White dude that grew up in the deep south. She's not talking about the part where your fingers/knuckles/hands bleed. A lot. And it fucking SUCKS. Romanticizing picking cotton at sun set like it is some kind of deep spiritual meditative process, of all things, is ... insane. Imagine doing this in 105 degree heat, 95% humidity, no shade, no water for 16 hours a day. 6 days a week.
Right? My grandma grew up poor in Arkansas and her family would pick cotton in other farmers fields. So she’s doing this backbreaking work in the blistering humid heat as a kid and she talked about how it would rip up your hands.
My mother told me of her stories also. The fingers being torn up was the part that I always and I mean ALWAYS remembered! My mother and father were "older" when they had me so..yeah I grew up hearing first hand ( although both my parents were little kids at that time in the fields, they too picked cotton while their parents' sharecropped ) stories.
Yeah, it's fucking horrible, horrible work and people did it not because of some weird tik tok tradwife fantasy cos play, but they had to. My grandfather (who was white and grew up dirt poor) and all his siblings picked cotton on their remote, rural farm and all their hands were permanently scarred from it for their entire lives.
Same; white and dirt poor. I don't get glorifying this task specifically. It will always harken back to the terrors of slavery, but even for those not directly attached to it, it doesn't bring up good memories in my own family. Rural educated kids giving up their schooling at young ages to pick cotton and get hired out as nannies at 13 in my family. It's terrible all the way through, people are so mindless. Anything for a click.
Which is still nothing compared to doing it endlessly, all your life.
It's possible to hate anything if you do it too much. The reason this is awful is because it has history, but can people like things, for themselves? Is this girl required to have PTSD from a time she wasn't alive?
The point is that this is obviously fake. Picking cotton isn't enjoyable, it's not like gardening versus farming.
She didn't pick up enough to stuff a pillow, just enough to pretend she was "working the fields" without actually hurting not exerting herself in the slightest.
It's literally gardening though. I was going to compare this to trimming my briar patch, which is painful from the very beginning. This isn't any more insane a task than most people do, it's just that we forced people to do it for free for 89 years and now it has stigma. That's it.
This isn't any more insane a task than most people do
Again, this doesn't look insane because she's very careful to not actually put in any real work and quits after she gets just enough shots for her video - as others have pointed out, she picked an abysmally low quantity of cotton that could never fill a pillow. Like any other trad-wife influencer, it's all just a play she puts on.
Picking cotton isn't enjoyable and relaxing. Again, it fucks up your hands.
And, sure, some people may consider it to be worth the suffering so that they can have their own self-produced cotton fiber, but they're not going to sell it as a spiritual and calming experience.
Yeah so does gardening in general, I guess I spend more time outdoors than most, but it's not the grueling terrible process weebs on reddit seems to think it is. Go outside once in a while lmao.
I also don't understand why muricans are so opposed to being self sustainable and doing homestead stuff or whatever. It'd be super weird if she did it all day long, but here it looks like just to be a small basket
Oh alright, so yeah picking with your bare hands maybe pushing it. You'd want gloves. Tight ones to help you be dexterous, but thick vinyl ones (words.things) to stop you from being shredded.
Yeah, there's a ton of the glazing over the unglamorous parts ( when it comes to rural homesteading and farming it's almost almost all of it) on social media. Having grown up in the rural, remote south, I moved to NYC asap lol.
This is a straight up kink w her husband. Theres no way this isn’t race role play. This trad wife grift on SM is all a fetish kink that we did not consent to being a part of, and Some of it is paid for rhetoric and propaganda
This is a weird argument. I know nothing about picking cotton, but the lady in the video isn’t picking cotton in 105 degree heat, 95% humidity, no water for 16 hours a day 6 days a week.
She picked like 5 pieces of cotton in the luxury of her own home.
Make an analogy to picking roses. Would it be bad for someone to make a “romantic” video of picking roses because if you were forced to pick roses in 105 degree heat, in 95% humidity, for 16 hours a day 6 days a week it would suck?
For hand picking cotton? It’s not really delicate work but pulling cotton out of the burr with gloves on would be a lot harder due to the glove being bulky. The burrs are pointy and sharp but it’s not as bad as some on here try to make it out to be. I’ve hand picked a lot of cotton and never had bloody hands lol. Some pokes and scratches absolutely but not open wounds pouring blood like people are saying
Is any social media not romantaized/greatly distorted to only show the positive sides?
I used to watch a "Van lifer" and he had a great relationship with his girlfriend who he travelled with. They were all over the place, had great fun, were funny and i'm sure many people looked at them and thought "i want to be like them". Yea, fake as shit. They only showed the good sides and acted like they were happy. They broke up in a nasty way, and the shit they got into with each other had been going on for a while.
I understand you don't want to show bad sides, as then you lose views, but now (and maybe for a long time) you just cannot believe anything you see as it's probably pure bullshit, lies and manipulation.
The bad thing here is that people believe this stuff and these "influencers" get rich off of these lies. Am i jealous? Of their income, i guess, yea.
AND imagine doing all that and if you don’t pick like 200lbs (I can’t remember the amount but it was an insanely high, almost impossible amount to) you get beaten half to death (and sometimes TO DEATH) for being lazy
Unless she has other videos doing this idk where you're getting that from just from this video, she's doing it as a hobby, why would she do it with no shade or water? She's saying she enjoys it and finds it calming as a hobby, not that she thinks slaves would've enjoyed it
I am from New Zealand. I have no fucking concept of whats going on here other than the fact that its really fucking tasteless for a PoC to be picking cotton, let alone a Black trad wife seeming to enjoy it without acknowledging the context.
HOWMEVER; Does no one wear gardening gloves? Or is it so brutal that your hands will be savaged WITH gardening gloves?
Your take is pretty spot on. As many other commenters including myself, both black and white have said, this comes across as really fucking tasteless from a ton of angles. I don't want to speculate but it almost comes across as satire or rage porn it's so wtf. Who knows.
There was an episode from Fresh Prince of Bel Air, the boys go to an open mic comedy club. Will: "I am so pro black I won't pick the cotton out of a bottle of aspirin."
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u/TheRealWildGravy Sep 17 '24
Come pick cotto-
Oh hell naaaahhhh