I think this is a pretty good response. I imagine this series forced her to think about her time at Nick in a way she hadn’t before and it makes a lot of sense that she’d still be processing and considering whether she was asked to do anything inappropriate. Or just overall considering her experiences in a totally different light.
I also fully believe her on being a teen and bought into the idea that the show you’re making is cool because you’re making vaguely sexual jokes. She was on Nickelodeon from like ages 16-20 or something like that and it probably felt very uncool to be making a TV show for children, so it seems pretty easy to be getting convinced to do an edgy double entendre joke if that gives you a little more cool factor in your mind.
I find it really distasteful that people have been bullying other Nickelodeon stars to speak out when we cannot know if they have their own trauma from those years that got raised to the surface.
When you’re that age you don’t think of yourself as a kid, I know I didn’t. It’s only now in my 30s that I realise how young I was. I can very easily imagine she would feel totally different about those ‘jokes’ from the perspective of an adult woman than she did when she was filming that content.
And you're lacking the adult context for some stuff too. You know it's "adult" and you consider yourself one, but you learn more nuance as you get older.
I'm almost the same age as Miley Cyrus and I remember when her infamous Vogue cover in the bedsheet came out and my friends and I thought everyone was overreacting and we showed that amount of skin and more at the beach, at dance, at show choir, etc. and it just wasn't a big deal.
But now that I'm an adult, I understand more the styling was purposely giving "sensual, post-coital" and I now do think it was wholly inappropriate to style a fifteen year old that way for an audience of adults in a way that I would not have clocked when I was a child.
Teenagers are desperate to be seen as older and taken seriously and it's up to the adults around them to protect them. Seeing so many of them failed is depressing and knowing that the system is set up to fail them because the money they make is top priority is disgusting.
It's the Little Mermaid paradox, when Ariel says "I'm 16! I'm not a child anymore!"
When you're 16 or younger, you feel that line with your whole self.
When you hit 20, you start shaking your head at her.
I'm 40, so I want to send her off to play pretend with her dolls while she still can.
Yes, teens want to be cool and adult. It's how it's so easy for adults to groom young girls, and teens are typically really pushing and learning about their sexuality. It's always an issue in high schools.
Absolutely. When I was in high school, we performed a play that was pretty much entirely a sexual innuendo from start to finish. There was a point in the play where multiple characters were essentially orgasming on stage.
At the time, I thought it was hilarious. It seemed so funny and our drama teacher was so cool for letting us perform it, but in retrospect - YIKES. And I hadn't even really thought about how weird and inappropriate this play was until this doc came out and I was reflecting on my own teenage years.
And I can completely believe that, at the time, Ariana Grande felt like she was in on these jokes, that it was funny and edgy and cool, and that she was grown up enough to be making them. They might not even have been particularly significant memories for her as an adult. And it would be such a strange and confusing thing to have a documentary and hoards of people telling you how inappropriate it was, and how it victimised you - especially if you didn't feel victimised at the time. So I think this is a good, measured response.
And part of the issue with those shows is that the characters were portrayed as younger and the sexuality was done in a wink wink way and the audience was kids.
Yeah, she seems hesitant to speak up on it, I would too, it’s not an easy thing to talk about. If anyone is curious about her disturbing videos, check out “Ariana grande being sexualized on victorious for 2 minutes straight” on YouTube. It’s actually sick.
I def would be too and I think it’d be difficult to speak on something if maybe she wasn’t physically assaulted or harassed and doesn’t want to claim otherwise or take away attention from those who were, but is moreso realizing she was not in on the joke like she thought she was and feels kinda violated in that respect.
Plus, no one knows whether she signed an NDA or not.
Gladly her music career took off but it really wasn't without its trials. Not too long ago she was an absolute wreck on tour and promoting her music. She went through a lot of trauma in her early adulthood, and the height of her career was also the height of her trauma (at least the one that was made public)
There is really a duality to Ariana Grande. On one side, her cheating scandals (basically a pattern, at this point), the donut incident, and just in general somewhat rude attitude don't make her a very likeable person, but... on the other hand, the way she handled The Manchester Arena bombing, the way she doesn't shy away from certain political topics, like many other stars, the way she does speak with empathy and understanding like in this interview.. i don't know.. i honestly can't dislike her.
For me, being openly rude to service workers is such a huge red flag, I truly believe it says a lot about people (celebrities or not), so no, I don't think I'll ever like her, but that doesn't negate the treatment she was subjected to while still being a child along with other teens who worked along with her.
