Yahoo News 15 creepy Justin Bieber products for sale
The selling of teenage pop star Justin Bieber is getting weirder by the minute. This week alone, he was re-packaged as an action figure, a pair of headphones, and now, get this, bedding! In fact Bieber's inspiring a whole line of sheets, pillow-cases and towels plastered with the singer's face. I'm going to take a wild guess that this has less to do with his nesting impulses and more to do with fans' insatiable need to get close to the singer. Does anyone else feel weird about vendors selling a night in bed with a teenage boy--even if it's just his grinning face?
And speaking of his face, does anyone else find his pudgy, Play-Doh face, closer in age to Suri Cruise than we're comfortable to admit? He's the first celebrity that has made me feel like Andy Rooney's contemporary. He also acts the way Andy Rooney likely imagines teenagers: Having fights on 'the Twitter', launching a career with the word "Baby" and gorging on Swedish Fish.
If he weren't real he'd be a parody. But he's not. People really like him. Almost too much. And not just the young ones. Tina Fey parodied adult fixations on the singing zygote when she played a teacher in crush on SNL last season. The sketch played up just how disproportionately young and deeply he's sexualized. We do it to teen female pop stars all the time, but a) they look older and b)we're constantly collectively outraged by it.
Because the Beeb's is a boy, no one really seems to mind how young he is and how over-the-top enthusiastic the world is about his sex life. Photos of him hugging or kissing Katy Perry and Kim Kardashian are the stuff of Leno jokes. "What a lucky kid!" (audience howling, applause). But if you look at those photos where he stands with busty 20-something sexually-experienced women, the boy looks petrified.
As fast as he's maturing (which is slower than most girls), he can't catch up with the velocity at which he's being sexualized. He still has the cheeks, build and gummy candy addiction of a pre-pubescent. And yet as Bieber merchandise expands, so does the demographic of the consumer. He's more than a teen idol: he's an ironic statement, a testament to idealized youth, a hilarious joke, and sometimes something undefinable.
How else do you explain the Ken doll reproduction of the kid, or the underwear that bear his name on the butt. The cult of Bieber is getting either funnier or creepier. Or both. A slew of merchandise on shopping sites across the web have already tipped the scales from "is this a joke? to "I hope this is a joke." You decide.
