This Chapter really unsettled me, especially those lines like “we are gonna make you a big boy.” That one in particular just made me feel genuinely sick. There’s something about the casualness of it that makes it even more disturbing, like the way power and violation are wrapped into language that is almost playful or dismissive on the surface.

And then the other quote: “God, how old are the Olsen twins now? [...] Come on, they are still jailbait, right? Don’t tell me none of you haven’t thought about it.” That one hit in a different but equally uncomfortable way. The word “jailbait” alone is already so loaded and disturbing, and reading it in that context just brought up how normalised that kind of sexualization of minors has been in certain spaces.

I actually came across a video a while ago about the Olsen twins and the way they were discussed in the 90s and 2000s, and it stuck with me. The idea that there were countdowns to celebrities turning 18, or open conversations about waiting for them to become “legal,” is horrifying. It really highlights how normalised that kind of thinking was, and probably still is in different forms, especially around young women in the public eye.

It’s one of those sections where I had to stop for a moment, because it just leaves you with this very uncomfortable awareness of how normalised these attitudes have been.