Overcorrections

You have Anthony Anderson’s creepy self to thank for this post.

I came across a video from 2003 of Anderson interviewing Lindsay Lohan, who was seventeen at the time, where he made multiple comments about her appearance and said how he had an interest in young women. Gross.

But, this got me thinking about something: overcorrections.

Don’t know what I mean? Let me show you, starting with Lindsay Lohan and another starlet whose youthful image has made waves.

From adultification to infantilization

Anderson’s off-putting comments weren’t made in a vacuum. For decades, adults have been drooling over almost/barely-legal young people. The example I had in mind was multiple media outlets counting down to the Olsen twins’ eighteenth birthdays back in 2004, but one article I found proved the “jailbait wait” long predates the Olsens. Shirley Temple, Elizabeth Taylor and Annette Funicello all had legions of men chomping at the bit as their eighteenths approached. In modern times, Anna Kournikova, Hilary Duff, golf prodigy Michelle Wie, and Emma Watson, along with the aforementioned Olsen twins and Lindsay Lohan, all had men watching the calendar for their eighteenth birthdays. This is primarily a man thing, but ladies, you’re not innocent here—I saw some of you making creepy comments about Finn Wolfhard, and I was there when ‘Twilight moms’ were thirsting over Taylor Lautner even though he was young enough to be their son.

Fast forward to 2026, and a lot of people now act weird about age in the opposite way. Adultification hasn’t disappeared (see: Billie Eilish and Bella Ramsey in their portrayal of teenage Ellie in The Last of Us). It’s instead receded in favor of treating adults like kids. Case in point: Sabrina Carpenter.

Yes, Sabrina Carpenter cut her teeth in Disney shows and teen films like The Hate U Give and Tall Girl.  But she is my age, twenty-six, and discarded her squeaky-clean Disney image years ago. Despite her being over halfway to thirty and speaking sexual euphemisms as a second language, morons a certain type of parent routinely gets upset about the risque nature of Sabrina Carpenter’s music and her live performances. 

Infantilization is a topic that could be its own post, so Google search term time for brevity’s sake:

Age gap discourse

“I’m just a girl”

Girl math

Adulting

“Boys will be boys”

Gen Z being anxious about cooking for themselves

From the Janet Jackson controversy to the Not-Listening-to-Jeff-Winger Army

American society has a contradictory relationship with sexuality, one that manages to be simultaneously horny and prudish. The same media outlets that ran countdown clocks to when wanting to sleep with the Olsen twins wasn’t illegal also stalled Janet Jackson’s career after Justin Timberlake inadvertently exposed her breast during the 2004 Super Bowl halftime show.

Spin the clock forward seven years from Janet’s Justin’s faux pas. In the season 3 Christmas episode of Community, Annie Edison, played by Alison Brie, tries to seduce Jeff Winger, played by Joel McHale. She does so with a song-and-dance number the previously-mentioned Sabrina Carpenter would find over the top. When she’s concluded her song, Jeff retorts, “Look, you eventually hit a point of diminishing returns on the sexiness.”

In 2026, the Internet is chock-full of female creators who don’t heed Jeff Winger’s words. As a mid-twenties heterosexual male whose social media algorithms can detect I am such, more than once my TikTok ‘For You’ page, suggested posts on Instagram, and reels on Facebook have begun waterboarding me with posts and videos of women who have sex. They go on podcasts to give every nasty detail about all the sex they have. They pump out video after video teasingly alluding to all the sex they’re having or videos showing the amateur sets where they film themselves having sex or displaying the aftermath of having sex. All this is usually gussied-up advertising for their OnlyFans, where you can pay to see them have sex.

I’m not about to swerve this post into the shark-infested waters that is the ethics or validity of sex work. Instead, I’ll paraphrase The Incredibles’ Syndrome: when everything is sexual, nothing is.

From mass incarceration to blunts on the bus

I’ve read The New Jim Crow. I know that the War on Drugs, and especially harsh anti-marijuana laws, were designed to disrupt black and brown communities. I know, from statistics and stories told to me, that in a state where weed is illegal, if a black person and a white person are both caught by a cop with a weed baggie in their pocket, the white person will likely walk away with a warning and their hash disposed of while the black person will be cuffed and hit with charges, possibly felonious ones. Objectively, I know that the decriminalization of weed is a net good.

That doesn’t mean I have to like it, though.

Michigan legalized weed back in 2018. Intellectually, I know a lot of good has come from that: unfair convictions expunged, a shot in the arm of the state’s economy, etc. Emotionally, I don’t care. I hate the smell of weed. I hate that people make ganja their entire personality. And I hate the strong correlation between smoking weed and being a moron.

Example: a few months ago, I was on the city bus commuting home from work. At one stop, a group of guys got on at volume I’ve-been-managing-a-classroom-for-the-last-eight-hours-shut-up. I couldn’t tell if they were already on something or simply high on machismo, trying to out-loud each other because they were men. I do know one impurity in the gene pool produced a blunt and sparked up. This cause of Einstein rolling in his grave had the gall to be shocked when the bus driver shouted that he either dispose of the blunt or the next stop would be his last on her bus.

 

There are probably more examples, but I’m going to stop here.

A whole year lies ahead of us. You have goals for the year and so do I. Whatever your goals, do your best to not overcorrect.

Also, if it wasn’t clear, if you’re waiting for anyone to turn eighteen so they’re legal, stop that.

Happy New Year. May xXMyBoobsAreHugePayMeToSeeThemXx never show up in your social media feeds.