Jessica, I agree with you that the videos of the “eerily composed” self-promotiing Justin Bieber teenaged fan (AKA “missvideo28”) were troubling, and not just because of her grating self-awareness and casual threats of violence. I also found them sad. Her faux air of maturity, the gratuitous cursing, her desperate need for attention and her seeming willingness to do anything “that’s kind of interesting” to keep her audience watching, all point to this attitude I’ve noticed in many teenaged girls who want to be famous for the sake of being famous and not because they’ve done something particularly impressive, or positive, or noteworthy.
In this video she’s pleading for people to watch her while simultaneously trying to maintain her sophisticated cool composure. She says one viewer wrote in and requested that she smash a shaving cream pie into her own face, and says matter-of-factly that she will oblige.
“What else you want me to do that’s kind of interesting, shall be done,” she says. “I’m up for anything, really I am.”
On the other hand, the girls in the Sydney Dalton video that prompted missvideo28’ s mean threats, are clearly having some harmless fun being silly and cracking up as they rip the Justin Beiber posters to shreds. They actually seem more like normal (healthy?) teenagers. They don’t threathen to hurt anyone, or hurl insults and they even sort of apologetically warn true Beliebers in advance that they may not like the video, and even make a point of saying they mean no offense to diehard fans. Their good-natured fun compared to missvideo28’s mean-spirited diss of Sydney and “her stupid f–king fat ass friends” speaks volumes about the state of mind of certain teenage girls who seem more like jaded, unfulfilled older women who’ve lost all their innocence and whose best days are behind them rather than young people with lives still ahead of them. What’s really sad is that this increasingly seems to be the norm.