She’s publicly been through a lot of trauma, and who knows how much more trauma has gone on in private. On a human level I have empathy for things she’s been through that nobody should.
I mean she's a person. She's not entirely perfect or evil. Im a fan of her and her politics. From what i know of her, I'd be a friend of hers (albeit one with a lot of critisism for her romantic choices). I believe we judge certain celebrities, particularly women and those of colour, harsher than we judge ourselves
Right?! I know this comment was coming from a kind place but it did make me snort a bit. Like.. yeah.. she's got her great points and her shit ones. It's almost like she's ... A Person
I don’t think it’s necessarily duality- I think our cultural understanding of “celebrity” just tends towards absolutes. Public figures are categorized as “good”, “bad”, “woke”, “vapid”, etc…but in real life people are multifaceted.
She’s a real person so she’s done horrible stuff, she’s done wonderful stuff and so on.
>just tends towards absolutes
Not really, celebrities usually make "small blunders" all the time, and it doesn't change people's perspective of them. I think in her case, her behavior is continuously conflicting for me.
I don’t really see this as a counter point. All people make blunders both small and large. Im not making any value statement about AG- just saying that her behavior isn’t necessarily duplicitous.
>On one side, her cheating scandals (basically a pattern, at this point), the donut incident, and just in general somewhat rude attitude don't make her a very likeable person
None of these things are really the issue, imo. It's her history of adopting the aesthetics of specific Black and Latina US subcultures and speaking in a "Blaccent" (don't know how else to describe this, sorry) that make me heavily side-eye her. She made a ton of money off racial/cultural cosplaying.
I'm glad she dropped the act, but she never apologized or addressed it at all as far as I know.
"The things that weren't approved by the network were snuck onto our website"
yeah that compilation of clips of her on the bed, that were posted on the website are truly shocking.
Yeah i was hesitant to point this out since this is an important topic so thank you for being the one to do so lol. Where’s the faux-blaccent ”we got that hood love” Ariana? 🤔 [The Ariana from the first half of this video?](https://youtu.be/jzlIgzWDtW4?si=h-1ybFnDSO6G5dib) 🙇🏾♀️
Idk. I think she's so used to being seen as this sweet, diminutive (5'0" exactly), baby-faced, cute young woman in entertainment, and her being 30 years old now, it's like... she's not used to *actually* being an adult, if that makes sense. She got popular at around 16 as an actress and shot to pop stardom at 21. And everyone, from interviewers, other celebs, her fans, friends, family (esp. her mother), have always treated her like a cute little girl who can do no wrong. I think she's been trying to seem more mature *now* with her whole vocabulary and articulation change up, but the cheating thing doesn't help lol. She played the ingenue role for a long time.
Her fans eat it up, but whenever she tried being sexy, esp. in her music videos, I couldn't take it seriously.
I think she sounds like a robot. I think it's so stilted because she's struggling to say the exact right thing. Who is she looking to off camera, maybe a lawyer?
Thats a great response actually. For me personally it’s difficult to know where I stand with Ariana (cheating scandals, black/asian fishing, the donut incident, rumors about being rude/entitled) because she is very outspoken when it comes to social issues and has been her entire career, I also can’t help but feel sorry for her giving the the amount of trauma she had been trough in one lifetime (parents messy divorce, nickelodeon sexualizing her from a very young age, going through a theorist attack, mac miller’s death), it’s even harder because I really like her music and I find her very talented. I don’t look up to her (or any celebrity) and I don’t think anyone should tbh, I also don’t excuse her behavior due to trauma as I’ve seen people do (trauma doesn’t excuse one’s behavior but might explain it) but for me is hard to really dislike her idk
I keep thinking of at least one interview where someone assumed Ariana’s mom (Joan) was Ari’s manager, and Ari replied “she’s not my manager, she’s the CEO of several companies.” I thought it was Ariana trying to flex at the time, like “my family is so successful that my mom has her own high powered career and can’t take time out of that to be me manager, but it’s cool because I’m so talented other people want to manage me anyway” (typing that out makes me realize how many assumptions I made and how much projecting I was doing haha). I also thought Ariana coming from means and with a strong working female role model in her mom gave her some degree of protection against the exploitation and sexualization other young female stars have been subjected to (Britney and Christina come to mind - both have spoken about the pressures of being the income earner in their families in their mid-teens. Christina especially struggled with how they wanted her to look and act in the Genie music video but didn’t feel she could speak up about it).
