Most people like to start out a new year filled with resolutions. Resolutions like eating healthier, exercising more, being nicer, or becoming the best version of themselves they can be. This doesn’t seem to be the case for the internet’s least favorite siblings, Jake and Logan Paul.
It seems like every week one of the Paul brothers plagues the media with their controversial and immature antics; whether it’s mocking a dead body and broadcasting it for the whole world to see (Logan), getting called out for racist behavior (both brothers), or being called out for emotional and domestic abuse (Jake), it seems like they’ll do anything for a view and are completely willing to disregard others’ needs and feelings to help them up the social ladder.
Last year just around this time, Logan Paul uploaded his famously controversial 15-minute- long video depicting a dead body hanging in Japan’s Aokigahara forest, and received a tremendous amount of backlash for its problematic content.
Prior to its removal, the video gained more than a million views, one of them being mine. After reading about the video and its contents everywhere, it was necessary to see how the Paul brothers were disgracing the human race this time.
His overly-edited and voyueristic depiction of suicide was appalling and made me, and hopefully every other human being who saw it, want to curl up in a ball devoid of any contact with another person forever.
This year, bright and early, the Paul brothers are back in action and ready to give us the problematic content we couldn’t crave less.
This past week, Logan Paul declared he wanted to go “gay for a month” on his comedy podcast “Impaulsive.” Likening it to challenges like going vegan for a month or staying sober, Logan shared with listeners his plan to abstain from women for a month in his new self-dubbed challenge, “Male Only March.”
In “Male Only March,” he urged other males to think twice before being with a woman and instead turning to a man, as if sexuality was like a light switch. As if you could switch it on one day and be attracted to women, and flip it off another day to be with a man.
By depicting an LGBT lifestyle like something one could easily change, like putting on a mask and taking it off, it diminishes and ridicules the oppression and struggles of members of the LGBT community.
While on the podcast, Logan’s idea was enough for intense laughter shared between him and his co-hosts, though listeners and critics alike had other thoughts.
When called out about his atrocious and disrespectful behavior towards the LGBT community through Twitter by the LGBT media monitoring association, GLAAD, he tweeted out an “apology” by his standards.
“Very poor choice of words,” he wrote, “My fault. Let’s get together and talk about it on my podcast next week?” Which, in all honesty, did we expect anything more?
Time after time the Paul brothers release negative and problematic content into an already crowded and divided world and get met with backlash and criticism, but instead of using their mistakes and past experiences to help change (and preferably not create content), they warp and twist their way into becoming more popular and annoying.
So if you’re looking for a more practical and equitable new years resolution, consider going “Paul Brother free 2019,” or even for the rest of eternity.