I’m Not Okay with Chris Brown Performing at the Grammys and I’m Not Sure Why You Are

a little while after it happened, I was at a friend’s house in San Francisco with several other people from USF who I was and still am friends with, and they started talking about the incident.  

This was a group of all females, mostly Performing Arts majors who regularly put on performances of The Vagina Monologues, a show that speaks out against bullshit just like what Chris Brown did to Rihanna.

But they were on his side.

They literally said “You KNOW that she probably did something to get him to that point.” and “She could not have been innocent in that.”

I was so disgusted, horrified, and shocked I couldn’t speak.

How could a group of very educated women, who go to a school whose unofficial motto is “Social Justice,” who take the time to absorb the experiences of women who been abused and raped and educate others about it, actually believe that a woman was to blame for her partner hitting her in the face so hard the was hospitalized and temporarily disfigured?

It doesn’t matter if either of the parties involved are super talented or super famous.  It doesn’t matter whether or not she did anything to piss him off.  What he did was absolutely disgusting and worthy of every bit of criticism and blacklisting and general shunning.  ESPECIALLY because he’s a public figure, and the message needs to be sent that domestic abuse is fucked up and will get you banished.

But as this article points out, the opposite happened, and the message that went out was “We will easily forgive a person who victimizes you. We are able to look beyond the fact that you were treated as less than human, that a bigger, stronger person decided to resolve a conflict with you through violence. We know it happened, but it’s just not that big of a deal to us.” 

Which is why everyone in this Cracked.com article is a hero (in a small way, but unfortunately they’re the only ones doing anything in the right direction.)