“What if tough love is just trauma we’ve mythologized as being useful.” - FD Signifier. That quote sticks with me because I think it’s accurate.

A huge plot point in the first season of dance moms was that the mom of Nia (one of the only Black children was ever a cast member) had a job and because of that she apparently “couldn’t devote enough time to her costumes”. Her mother was a DOCTOR. the rest of the moms (as far as the show portrays) were stay at home parents. there is 100% a massive class element to becoming a youth dancer and it is great to hear you guys speak about it!

Someone once tweeted something like “her mom started coloring her hair at age 2, she never stood a chance”. Enough said.

Babe I'm 31 and I'll still probably cry if someone started yelling at me like that

Guys i think matt might not be a lesbian

Things I remember people made fun of Jojo for when she was a teenager:
- drinking whole milk
- being tall
- being loud
- dressing "too young" for her age
It was just bully behavior

i will never forget working in a department store in like 2018 and a parent with a daughter coming up to the beauty counter and asking where she could get 'jojo bows' and i asked "for hair?" because i thought she was mispronouncing 'jojoba'. i then proceeded to bring this poor 7 year old a bottle of jojoba oil when she thought i was finding a jojo siwa hair bow. its one of those moments i replay in my head before i go to sleep, just so mortifying but really stupid funny to me now

The way that all this “controversy has been swirling around her I forgot that she’s 22 YEARS OLD. Like holy shit. I wouldn’t even wanna hold a convo with my 22 year old self give her some grace.

No joke, when that law in Cali got put in place, a bunch of family channels moved out of LA to avoid having to give money to a trust fund.

Someone said “Jojo Siwa is a child star going through the pain of trying to figure out who she is in front of everyone” & I haven’t stopped thinking about it since.

it's not that Jessalynn saw Jojo's talent at 2 years old. She said she wanted Jojo to become a star the moment she was born and bleached her hair at 2 years old and went on talent show and such to make her one.
Edit for more context that weren't mentioned: Jojo barely had age appropriate friendships as a teen. She said Colleen Ballinger was her best friend and hung out with plenty of adult problematic youtubers. She wasn't close to the Dance Moms cast but they were friendly and supportive of her until they spoke out against Abby's mistreatment, and Jojo downplayed it saying it was just "tough love". She says the most valuable thing Abby taught her was that you had to be ready to serve your heart on a plate and have people sqaush it! Now who has a vested interest in Jojo thinking what they experienced wasn't child abuse? All the adults on her life and most of all her mother.

Jojo's whole life is giving Sarah Lynn from Bojack Horseman. Her whole life is one big performance for the masses and she won't stop till the curtains fall

Josephine Josephine Siwa needs a good couple months away from camera imo, child stars always turn out so tragically.

I really appreciate you not censoring words pertaining to lesbophobic sexual violence. It is disheartening to see other creators using emojis and euphemisms to describe and analyse these very very real things that we have to deal with (and have had to survive). I'm so tired of it being sugarcoated online tbh, if I see one more grape emoji I'll heave. The content warning gives us ample choice to skip if we feel we need to. But I genuinely appreciate you using the correct language.

threw up my hands & said "YESSS" when i saw kat pop up after clicking on this title are you kidding me

30:53 for reference, Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour was 149 shows. So basically child JoJo did almost as many shows as adult Taylor did.

I really appreciate the grace that Kat gives jojo in figuring out her gender and sexuality. And Matt is correct, sexual fluidity IS very misunderstood and even demonized. Even if individual lesbians in Jojo’s life may have said biphobic things to her or made her feel less able to explore her feelings, those ideas and forces still come from heteronormative, straight society, not lesbians. Packaging herself as a lesbian (in her mind, as her own marketer), is self-evidently transgressive. Packaging herself as a pansexual genderqueer person is transgressive but not at all self-evident, it fully defies heteronormative conventions, and defies the world jojo has spent her whole life trying to sell herself in

As a Brit I’m telling you, ‘The Sun’ is not a newspaper. That’s giving it wayyy too much credit! It’s a gossip tabloid that often spreads misinformation, criticises women’s (and men’s) bodies and causes real harm. It’s hated in many areas of the UK

Kat is absolutely right about having a young daughter in dance being a status symbol. I was always so jealous of the girls in dance classes because we couldn’t afford dance classes.

I have seen a lot of discussion going "Jojo siwa is straight???" and I don't follow her particularly, but it's maddening if she's calling herself queer that she's being called straight anyway because she's dating a man. She may be wrong about the primary source of biphobia, but she's not wrong that biphobia is alive and well.