Listen, I thought I’d seen it all up here at the top of the universe, what with the gods’ and goddesses’ perverse antics. Have I ever claimed that gods and goddesses aren’t a jealous lot? Have I ever suggested they aren’t easily insulted– particularly by mortals? So I let this story about the pop singer, Rihanna—bloodied and bitten, punched and choked by Chris Brown (for her display of jealousy over another woman’s text message) sit and simmer.
But I’m boiling over, and deeply insulted myself. Not by him—he’s a jerk and a loser—and not by her—she’s a victim (at least she was. By going back with him, she’s an accomplice), but by mortals who profess to want love, love, love pouring down from the Love Goddess– and yet have an increasing and alarming tolerance for hate.
To wit: A recent poll of 200 teenagers by the Boston Public Health Commission, 46 percent of teenagers feel Rihanna is responsible for having been beaten bloody by Brown. Why? Because, many respondents thought she “overreacted.”
SHE overreacted. Really.
Have we not spent centuries hearing vicious men’s boring excuses for savaging, even murdering women? (“I’m really sorry. It won’t happen again.”) Haven’t we seen, in Shakespeare as in life, innocent wives strewn about the page and stage because of their husbands’ jealousy—a jealousy so pernicious that it poisons the imaginations of characters like Othello and Leontes…and O.J. Simpson? Haven’t we all been conned into believing this insanity to be a result of “loving not wisely but too well”?
Love, eh? More than a third of all murders of women are committed by husbands and boyfriends who feel just this kind of cozy “love”–and jealousy figures in most of them.
But back to what saddens me: While we know men’s jealousy prompts them to beat up and kill women, now it appears that so does women’s jealousy. Wow! A new reason to beat women up!
And this is okay by teenage girls?
True, women have always protected men, hiding domestic violence so that their men don’t get in trouble. But this new violence gives added permission to bite, kick, and punch women. In a New York Times story on March 19, “Teenage Girls Stand By Their Man,” Professor Marcyliena Morgan of Harvard states that kids have been taught “What really matters is that we don’t destroy boys.” So besides making sure that boys aren’t not punished for beating them up, girls now want to make sure no one can interfere with their futures.
This is a protection racket, pure and simple, and it’s a recipe for tragedy, greater even than the one we’ve had to ingest for centuries. Now the heartbroken guy apologizing to his punching bag of a girlfriend can claim he was jealous or she was—doesn’t much matter.
Is TV the culprit? Hip Hop? Rap? Whatever it is, from up here in the heavens, what I see down there is unbearable. Even the pitiless gods and goddesses are weeping, for when young mortal girls look at their girlfriends, the ones with the bite marks and black eyes, we’re afraid all they see is the sorry, sorry guy.
