From Badshah To Britney Spears: The Aesthetics Of Paedophilia

After an expose about hosting child porn and assault videos on its platform, adult videos site PornHub removed search terms like ‘teen’, ‘child’, ‘underage’, ‘child forced’, ‘infant’, ‘kiddy’ — all frequently used search terms by mostly male users looking for pornography. The expose by The New York Times in 2020 revealed the darkest secrets of the company through leaked internal documents, where executives knew teen and child sexual material was available on the platform, but did not want to lose viewers as the demand was high.

The company had to put on a pretense of taking action by banning search terms like the above, but an NYT reporter found that metadata tagging for several videos still included terms such as ‘child’ or ‘12-year-old girl’. Other tags included ‘degraded teen’, ‘unwilling minor’, ‘drunk teen’, and ‘under 10’.

This morbid fetishisation, however, has long been spilling over from the world of pornography into mainstream popular culture. The schoolgirl aesthetic—the “barely legal,” often paedophilic-appealing girl child look—has long featured in music videos and entertainment shows. Both in the West and the East, the naivete of the virginal, desirable girl is portrayed through the visuals many associate with innocence and purity—a schoolgirl. These songs are meant to titillate, objectify and create controversies as a by-product. 

The most recent case from India involves rapper Badshah, who ultimately had to issue a public apology for his song “Tateeree” in case it ‘hurt anyone’, when threatened with arrest. 

A short clip from the music video, barely 15–20 seconds long, went viral online as people accused him of sexualising minors. In this song, scores of girls are dressed in school uniforms, dancing in classrooms and on top of school buses. They carry backpacks and have ponytails and pigtails commonly associated with schoolchildren. The backlash was quick. Many pointed out the absurdity of featuring schoolgirls in a song where the singer wants to bend girls over like an animal (aya Badshah doli chadhane, in sabki ghodi banane). The word ‘tateeree’, though literally translated to a kind of bird, is used in Haryanvi slang to connote a flirtatious woman. 

Eventually, the Haryana Women’s Commission and the National Women’s Commission became involved, an FIR was filed and the video was eventually taken down from YouTube. Demands for the rapper’s arrest flooded the internet. There were his supporters in the mix too, as on the internet, one can find supporters even under news reports of dowry and rape cases on X (formerly Twitter). The fans argued that it is dumb to call it paedophilia—the dancers are all professional and adult. The messaging however, is extremely thinly veiled. There is little ambiguity over what those dancers are meant to represent in the video—young schoolgirls. Critics countered that art is not always literal.

The fetishisation of schoolgirl imagery, however, has been evident in multiple videos, where adult performers wear school uniforms as part of a visual language catering to the male gaze. It is a recurring aesthetic in global pop culture, not limited to one performer or one region. And it isn’t just men using these props for music videos. Sometimes women, too, don the costume of the innocent, maiden schoolgirl to titillate the audience, letting them indulge in a fantasy long normalised by society. 

In 1999, Britney Spears emerged as a global phenomenon with “…Baby One More Time,” dressed in a schoolgirl uniform, pigtails and suggestive choreography as she wandered through the hallway of a school set. Her pining over the titular ‘baby’ is fair—teenage heartaches can feel that intense. What is a little unclear is the explicit moves when featuring a teen/schoolchild look. While some fans celebrated her empowerment and artistry, the video also established a template for the sexualised schoolgirl as a recurring motif in Western pop music.

In the post-Epstein era, these choices take on a more sinister intention. Jeffrey Epstein’s files revealed a global network of sexual exploitation, primarily involving young girls and children— even rapes, cannibalism and murder. These files named the who’s who of the corporate and political world. A broad overview of the files gives the impression that paedophilia is way more rampant than a regular person would assume, making one look at arts promoted by those moguls in a more suspicious way.

Actor Jameela Jamil, in a recent podcast interview, noted that modern beauty standards were set by a ‘bunch of paedophiles’. Figures such as Ronald Lauder (of the Estée Lauder family) and Les Wexner (associated with Victoria’s Secret) were publicly documented as part of Epstein’s social or professional network, helping shape ideals of appearance and style in global media.

Let’s recall the ‘heroin chic’ era from the early 2000s—gaunt face, weak limbs, skinny to the point of looking like a heroin addict and low-rise jeans on bodies with no curves. Since the release of Epstein files, many influencers have taken to social media to vent how the ‘paedophile ring’ gave them body image issues through pop music aesthetics, beauty brand models and more. On the other hand, it gave men more options to fantasise and fetishise the sexuality of youth. 