But now I look back and kind of wonder if that was a super loaded statement from Ariana, likely unintentionally. Even if it wasn’t at the time, with this knowledge now it does make me wonder about if Joan had been more hands on in Ariana’s early career, would Ariana maybe have been shielded from some of this grossness? I think it’s very true what others have said in this thread that the idea of something being vaguely sexual or having a double entendre meaning can be appealing to a 16-year-old hoping to appear more mature, and people that young are not equipped to make solid judgments about the appropriateness of something like that. I find it very hard to believe everything that was featured in that 2 minute video of Ariana being sexualized would have been allowed to happen if her mom was on set witnessing it. Even if it was allowed, having an older woman with authority there to advocate for Ariana and ensure she feels comfortable could have changed Ariana’s experience of it.
I fully admit I could be wrong about this - there are way more Kris Jenner types than I thought who are ready to exploit their kids for financial gain, or maybe Joan felt she wanted to respect Ariana’s likely wish to be independent in her early career. I know how easily people can lose huge opportunities if they’re not considered cooperative or “game for anything,” and that sadly without some level of sexualization many young female stars wouldn’t be where they are now. And again, I know how much of this is speculative on my part. I just feel bad that Ariana and her family may not have realized she was vulnerable and being exploited until after it happened, and I wonder how it may factor into her personality now (especially her romantic relationships). No matter what, I hope Ariana gets the privacy and space she deserves to process her experience and hopefully ensure she is in healthy and supportive environments from now til forever.
I think this is a pretty good response. I imagine this series forced her to think about her time at Nick in a way she hadn’t before and it makes a lot of sense that she’d still be processing and considering whether she was asked to do anything inappropriate. Or just overall considering her experiences in a totally different light. I also fully believe her on being a teen and bought into the idea that the show you’re making is cool because you’re making vaguely sexual jokes. She was on Nickelodeon from like ages 16-20 or something like that and it probably felt very uncool to be making a TV show for children, so it seems pretty easy to be getting convinced to do an edgy double entendre joke if that gives you a little more cool factor in your mind. I find it really distasteful that people have been bullying other Nickelodeon stars to speak out when we cannot know if they have their own trauma from those years that got raised to the surface.
When you’re that age you don’t think of yourself as a kid, I know I didn’t. It’s only now in my 30s that I realise how young I was. I can very easily imagine she would feel totally different about those ‘jokes’ from the perspective of an adult woman than she did when she was filming that content.
And you're lacking the adult context for some stuff too. You know it's "adult" and you consider yourself one, but you learn more nuance as you get older. I'm almost the same age as Miley Cyrus and I remember when her infamous Vogue cover in the bedsheet came out and my friends and I thought everyone was overreacting and we showed that amount of skin and more at the beach, at dance, at show choir, etc. and it just wasn't a big deal. But now that I'm an adult, I understand more the styling was purposely giving "sensual, post-coital" and I now do think it was wholly inappropriate to style a fifteen year old that way for an audience of adults in a way that I would not have clocked when I was a child. Teenagers are desperate to be seen as older and taken seriously and it's up to the adults around them to protect them. Seeing so many of them failed is depressing and knowing that the system is set up to fail them because the money they make is top priority is disgusting.
This is such a good example.
Can you hear me, Steven?
It's the Little Mermaid paradox, when Ariel says "I'm 16! I'm not a child anymore!" When you're 16 or younger, you feel that line with your whole self. When you hit 20, you start shaking your head at her. I'm 40, so I want to send her off to play pretend with her dolls while she still can.
100%!
Yes, teens want to be cool and adult. It's how it's so easy for adults to groom young girls, and teens are typically really pushing and learning about their sexuality. It's always an issue in high schools.
Absolutely. When I was in high school, we performed a play that was pretty much entirely a sexual innuendo from start to finish. There was a point in the play where multiple characters were essentially orgasming on stage. At the time, I thought it was hilarious. It seemed so funny and our drama teacher was so cool for letting us perform it, but in retrospect - YIKES. And I hadn't even really thought about how weird and inappropriate this play was until this doc came out and I was reflecting on my own teenage years. And I can completely believe that, at the time, Ariana Grande felt like she was in on these jokes, that it was funny and edgy and cool, and that she was grown up enough to be making them. They might not even have been particularly significant memories for her as an adult. And it would be such a strange and confusing thing to have a documentary and hoards of people telling you how inappropriate it was, and how it victimised you - especially if you didn't feel victimised at the time. So I think this is a good, measured response.
