Laurie Uttich wants to pity the young women who tweet that they would let Chris Brown beat them up.
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What do I care how inappropriate a song like this is for a woman who was so publicly abused? I get it’s S&M and consensual and all of that, but I’m not sure the fifth-grade girl I carpool with has all that figured out.
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Rihanna and Chris Brown reconciled almost three years to the day since he bashed her face in. I’d like to say nobody gives a shit, but that’s a lie. Lots of people give a shit. After they released their “Birthday Cake” remix, Rihanna increased her fan base—Facebook friends and Twitter followers—by 19 percent. Chris Brown fared even better with approximately a 28 percent increase in Facebook friends and, yeah, I know those people are idiots, but there are over 4 million of them, or at least that’s how many are watching their “doggy want the kitty, watch me get it” reunion remix on YouTube. When Rihanna defended the reconciliation in Elle magazine this month, her comments made the news (and not just The Enquirer; CBS even picked it up yesterday in their Celebrity Circuit).
I was only mildly interested last year when Rihanna released her hit song, “S&M,” a literary triumph that offers these types of thought-provoking lyrics: “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but chains and whips excite me.” Lucky for her, I thought then, that Brown’s off probation and the restraining order no longer applies. He just punched her a few times in the face, but he’s seems like a flexible kind of guy. I bet he’d use a whip.
What do I care how inappropriate a song like this is for a woman who was so publicly abused? And, yeah, I get it’s S&M and consensual and all of that, but I’m not sure the fifth-grade girl I carpool with has all that figured out. We listen to mainstream FM radio and she caught the lyrics before I did. But still, it’s not like any of us look at Rihanna as role-model material. Nobody’s lining up to say that girl there? that topless one on Twitter? that’s exactly how I want my daughter to turn out.
But I began to care in February. Chris Brown wins the Grammy and women on Twitter offer to let him beat them up. Nicole thinks I’m stupid if I don’t realize what an “honour” it is for Brown to hit me. Sharon’s not gonna lie: she’d so let so-sexy, so-hot Chris Brown beat her any day. Casey is down for Brown to punch her in the eye as long as he serenades her first. Stephanie doesn’t know why his then-girlfriend Rihanna complained: “Chris Brown can beat me any time he wanted to.”
Country singer Miranda Lambert wants to know why all of our memories are so short: “He beat on a girl,” she tweets. “Not cool that we act like that didn’t happen.” At a concert, she asks Chris Brown to “take notes” and thanks her dad for showing her how to use a shotgun. Brown’s annoyed. He can’t understand why people care about something that happened “like years ago” and whatever, haters: “I GOT A GRAMMY Now! That’s the ultimate F**** OFF!” It seems entirely possible that Rihanna’s songwriter and Chris Brown share the same creative writing strand of DNA.
I think about these women on Twitter: most of them heart-breakingly young, many of them looking like the twenty-something students who sit in my classes. I want to feel pity for these little social networking fools, some kind of sorrow for the world we’ve created that’s told these women that riding in Brown’s Lamborghini is worth having your mouth filled with blood occasionally. And I do feel it. I do. It keeps me up at night. But I am also still so very much pissed off, because whether they intend to or not, they make all young women look bad.
I’m wondering if the good men care, if they’re as pissed off as I am. Maybe they’re not. Maybe you’re all so beat down by women who claim to want a “good man” and then get dumped by someone like Brittany who Tweets “Call me crazy butttttttt I would let Chris Brown beat me up anyyyyy day.” Maybe you’ve given up trying to figure out what women want and maybe that’s because so many of us sit back and roll our eyes at these women instead of speaking up. I know most of the women my age—and many of the 20-something women I teach and love—feel as if Chris Brown and Rihanna are so unimportant and ridiculous that they’re not even worthy of a conversation. But the conversation is already happening. And when we don’t join it, we look as if we accept it.