Coming back to India, while Badshah’s ‘ghodi’ song died a quick, sudden death, another Punjabi singer, Guru Randhawa, continues to reap benefits from the song “Azul” with over 60 million views on YouTube. In this pure male fantasy song, a male photographer finds himself in a school gym to immortalise young girls with his camera, while they traipse around suggestively. Again, they are adult performers; their facial expressions are that of an adult woman who is bold and sensuous; and yet, the visual motif is that of a schoolgirl, basically, a child. 

The song’s name, “Azul”, is titled after an alcohol brand. In this video, deeply inspired by American pop culture, the school gym is reminiscent of the sets most associated with American high schools in movies. The high school uniforms are shorter and tighter than in reality; the girl in Randhawa’s fantasy dons an American hip-hop street attire after shedding off the school look; and the car wash scene is a staple in a lot of American pop songs as a means to depict ‘hot girls’. 

The television channel Nickelodeon had a car wash and water fight scene in the sitcom Victorious (2010), featuring Ariana Grande. A below-16 Grande, in tight clothes and exposed belly and legs, vibrates her body to shed off water and opens and closes her mouth when four boys around her sprinkle her with water. It wasn’t a music video, but it highlighted a future pop star who would again rely deeply on looking like a child (as her critics say).

 In 2025, there was a social media ‘concern ring’ going on about Grande’s ‘unsettling age regression’. Long-term fans expressed concern over Grande seeming to appear more childlike with each passing day—through a voice with a prepubescent pitch, actions mimicking a clueless child and other mannerisms. Most fans, both on Reddit and Instagram, found it concerning that a woman in her thirties would act like a child to be more appealing male fans. 

Hollywood, Bollywood and other film as well as music industries have always framed aging as nothing short of a curse for women. The beauty industry—which, as Jamil rightly reminded us, was built by those closely working with a convicted paedophile—also heavily promoted ‘baby skin’ and ‘anti-ageing’. So, some fans have theorised that it could be her attempting to hold onto that young girl who shot to fame, thanks to Nickelodeon. On a more troubling front, the show creator, Dan Schneider, has been accused of using Grande inappropriately. In retrospective dissections of the show, people found troubling scenes—one where Grande attempts to ‘milk a potato’; one where she bends backward to the camera and squeezes white liquid over her face, all the while squirming and making moanful noises; and several scenes of her sucking her big toe while staring at the camera rather suggestively, acting naive and clueless. Schneider has been accused of misbehaviour, amounting to paedophilia, by many. While there is no schoolgirl aesthetic here per se, the show is about two young teens and their school life. 

Whether it is a porn-like or Halloween template of the schoolgirl attire in a song, or a show depicting teenage life, the sexualisation of schoolgirls can be found everywhere. In a more recent trend, some fans have called out shows like Euphoria (2019) that are turning most teen schoolgirl characters into sex workers and OnlyFans models, once again pandering to the fetishisation and fantasy of the archetype. 

In the US, Britney Spears’ “…Baby One More Time” may have popularised the archetype (visually, at least), but K-pop and J-pop industries have similarly leveraged school uniforms and youthful imagery in performances, blending the perceived innocence with sexualised presentation for ages. 

In Japan, the seifuku school uniform is a recurring feature in idol culture, anime and manga, sometimes influencing adult media and pornography. The ‘Japanese Waifu’ trends on forums like Reddit—empowered by traditional media using these motifs in songs and anime—can lead to extremely misogynistic rabbit holes. 

Even as early as 2017, BBC had covered the growing paedophilic influences in Japanese anime. And it doesn’t stay limited to the screen. There were ‘high school’ girl alleys, as discovered by the British media house, where young girls in schoolgirl uniforms ‘sold their time’ to customers. Even without any sexual interaction involved, the time spent and the fantasy it offered were enough for it to become a flourishing business in Tokyo. 

Owning child pornography material was not a crime in Japan till 2014. So, the historical approval of child porn—and paedophilia—naturally spilled over to its anime, pop and other art. 

But the USA, the land of the free and lifeline of liberty, criminalises child porn. Yet, does this make the scenario any better? As evidenced, it is pretty easy to be a paedophile as long as you are rich in the US. The Epstein Files are proof of that. The crimes alleged—from child rape to child murder to cannibalism—will reportedly see no convictions according to the government. The president of the United States is accused of child sexual assault and he was elected president twice. While a certain section of audience has always objected to such sexualisation in music videos, the conversations have mostly centred the conduct of the women featuring in these videos. Very rarely is the gaze addressed—the gaze that consumes such packaging where the sexualisation of a schoolgirl or ‘barely legal’ teen appeals to them.