Just holy shit. Holy shit. Conservative conspiracy theorists always go on and on about secret societies planting subliminal pedophilic imagery in kids’ shows and it’s ridiculous because in reality you don’t need a secret society and it barely needs to be subliminal. Just wrap your abuse up as a “joke” and get people to laugh with you. The concept of sneaking adult themes into kids’ shows has never been more insidious.
Not to distract from the point in your post but as a child actor Shirley Temple starred in some really gross and creepy shit just under a century ago. Idk if it would be classified as kids’ shows specifically but I think it was intended for a general audience.
Baby Burlesks was her first role in film. As in burlesques.
This was pre-Hays Code Hollywood too, which was pretty astonishing for how salacious some of the movies they were putting out given the era and how it’s easy to imagine this time period being as conservative as the 1950s when it really wasn’t that way at all. Basically all of the code was a reaction to the content that was pretty rampant in Hollywood prior to it being enforced and it has some of the code says a lot, such as the prohibition of depicting “children’s sex organs” and encouraging that the “deliberate seduction of girls” be dealt with in a tasteful way that does not stray into vulgarity or licentiousness. Note that elsewhere in the code, women are not referred to as girls but specifically as women. The choice of wording it as “girls” appears to be intentional.
What happened to Shirley Temple off-camera was even worse though. When you have Hollywood producers sexually abusing a child star and then you have really odd and distasteful stuff happening on set, it gets a lot harder to dismiss the decisions made in the films as being unintentional or “from a simpler time”.
At the time a few prominent figures spoke out denouncing this shit for what it was and, naturally, other rich white men who occupied a position of power in society applauded it and professed to being in love with Shirley Temple. Graham Greene, true to form as a member of the privileged upper class in Britain and as a Catholic, wrote very descriptive, sexualised praise of Shirley Temple’s screen appearances.
I don’t have any conclusions to draw here aside from the fact that this shit is endemic and it has been for a long time. And if you decide to look into Shirley Temple’s acting career or to watch clips from the films she starred in, you do it at your own peril.
I wasn’t aware of this but it makes a lot of sense. Most of the Shirley Temple I’ve watched (maybe 1 movie) was rather tame. I remember her as a proto-Annie with lots of tap dancing. It’s sad to hear she endured abuse like that.
Pedophilia really is an intricately woven part of western bourgeois culture.
Honestly, I think if you’re good natured and maybe not a parent who is attuned to the need to be vigilant for creeps it’s actually pretty easy to view some of the stuff and to just pass it off as being from an era where the cinematography was much less polished so that kid looking vaguely uncomfortable is just an accident and the placement of the male actor’s hands is just poor choreography, and that it wasn’t intended to sound like a man moaning but it was just the fact that the foley artist was doing their best impression of a cow mooing without a digital sound library at their fingertips, and that there’s no possible way that they could have intended to make that a thinly-veiled reference to a facial…
And then you learn about Shirley Temple’s story and you realise that they knew exactly what they were doing and what kind of audience they were appealing to because they were producing this stuff for people who are just like them.
For whatever it’s worth, I take my own self with a pinch of salt - there’s an old episode of Ren & Stimpy titled Nurse Stimpy which I watched as an adult and blazed out of my mind on edibles when it struck me that the episode was one long metaphor for a BDSM sorta kink relationship and tbh I’m not convinced that I was right about that interpretation and I haven’t revisited that episode with fresh, unaddled eyes to check my own notes - but if you look critically there’s just way too many pings on the radar with Shirley Temple’s stuff for it all to be just a string of unfortunate mishaps and oversights. Not when you know the context.
By this point, after the Epstein case and how it has been “handled” along with old shit like R Kelly getting away with stuff that his manager and handlers and entourage must have known about as well as Diddy and the stuff that has recently come to light (though the stuff about Usher living with him at the age of 13 is old news) or fucken dozens upon dozens of other examples that I can point to just in showbusiness, bourgeois culture has such a dirty reputation that I’d be open to someone making a solid case that the British Royal Family is suspected of engaging in the sacrifice of infants in blood rituals.
I mean I don’t actually believe that this true and I’ve never been presented with an argument for it but my disbelief is completely dead and buried by this stage. I’m so jaded that I don’t think I am capable of being shocked anymore.