What’s Up With Grown Women Infantilizing Themselves For Social Media?
The adults fetishizing themselves as children must be stopped.
One TikTok posted by @kyleoat went viral this month, amassing 8 million views and thousands of comments in less than just one week. The reason? He shared controversial images posted by a famous content creator and influencer, @olivia.ponton. The now-deleted pictures showed Ponton with her hair in pigtails, dressed in a floral crop top and short skirt while holding a stuffed animal. Her expressions in the photos show a range of emotions that are reminiscent of a child’s demeanor: There’s one photo of her with her arms crossed, pouting at the camera with a stuffed bunny. Many of the comments on TikTok referenced another influencer, @hannahkae27, who was infamously known for posting similar photos of herself in the past. Users found out shortly after that her boyfriend was allegedly grooming minors.
What’s the Deal with Age Regression?
Grown women posing as children isn’t a new thing – back in 2019, Healthline wrote an article on age regression, a nonsexual defense mechanism where adults would “regress” back to a younger state of mind, including infancy. It’s important to note that these individuals are different from those who are sexualizing themselves via infantilization. However, the acceptance of this movement has caused others to use it as a means to utilize the movement as a fetish. In my research on this topic, I’ve come across age regression posts that were anything but innocent, including pornographic content of women in diapers with pacifiers in their mouths, all under the category titled “Age Regression.”
It may seem okay for grown women to pose as kids on Instagram, but it’s sending the message that kids are sexy.
Acceptance of Movements and Slippery Slopes
The Age Regression movement, which may have had good intentions in the beginning, only became a growing fetish on the internet. The increase in posts of women infantilizing themselves in the name of “age regression” reminds me of the Minor Attracted Persons (MAP) movement. MAP tries to normalize the wrongful adult attraction to children, thereby creating a slippery slope to accepting pedophilia altogether. While it may seem okay for grown women to pose as kids on Instagram, it’s sending the awful message that kids are sexy – it’s vile, it’s disgusting, and it should never be normalized.
Closing Thoughts
I understand that people who practice age regression as a coping mechanism use it as a way to feel better, but maybe the practice should remain behind closed doors since it’s attracting the wrong people. And to empathize with influencers, it's possible they may not even realize the damage they’re causing by posing as kids, but this is why discussions on this topic are important. We have to protect our kids by bringing awareness to this subject so that we can put a stop to the self-infantilization trend once and for all.
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