On Gypsy Rose Blanchard and Social Media’s Glorification of Negativity
“Social media – and the way it tweaks and distorts facts – can change our perception of the world unconsciously, and also affect our active influence on the world around us.”
Try this exercise for me. Place yourself in someone’s shoes. Imagine a life in which you’re stranded with constant physical, spiritual, and mental pain. Your provider and soul caretaker, your mother, has made not only you but your community and the world believe you are sick, wheelchair bound, and have leukemia, when in reality you’re being forced to swallow pills you know nothing of and being made to shave your head in order to sell an act so believable that even your abuser believes you’re unwell. There is someone who does not have to imagine this story, as this was the life of Gypsy Rose Blanchard before she was arrested and charged with the murder of her mother, Clauddine “Dee Dee” Blanchard.
Dee Dee Blanchard was affected by the mental illness known as Munchausen by proxy, which causes the sufferer, most often a caretaker, to cripple the person they’re taking care of by creating fake symptoms later, possibly making them a reality with physical abuse. It is a kind of gaslighting. And it involves behaviors such as forcing pills, injuries, and overall trauma, feeding their own delusions about the person they're taking care of being ill, and also leading others to believe in the victim's illness.
My reason for speaking about Gypsy’s situation is because of her rise to fame on social media, the discussions her infamy has created around her name, and the “glorification” of negativity on social media. What I mean by glorification of negativity is how the media has a trend of focusing on bad news and events.
The younger generation, such as Gen Z, partakes in a focus on negativity by making memes and jokes about terrible events, which many focused on during the COVID quarantine era. The glorification of Gypsy has been interesting to me as I see her everywhere, and I have seen plenty of edits giving her a sort of aura or presence that gives off, for lack of a better term, "boss" energy with the edits, which include filtered slow motion shots of her walking with a Nicki Minaj song playing. . It's not like I don't understand that these edits are ironic, and most people aren't really supporters of Gypsy Rose, and many could care less about her story. I still find it interesting because these edits have made people question her situation and things like whether she'll kill again or if she's just a huge manipulator.
I am especially interested in social media's ability to glorify negative events and people. Gypsy's situation is unique, seeing as she is a woman who has been abused her entire life, just got out of prison, and has never had the ability to live a normal life and never will. She'll now have to deal with the media following her for the rest of her life, while many won't care about her as a human either because of her "celebrity" status or the events that led to her infamy.
The only situation I can compare to Gypsy Rose's is a niche community on TikTok that is obsessed with school shooters and creates similar-style edits of these dangers to society in court, and some edits even use footage of the shootings they committed to show their attraction toward these threats to society. An example is Salvador Ramos, who, as an 18-year-old murderer, walked into Robb Elementary School in Texas and killed 19 children and two adults. The edit of Salvador Ramos included a similar style of editing of slow motion and "sexy" R&B music in the background, showing him running his fingers through his hair after he just got done murdering children.
The difference to me between these two people is the distinction between possible morality. When I say this, I mean that no matter how you twist my words or the situation, Salvador Ramos walked into an elementary school that, to my knowledge, had no connections to him and killed 19 children and 2 adults, or 21 people total, while Gypsy, on the other hand, had her abuser murdered, and without the murder of her abuser, Gypsy could have ended up dead. Many may say that Gypsy could've gone away or didn't have to get her mother murdered. Such people forgot to mention how Gypsy was not only wheelchair-bound at the time and had to learn how to walk in prison; she also tried to escape and was later found and chained to a bed frame, not allowed to eat Gypsy. In the eyes of many, she had no other choice but to have her mother murdered, as it was a do-or-die situation. Nicholas Godejohn, who was dating Gypsy at the time of the murder and thus went through with the murder of Gypsy's mother possibly as a way to prove his love to her, is also a possible victim in this situation, seeing as he is not only autistic, which leads many to believe he could've been manipulated with less need for coercion, but is also still not released from prison, unlike Gypsy Rose.
I believe it is important to say we must be careful with the media we consume and watch. Such media has the unbelievable power to change our thoughts, behaviors, and what we're interested in. Social media – and the way it tweaks and distorts facts – can change our perception of the world unconsciously, and also affect our active influence on the world around us.