“She provides a look that is a woman’s body and a very young face. “For me it posed the question: Does this bait a certain demographic of people?” Day says. Though her body looked like that of a fully mature woman, her face, Day thought, made her look like she was 14 or 15.
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A 24-year-old mom from Ohio, Day became popular on TikTok for her ongoing series with the same name, and she saw that a number of people had posted side-by-side photos of older photos of Deets, juxtaposed next to newer ones after she started going by Coconut Kitty.ĭay tells Rolling Stone that she was shocked by how young Deets looked in the edited photos, particularly since she made a living making NSFW, sexually explicit content. Last June, a TikTok creator named Bekah Day was perusing Reddit’s “Instagram versus reality” forum to find content ideas for her page. #AsSceneOnTubi #PrimeDayDealsDance #TubiTaughtMe #viral #fy #instagram “And they were right, and it fuel for p-words and profiting off of it doesn’t sit right with me. “People are taking these pictures of me and creating a story they thought would go viral,” Deets says. More broadly, the controversy surrounding Coconut Kitty’s Instagram presence has raised questions about the ever-fluctuating lines between fantasy and reality on social media, and the ethics of representing yourself as something you decidedly are not - even when, as an influencer with a large platform, misrepresentation is sort of, kind of, part of the gig. But she says she never could have anticipated that by editing her photos to look younger, she would be accused of exploiting and grooming minors while receiving a barrage of death threats, and launching a conversation about internet minor safety and sex work. The gambit worked: On Instagram alone, Coconut Kitty has amassed more than 3 million followers, and 11,000 on OnlyFans. Coconut Kitty “gave me an opportunity to disassociate myself” from the criticism. “Whether they say you’re pretty or ugly or your boobs are lopsided or this or that, it doesn’t matter because it was literally a character I created,” Deets says. She had some reservations about editing her own face to such an extent - mostly about promoting unrealistic or unhealthy beauty standards - but she figured all the big magazines used tools like Photoshop so why couldn’t she? Plus, using a heavily filtered version of her own face helped distance herself from some of the painful critiques she would get while camming. Deets says she wasn’t shy about the fact that she heavily edited her image, referring to her profession as “art and magic” in her Instagram bio and not deleting older photos on her page.