Piercing Your Baby’s Ears Does Not Make You a Bad Person, But Calling a Baby Ugly and Low Class Does

This week, the spawn of Kim Kardashian and Kanye West celebrated her first birthday. What does one gift the infant who has everything? Oh, just a set of diamond stud earrings to go with her freshly-pierced ears. Yes, North looks adorable with her new baby bling, but of course, no action of famous parents shall go uncriticized by the Internet commentariat. While some people gushed about how cute little Nori’s new look is, there was a large portion of people who were turned off by the fact that a one-year-old child had gotten her ears pierced.  Hollywood Life commenter Tanya wrote, “Practically child abuse in my eyes, mutilation of a 1yr old perfect little body and dangerous to boot.”

Mutliation? Child abuse? Quite strong terms to be throwing around over the harmless prick of a piercing gun, which you can barely feel, especially when you’re piercing the very bottom of the ear lobe. But Tanya isn’t the only person feeling a little icky about Nori’s new look. British TV personality Katie Hopkins took to Twitter today to sound off, and to say she went in on an innocent baby girl would be a gross understatement.  “North West. If there’s one thing worse than an ugly baby, it’s an ugly baby with pierced ears.” Ouch! She continued, “Piercing holes in the head of your baby is a strong indicator of social class. More downstairs than up.”

Wow. Besides it being completely screwed up that she’s a grown woman attacking the appearance of a child, for her to make a connection between pierced ears and social class is troubling, to say the least. Piercing an infant’s ears is a common practice among many black and Latino communities, at least here in the United States. As little as a few days after birth, or as many as a few months, infant children are whisked away to the piercing parlor to get their first studs. Hopkins, being from the U.K., has probably seen pierced ears on the children and children’s children of immigrants from the West Indes (where piercing is common), Africa and the Middle East. By connecting baby ear piercing, a cultural norm in many non-western communities to social status, she is ostensibly saying people of these cultures have no class, in comparison to her superior British sensibilities of propriety. 

Obviously, Hopkins knew her tweets would cause a stir. After all, it’s kind of her job to make asinine comments every once in a while, something she’ll describe as “telling it like it is.” But it is particularly low to attack a baby girl, and then go on to cluelessly insult the traditions of people she most likely doesn’t spend a lot of time with. 

There is no stadium large enough to hold the amount of seats Hopkins needs to take on this one. 

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