So, let me be clear and allow me to speak for the silent, heterosexual woman who is interested in a relationship: we want you to be good men. We want to be with a good man. Some of us even want to marry one. (I did.) And some want to raise good men. (I’m trying.) We get how frustrating all this bullshit must be. And if we could get these “other” women in a room, here’s what many of us would say to them:
Go visit a damn shelter and then tell me how hot it is for some guy to bash your face in. And until you do so, please, please shut the hell up. Because we play for the same team and when you don’t get it—when you don’t get that a woman is beaten every 9 seconds in this country and more than 10 million children witness some kind of domestic abuse every year—when you don’t get that and you write your stupid social networking dumbass tweets that you think are cute, you make us all look bad. You make a mockery out of the work the people—many of them women—who came before you did to ensure you have the right to live in a safe, violence-free environment. So, please, please stop it already.
And I have one more thing I’d like to say and then we can all go back to living however we damn well please, because no matter how stupid I think Chris Brown, Rihanna, and all these various Brittanys and Caseys are… I don’t want hinder anyone’s ability to prove it online or anywhere else.
But I do want to ask all of you good men a favor: If you run into Miranda Lambert, will you please buy her a beer for me?
—Photo Sean MacEntee/Flickr
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“This is an interesting post, I think the Chris Brows/Rihanna thing is indicative of several problems in our society, and several fundamental misunderstandings which have lead to those problems. A few month or so ago there was a post on gmp about a recently released book which chronicled the pushy tactics of the PUA community. I came in part to the defense of that community, not entirely they have serious problems and I don’t endorse some of the more pushy tactics some PUA’s use or believe is appropriate to use. Where am I going with this you might ask? At… Read more »
I’m a little confused as to what your disagreeing with me about. “What has BDSM and some sex positive communitys to do with PUA’s?” Well frankly not much, but as I said in my original post that was not my original point in fact it was a point someone else said to me which the rest of my comment addressed. Anyway, despite viewing some aspects of PUA as overly simplistic and even too pushy I fully support the ethic of PUA and it’s existence, indeed it has helped me in my past. Furthermore I don’t believe that the BDSM community… Read more »
The BDSM community is about learning what you like, finding someone to do it with who is genuinely interested in it, and doing it together. Whatever that may be. for some it’s only in the bedroom, for others it is all the time. There are dominant men, and dominant women, and switches and people who are none of the above. So why would it be bad for a man who likes to dominate learn how to do so with consent? I’m not sure what you’re trying to say.. are you saying that it’s bad for people to get the excitement… Read more »
As bad as what Chris Brown did, this wasn’t (according to all the experts) DV, people continue to protray it as such and it wasn’t. It was a brutal assault to be sure. But there wasn’t a power inbalance here, this was a fight that got WAY WAY WAY out of hand.
This is not meant to exonerate Chris Brown in any way, nor to suggest that Rihanna was not a victim. But, where do we put the fact that Rihanna has chosen to reconcile with him? She chose to sing duets with him and let him back in her life. Perhaps she did so in order to make more money. Perhaps she did so because she has self-esteem issues and/or has battered wife syndrome. Who knows? But she is not ONLY a victim and nothing else besides a victim. Her choices are also read as a message by younger people. Isn’t… Read more »
“I want to feel pity for these little social networking fools, some kind of sorrow for the world we’ve created that’s told these women that riding in Brown’s Lamborghini is worth having your mouth filled with blood occasionally.” Who says it’s not worth it? I can think a million debasing and humiliating jobs that people go to every day because they want money. We all sacrifice our dignity and our health to some extent in order to get what we want out of life. I think Chris Brown sounds like a bad person, but I’m not so sure that these… Read more »
Rest assured, good men care and we are pissed off that Chris Brown won a Grammy. That award gave undeserved legitimacy to an unapologetic egomaniac with violent tendencies. His delusional fans only added insult to injury. I was willing to forgive Chris Brown’s transgressions if he was truly sorry and became a changed person. Unfortunately, he is still the same arrogant, immature thug that beat up Rihanna. I was even willing to let the past stay in the past if Chris Brown faded into obscurity. Unfortunately, winning a Grammy made him once again relevant to pop music. Todd in the… Read more »
Is he the first Grammy winner with a penchant for violence and a criminal record? I think not.
