It’s time to fight the bullies who would deny us the pleasure of looking at chubby cheeks.
John Gara for BuzzFeed
"There's only one brand now, and that's family."
Those wise words come from Kanye West. West's visit to Kris Jenner's talk show aired Friday, and after he transitioned into a full-blown Kardashian, he debuted the first public picture of his 2-month-old daughter with Kim Kardashian: North West.
Like much of the Western-pop-culture-following world, I was very eager to see the first picture of baby North. Partly to confirm that two attractive people made an adorable baby, and partly because I just really love looking at pictures of other people's babies.
In fact, the only thing more exciting to me than a celebrity baby is the baby of a friend. If I had a choice, my Facebook feed would be solely pictures of people's babies — with, perhaps, a few pets sprinkled in the mix. Fat cheeks, messy faces, big eyes, chubby hands reaching out — babies are surely the best part of Facebook.
And yet, there are amazingly wrongheaded humans out there who claim that infants are "annoying."
The line seems split between people who find babies in general annoying and people who find the volume of pictures annoying.
"Baby pictures, by and large, creep me out," my friend Rashid told me. "Real-life babies creep me out too. They're just gross and fat and defenseless and GROSS. And bald. I'd prefer to see pictures of toddlers. Or, you know, whatever age they are when they start having personalities."
Meanwhile, my friend Fee wrote, "People take it too far. Is a daily photo of your child really necessary? NO, not under any circumstance!"
Unbaby.me is a Google Chrome extension that uses keywords to replace pictures of babies on Facebook and Twitter with pictures of dogs, or bacon, or other "awesome stuff." I tried it out, and it sort of worked — a picture of a cute baby on Facebook was replaced by a picture of mini horses, but most of the other baby pictures in my feed were unaffected.
When I emailed the creator of the extension to ask what prompted its development, I received a one-line response: "Just annoyed by the growing trend."