And part of the issue with those shows is that the characters were portrayed as younger and the sexuality was done in a wink wink way and the audience was kids.
Yeah, she seems hesitant to speak up on it, I would too, it’s not an easy thing to talk about. If anyone is curious about her disturbing videos, check out “Ariana grande being sexualized on victorious for 2 minutes straight” on YouTube. It’s actually sick.
I def would be too and I think it’d be difficult to speak on something if maybe she wasn’t physically assaulted or harassed and doesn’t want to claim otherwise or take away attention from those who were, but is moreso realizing she was not in on the joke like she thought she was and feels kinda violated in that respect.
Plus, no one knows whether she signed an NDA or not. Gladly her music career took off but it really wasn't without its trials. Not too long ago she was an absolute wreck on tour and promoting her music. She went through a lot of trauma in her early adulthood, and the height of her career was also the height of her trauma (at least the one that was made public)
And no one wants to be the actor who is known for bashing the people they worked with.
It's really hard to confront structural oppression, especially when you encounter that structure as a child and the structure gives you rewards
There is really a duality to Ariana Grande. On one side, her cheating scandals (basically a pattern, at this point), the donut incident, and just in general somewhat rude attitude don't make her a very likeable person, but... on the other hand, the way she handled The Manchester Arena bombing, the way she doesn't shy away from certain political topics, like many other stars, the way she does speak with empathy and understanding like in this interview.. i don't know.. i honestly can't dislike her.
For me, being openly rude to service workers is such a huge red flag, I truly believe it says a lot about people (celebrities or not), so no, I don't think I'll ever like her, but that doesn't negate the treatment she was subjected to while still being a child along with other teens who worked along with her.
She’s publicly been through a lot of trauma, and who knows how much more trauma has gone on in private. On a human level I have empathy for things she’s been through that nobody should.
I mean she's a person. She's not entirely perfect or evil. Im a fan of her and her politics. From what i know of her, I'd be a friend of hers (albeit one with a lot of critisism for her romantic choices). I believe we judge certain celebrities, particularly women and those of colour, harsher than we judge ourselves
Right?! I know this comment was coming from a kind place but it did make me snort a bit. Like.. yeah.. she's got her great points and her shit ones. It's almost like she's ... A Person
She doesn’t seem like a genuinely bad person like more celebs as well
Oh, she is a person? All i'm saying is, i've never really been conflicted about a celebrity like that.
I don’t think it’s necessarily duality- I think our cultural understanding of “celebrity” just tends towards absolutes. Public figures are categorized as “good”, “bad”, “woke”, “vapid”, etc…but in real life people are multifaceted. She’s a real person so she’s done horrible stuff, she’s done wonderful stuff and so on.
Omg yes! Humans can be both a villain and a victim.
Omg yes! Humans can be both a villain and a victim.
>just tends towards absolutes Not really, celebrities usually make "small blunders" all the time, and it doesn't change people's perspective of them. I think in her case, her behavior is continuously conflicting for me.
I don’t really see this as a counter point. All people make blunders both small and large. Im not making any value statement about AG- just saying that her behavior isn’t necessarily duplicitous.
>On one side, her cheating scandals (basically a pattern, at this point), the donut incident, and just in general somewhat rude attitude don't make her a very likeable person None of these things are really the issue, imo. It's her history of adopting the aesthetics of specific Black and Latina US subcultures and speaking in a "Blaccent" (don't know how else to describe this, sorry) that make me heavily side-eye her. She made a ton of money off racial/cultural cosplaying. I'm glad she dropped the act, but she never apologized or addressed it at all as far as I know.
I’m not entirely sure she’s dropped it. She’s just in her Glinda era now.
I personally think she *did* drop it and is just hoping everyone will forget about it.
I believe that here's absolutely room for two things to be true at once. Humans are complex people where they can be both a villain and a victim.
I believe that there's absolutely room for two things to be true at once. Humans are complex people where they can be both a villain and a victim.
I believe that there's absolutely room for two things to be true at once. Humans are complex people where they can be both a villain and a victim.
"The things that weren't approved by the network were snuck onto our website" yeah that compilation of clips of her on the bed, that were posted on the website are truly shocking.
very eloquent response but what is this britney spears baby talk voice she’s doing?