If Teddy Roosevelt, Henry Kissinger, and Yasir Arafat can win Nobel Peace Prizes, and if Hitler and Stalin can both be TIME Man of the Year, then hey, why not Chris Brown win a music award?
This is an interesting post, I think the Chris Brows/Rihanna thing is indicative of several problems in our society, and several fundamental misunderstandings which have lead to those problems. A few month or so ago there was a post on gmp about a recently released book which chronicled the pushy tactics of the PUA community. I came in part to the defense of that community, not entirely they have serious problems and I don’t endorse some of the more pushy tactics some PUA’s use or believe is appropriate to use. Where am I going with this you might ask? At… Read more »
Alrighty let me see if I’m understanding you here? Basically you’re saying that although there are communities that help “nice guys” and shy guys navigate sexual interactions with women, they still aren’t mainstream enough to properly counter the socially ingraine ideas that in a sexual relationship, the man is supposed to take initiative. So then you end up with women who think they’re supposed to be attracted to dominant guys, but find themselves surrounded by men who are less-dominant, in part because of the huge completely consent push, and then they end up finding men like Chris Brown attractive, particularly… Read more »
Yes! Basically the reality is that there is a large community of women who want to be with a man who can take the lead. We can debate if this should be the case till were blue in the face the fact is that it is the case! But many men don’t realize that there are some areas in which they should/may need to be more dominant with women so they don’t act that way leaving many of these women frustrated. The sad result is that many of those women then turn to abusive men because the abusive men can… Read more »
Well I’m not a psychologist, so I don’t know if your analysis of the situation is necessarily true, though it certainly holds with a lot of what I’ve observed. Personally, though, I think the solution is to make the ideas that come out of sex-positive and bdsm communities more mainstream. If we were all open in our discussions of sex, and free from feelings of shame about what we desire, perhaps we’d have an easier time finding partners (or flings, whatever) that suit our needs. Then women who do want a dominant partner would be better equipped to look for… Read more »
I can agree with that, but I still believe that there are many men who are less confident and dominant than they want to be which I believe is just as destructive potentially leading them to relationships which won’t benefit them. For example my own experience, growing up I was taught that there are two kinds of men, essentially door mats and abusers, since I didn’t want to be the latter I assumed that I must therefore be the former. But for me relationships in which I am not dominant are horrible. But it wasn’t until recently that I realized… Read more »
Okay…well what you’re talking about there is gender roles, and so the places that are discussing the definition of “man” would be the lgbt community and sites like this one. GBT men have been examining what it means to be a man for decades. But also, with regards to nuanced definitions of dominant, I think the bdsm community does help with that. The idea that the submissive in a d/s relationship is actually the one with more control, for example, certainly challenges the idea that a man needs to be either a doormat or an abuser. I think the key,… Read more »
I guess I’m beating a dead horse here seeing as this post is not over a week old, but regardless the conclusion to this back and forth has been bugging me. The problem with the bdsm community is simply that fact that things are negotiated. Of course I would never suggest that a couple should not communicate but we must be clear constant negotiation is not always an option in real life. The fallacy of bdsm is that it accepts that one person may want to be either dominant or submissive, but rejects that as part of their nature instead… Read more »
I actually had to re-read my comment because I’d sort of forgotten what I’d said, lol. Anyway, yeah I wasn’t saying that women need generally accept submissive men, or that men generally need to be more dominant. I’m always about the individual…I’m saying that people need to be better able to accept themselves, and that society shouldn’t condemn or praise one type over another type. Your phrase “teach men to be dominant without being abusive,” strikes a bit of a disharmonious chord with me…and I think it’s because of the implication that men need to learn to be dominant. I… Read more »
Right the hell on!