander who has made numerous videos examining online youth culture discussed this phenomenon with me even if you're a progressive person you might think that like the lower socioeconomic status of like a certain group of people exists because of some cultural problems exist because of some like failure on their part and it is important I think to unlearn that yeah to to me it's that if you're advocating on behalf of someone else you should not be the one leading the conversation right you should be the one showing up offering practical help no one needs a polemic on Race for me you know right if I were to give you advice on something if just even if it's a personal thing like I have maybe some insight or some ideas that I have but ultimately the person who has if not the knowledge inherently then at least the responsibility to know your own situation and change it is you the infantilized the people that are essentially being deemed unable to fix the situation for themselves so when we talk about somebody who is an infant and is being put in a negative situation we're saying you know this person cannot fend for themselves they are literally five they're literally 10 years old and much of the trauma and the issues we develop come from those time periods because we didn't have any autonomy right but at the same time for one there is a sense that we underrate how much children can fend for themselves if given the opportunity there's a lot of for instance studies on different forms of parenting that speak to how much more valuable a parenting style is when it's not about dictating to the child what they must do but is instead about like informing them and giving them resources but letting them make their own choices including their own mistakes and uh also like political movements that have been about like youth Liberation Liberation things like that but also that's where it becomes really disturbing when you notice a sense of infantilization culturally because it's as if people are looking for this reason to not have to do things for themselves right it's like you're looking for this ability to say I can't be held accountable from actions I don't have autonomy I don't have choices in this situation and on one hand recognizing your own victimhood or in a situation is is good or other things that are out of your control but also when you do that that's like the worst thing you could do for yourself uh when you when you make that step too far and it might also lead them to nostalgic children's media I don't know that that watching that stuff necessarily causes the like empowerment or helplessness but I I would I would tend to think that they come from the same source which is like I just need to be held like a little baby and comforted that is kind of a lot of what we do when we consume media especially like where we're watching fun movies and playing video games and stuff is we are kind of just being like screw it right like I'm just I'm just going to nurture my little inner child there's something valuable there but it's not something you should be doing all the time I guess you could say like it's like something you do for instance for a break or for fun you know these things aren't necessarily mutually exclusive like feeling empowered trying to like take more agency of your own life and liking easy whatever media I think you can do both you know I'm I'm not thinking over here like if you want to be a true revolutionary you can't watch any of the movies you like right of course because I I don't think it's like a a political action to like to change your media diet I tend to think it's a really good idea just because it can open you up to New Perspectives and maybe make you feel more or make you like realize your agency a little more one of my favorite movies is this like 45 minute super weird experimental like animated movie about like a doomsday cult yeah freaky thing I just found it on YouTube one day and I bring it up because that was like a very tender gentle piece of media that also kind of made me realize like yeah it's kind of my responsibility to heal from the things that have happened to me uh for the sake of other people I think we could find you know helpful and even empowering lessons in media but I also think some people overestimate how important the media is in like a person's political life well I don't think it's enough basically you know I I'm a big advocate for people checking out whatever freaky Indie weird stuff but ultimately I guess like the root of the problem here is alienation and like our uncertain future so I guess I'm willing to cut people some sock if they if they want to watch like Powerpuff Girls reruns I get it right yeah we get it and at the same time challenge yourself like don't don't stay here um yeah if only for your own sake like it's there's cool stuff out there exactly it can it can be well your own sake is not comp is not like super extricable from like the sake of other people right um like the process of like doing good things for yourself and like properly taking care of yourself is a process that in part is social as well it's for it's for you to be able to to do work for other people for you to be able to be there for your friends Etc right in a very direct sense and only when we're constantly making the right choices like to recognize our situation and like do something good about it will we start to see what the answers are to situations right but if we're constantly in the headspace of like thinking about it or constantly in a headspace of like trying to escape the reality then it's all going to seem completely daunting to us right the real question of infantilization is of agency how much agency do you think you have over your own choices the problem is not strictly the media that you consume it's the messages that you internalize about yourself if you think you're not capable of accomplishing tasks not capable of critical thinking not capable of helping yourself or others with your actions if you think you have no control over your own life if you think you need someone else to dictate to you how to live you are infantilizing yourself this is why it's important too as Lily says challenge yourself you often have no idea how much you're capable of how much good you can do for yourself and others how much power and intelligence you have until you try new things until you feel new feelings and have new experiences there's nothing revolutionary about crawling up into a ball and sucking your thumb because you don't think you should have to do anything else because your baby and that's all you should ever have to be infantilization at its core is dehumanization and that's pretty interesting because infantilization strictly is treating someone like a child and this begs a very difficult question do we treat children as humans to be continued

Channel: Elliot Sang

Views: 911,350

Keywords: infantilization, tiktok, antiwork

Id: _ymJv4QDpOE

Length: 27min 23sec (1643 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 26 2023