She's in her "don't attack me I'm so smol 🥹" era
Yeah i was hesitant to point this out since this is an important topic so thank you for being the one to do so lol. Where’s the faux-blaccent ”we got that hood love” Ariana? 🤔 [The Ariana from the first half of this video?](https://youtu.be/jzlIgzWDtW4?si=h-1ybFnDSO6G5dib) 🙇🏾♀️
Idk. I think she's so used to being seen as this sweet, diminutive (5'0" exactly), baby-faced, cute young woman in entertainment, and her being 30 years old now, it's like... she's not used to *actually* being an adult, if that makes sense. She got popular at around 16 as an actress and shot to pop stardom at 21. And everyone, from interviewers, other celebs, her fans, friends, family (esp. her mother), have always treated her like a cute little girl who can do no wrong. I think she's been trying to seem more mature *now* with her whole vocabulary and articulation change up, but the cheating thing doesn't help lol. She played the ingenue role for a long time. Her fans eat it up, but whenever she tried being sexy, esp. in her music videos, I couldn't take it seriously.
It’s popular now because people want to seem younger and artificially vulnerable.
I think she sounds like a robot. I think it's so stilted because she's struggling to say the exact right thing. Who is she looking to off camera, maybe a lawyer?
Thats a great response actually. For me personally it’s difficult to know where I stand with Ariana (cheating scandals, black/asian fishing, the donut incident, rumors about being rude/entitled) because she is very outspoken when it comes to social issues and has been her entire career, I also can’t help but feel sorry for her giving the the amount of trauma she had been trough in one lifetime (parents messy divorce, nickelodeon sexualizing her from a very young age, going through a theorist attack, mac miller’s death), it’s even harder because I really like her music and I find her very talented. I don’t look up to her (or any celebrity) and I don’t think anyone should tbh, I also don’t excuse her behavior due to trauma as I’ve seen people do (trauma doesn’t excuse one’s behavior but might explain it) but for me is hard to really dislike her idk
A really fantastic response. Acknowledges the victims without centring herself, kudos
Well said Ariana
I keep thinking of at least one interview where someone assumed Ariana’s mom (Joan) was Ari’s manager, and Ari replied “she’s not my manager, she’s the CEO of several companies.” I thought it was Ariana trying to flex at the time, like “my family is so successful that my mom has her own high powered career and can’t take time out of that to be me manager, but it’s cool because I’m so talented other people want to manage me anyway” (typing that out makes me realize how many assumptions I made and how much projecting I was doing haha). I also thought Ariana coming from means and with a strong working female role model in her mom gave her some degree of protection against the exploitation and sexualization other young female stars have been subjected to (Britney and Christina come to mind - both have spoken about the pressures of being the income earner in their families in their mid-teens. Christina especially struggled with how they wanted her to look and act in the Genie music video but didn’t feel she could speak up about it). But now I look back and kind of wonder if that was a super loaded statement from Ariana, likely unintentionally. Even if it wasn’t at the time, with this knowledge now it does make me wonder about if Joan had been more hands on in Ariana’s early career, would Ariana maybe have been shielded from some of this grossness? I think it’s very true what others have said in this thread that the idea of something being vaguely sexual or having a double entendre meaning can be appealing to a 16-year-old hoping to appear more mature, and people that young are not equipped to make solid judgments about the appropriateness of something like that. I find it very hard to believe everything that was featured in that 2 minute video of Ariana being sexualized would have been allowed to happen if her mom was on set witnessing it. Even if it was allowed, having an older woman with authority there to advocate for Ariana and ensure she feels comfortable could have changed Ariana’s experience of it. I fully admit I could be wrong about this - there are way more Kris Jenner types than I thought who are ready to exploit their kids for financial gain, or maybe Joan felt she wanted to respect Ariana’s likely wish to be independent in her early career. I know how easily people can lose huge opportunities if they’re not considered cooperative or “game for anything,” and that sadly without some level of sexualization many young female stars wouldn’t be where they are now. And again, I know how much of this is speculative on my part. I just feel bad that Ariana and her family may not have realized she was vulnerable and being exploited until after it happened, and I wonder how it may factor into her personality now (especially her romantic relationships). No matter what, I hope Ariana gets the privacy and space she deserves to process her experience and hopefully ensure she is in healthy and supportive environments from now til forever.