PicoBlog

While the culture at large routinely fails child stars, the internet in particular has failed Millie Bobby Brown.

Brown, for the uninitiated, is an 18 year old British actress who rose to fame following her appearance as Eleven in Stranger Things, a role she was cast in at the age of 11.

Since then, she’s been subjected to continuous and ongoing sexual harassment online, which unfortunately isn’t uncommon for young women; what is unusual is the slew of memes framing her as a violent homophobe that have cropped up in recent years.

Brown turned 18 in February of this year, and she has since opened up about the sexual harassment she’s been subjected to online, including a NSFW Subreddit with a description explaining that it would open on her 18th birthday. One user explained the sub’s purpose thusly:

[It’s] to post sexual pictures of her the day she turns 18. It's a sub solely dedicated to sexual pictures of Millie, who is currently a minor, until next week but they have a sub prepared already with thousands of subscribers.

Millie told the Guilty Feminist podcast in April that she had:

Definitely been dealing with [being sexualized] more within the last two weeks of turning 18 — definitely seeing a difference between the way people act and the way that the press and social media have reacted to me coming of age.

“I believe that shouldn’t change anything, but it’s gross and it’s true. It’s a very good representation of what’s going on in the world and how young girls are sexualized. I have been dealing with that — but I have also been dealing with that forever.”

Depressingly, this isn’t new for teen girls in the spotlight. In 2017, former child star Mara Wilson wrote about the phenomenon of teenage girls being sexualised, drawing on her own experiences:

As soon as I’d hit puberty, it had become okay for strangers to discuss my body. Every time I stumbled across an article about myself, every fear I had about my pubescent body was confirmed: I was “ugly,” which as a woman, made me useless, or I was “cute,” which made me an object. I was “grown up,” which made me vulnerable. Because I was a child actor, my body was public domain.

Wilson does an excellent job of contextualising the way the media and the culture at large talk about famous teenage girls, pointing out that the same media outlets that counted down to Mary Kate and Ashley Olsen’s 18th birthday will run fear-mongering articles about sex trafficking, kidnapped children, and paedophiles. Wilson writes:

Young girls at risk, young girls objectified: It’s all titillation to them. These adults fetishize innocence, and the loss of innocence even more. They know what they’re selling.

We know that a culture defined by patriarchy and capitalism fetishises youth. Adult women are expected to transform themselves in order to appear as youthful as possible: thin, petite, hairless beings with no wrinkles or visible signs of aging. It’s inevitable that in a culture that fetishises youth, actual young women will become pin-ups, held up as the beauty standard for all to aspire to.

Not only does that create an impossible standard for women who are no longer teenagers, it foists a role onto these teenage girls that they did not ask for and that they have zero control over.

Hollywood has long failed its youngest stars; Mara Wilson is a more recent example of a former child star who has spoken out about her experiences in the industry, but the problem goes back almost a century to things like the events that led to the introduction of the Coogan Law.

Millie Bobby Brown is a unique case, because in addition to the rampant sexualisation and harassment, she’s also become the subject of a meme that suggests she’s violently homophobic.

According to Know Your Meme, the meme, which started as a hashtag, #TakeDownMillieBobbyBrown, “is a hashtag cataloguing a series of troll quotes and stories that are homophobic, Islamophobic, offensive and insensitive in nature falsely accredited to Stranger Things Millie Bobby Brown,” and dates back to 2017, when she was 13. In November 2017, one Twitter user tweeted:

I saw Millie Bobby Brown in the airport and asked for a pic and she said "only if you remove the hijab" and I said its my faith and she aggressively pulled it off my head and stamped on it.

Being the internet, this snowballed and turned into people photoshopping Brown’s tweets to make it look like she had made violent threats and used homophobic slurs. Brown eventually deactivated her Twitter account in 2018, but the meme lives on, largely in comments sections across Twitter, TikTok and Instagram.

In its current iteration, the meme mostly takes the form of people suggesting that Brown is going to run any gay person she sees over with her car. All of this is despite the fact that Brown has never, to my knowledge, publicly said or done anything homophobic, biphobic, transphobic, or queerphobic (or Islamophobic, for that matter) in any way. I assume the incongruity is part of the appeal — it’s preposterous that a teenage girl with no history of homophobia would want to mow gay people down, and that’s what makes it funny.

To me, when I place the jokes in a larger context of a culture that has fetishised, sexualised and mistreated Brown since her emergence into the spotlight as a pre-teen, I struggle to see the humour in it all. The memes seem lazy and thoughtless, a joke to reach for when you can’t be bothered being original or funny but you still want likes.

At every turn, Brown has been denied of agency and treated as a figure onto which the worst aspects of our society can be projected: patriarchy, the fetishisation of youth, paedophilia, homophobia. I’m not sure why so many queer people, particularly queer adults, seem to believe these memes are in any way transgressive or entertaining, but I implore them to place them in their wider cultural context.

Some people may be reading this and asking why it matters; it’s not like Brown is going to see these memes. Ignoring the fact that she has, prompting her to deactivate her Twitter account, and that she might continue to every time she posts on her remaining social media platforms, the main concern for me is: is it the decent thing to do?

For me, making jokes that frame a teenage girl who has been consistently dehumanised and sexualised from a young age as a violent homophobe doesn’t square with my ethics, with how I want to operate in this world. Evidently other people operate under different ethical frameworks; that’s hardly new information.

In my capacity as a writer, though, I’d rather err on the side of not contributing to an environment that is at best hostile and at worst harmful to young people coming to terms with stardom. I think it would be cool if other people with platforms did the same.

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