Barron Trump shouldn’t be criticized over what he chooses to wear.
THE PRESIDENT MUST BE READY FOR PAKISTAN TO RESIST AND TEST HIS RESOLVE. — KHALILZAD
Can j udging a book by its cover become more acceptable as one reaches adulthood, or are we all just big hypocrites when we tell our kids that it’s what’s on the inside that counts? When a conservative website pounced on young Barron Trump last week for the T- shirt and shorts he sported while travelling on Air Force One, was the site being mean because Barron’s just an eleven- year- old kid? Or is sniping about people’s clothing choices simply mean… period?
Since she knows what it feels like to grow up in the limelight of the White House, Chelsea Clinton spoke out on Barron’s behalf. “It’s high time the media and & everyone leave Barron Trump alone,” Clinton tweeted, “& let him have the private childhood he deserves.” She’s right — the kid didn’t ask for the attention, and generally preteens are dealing with plenty of appear- ance/clothing neurosis on their own. They don’t need the help of nosy web columnists to make them feel selfconscious and inadequate. But it doesn’t seem much more enlightened when The Daily Caller blabs elsewhere on its site: “Melania stuns in sundress Boarding Air Force One,” even if it’s at least a compliment.
Jokes about Donald Trump’s “orangeness” may be hard to resist — the man has hardly endeared himself to many of us, and it feels like his arrogance gives us licence to cut him down a few notches in any way, even a shallow one like picking on his appearance. Entire websites exist for just this purpose. (Picking on people’s appearances, that is, not picking on Trump’s appearance. Although, those sites may exist too.)
But if it’s generally agreed that there’s a real cruelty to blasting a child’s wardrobe, giving him the terrible message that his worth as a person hinges on his khakis, then why is it also generally agreed that it’s just good, clean fun to lambaste grownups’ style choices? The justi- fication seems to be that these grown- ups are usually celebrities. Therefore, they’ve put themselves in the public eye voluntarily. If they are going to reap financial rewards for their famousness they must expect to pay a price for it too. But I’m not sure that rationalizing that celebrities deserve the casual cruelty they receive makes the doling out of that cruelty any less corrosive to all of us — especially, but not exclusively, kids approaching and going through the confounding changes of puberty.
Even as a generalization that may be too broad to move you, but think about it in terms of your own family. What comes out of your teenage daughter’s mouth ( or the mouth of a teenager you know and love) about her “disgusting fat stomach” makes you cringe. In the years you’ve raised her, you’ve wanted and expected her to look at herself the way you do: with love and kindness and pride and maybe gentle amusement when a couple of front baby teeth have fallen out, or a hair dresser has been overly aggressive with her bangs. And while this is the way she seems to have seen herself for roughly the first decade of her life, every year since then appears to have sharpened a nasty inner critic that runs its own 24- hour showings of personalized What Not to Wear and The Biggest Loser episodes in its head. And that is not exactly a surprising way for someone to adjust to our world.
For “don’t wear that, you look hideous” and “you’d look so good if you lost 10 pounds and toned up” are things that adults say to other adults all the time. Maybe not in person. But on television, in magazines, on the web. Obviously, a growing focus on appearance in adolescence must be intertwined with the emergence of sexual attraction to others — and the awareness of being (and the desire to be) sexually attractive to others. Noble intentions be damned, we’re biologically wired to care how other people look so that, broadly speaking, we can choose mates who will help us effectively produce healthy offspring. Evolutionary biology needn’t, however, become an excuse for unthinkingly cultivating self-disgust by spreading around the criticism about people’s appearances.
Yet realistically, such displeasure with and focus on appearances — our own and those of others, including everything from body shape to clothing style to nail polish colour — is an inevitable part of adulthood. We’ve succeeded in making “fair game for criticism about how I look” a regular part of coming of age.
Barron Trump should not be given grief for his choice of T- shirt, but not because he’s a kid: because he’s a person. And people have a lot more important and interesting things to offer.
OR IS SNIPING ABOUT PEOPLE’S CLOTHING CHOICES SIMPLY MEAN.... PERIOD?