The Daily Procrastinator

There’s little in this paparazzi-driven world that can bring an issue to the forefront of public consciousness quite like celebrity involvement.  The recent news about Rihanna and Chris Brown is no exception.

At first, I really didn’t pay much attention to the story.  The extent of my knowledge of either of them was largely limited to the gym: her music playing during sculpting workouts, or their faces on the pages of the Entertainment Weekly found in the magazine rack.  It seemed like an unfortunate story that happened to faraway people in Celebrityville.

But as more time passed, I heard things that were increasingly disturbing.  They weren’t details about the attack.  They were the responses to it.  MTV.com ran an article with a headline that caught my eye, entitled “Why are people blaming Rihanna for alleged altercation with Chris Brown?” In it, they note that:

“Based on comments MTV News has received on the incident, a surprising number of people — some of whom are apparently female, although screen names often aren’t gender-specific — are blaming Rihanna for the alleged incident.”

The Guardian in the UK posted the following:

“Major media outlets spent days trying to ponder what possibly could have ’caused’ Brown to allegedly attack Rihanna. After all, he had such a ‘clean cut’, ‘squeaky clean’ image. The most egregious media platforms crossed the line from victim blaming right into victim defaming.”

A good point from the Guardian, but clearly the rest of the world can’t really think like this. These “what caused it?” stories are just a case of the media being full of people looking for both sides of a story to exploit.  That’s not what it’s like in the real world, right?

Oh, how I wish I was wrong.  While hanging out at my local coffee shop recently — a coffee shop which is frequented by an unusually significant number of Bible study groups and other people speaking openly about their Christian faith — I was seated next to a pair of girls who looked to be about the same 20-ish age of Brown and Rihanna themselves.  As they sat there, with their Bibles on the table, I overheard this conversation:

“You know, it’s, like, totally ridiculous.  I mean, he should know that he can’t rough up his girlfriend.  The Bible says you can’t do that until you’re, like, married.”

It took everything in my power not to beat this girl with her King James edition.  Maybe I’m showing my age here, but since when did it become okay to condone violence against women, and even worse, to teach that God thinks it’s okay?  I left the coffee shop in a caffeine-fueled frenzy, angry to think that in 2009, we still haven’t taught kids that this sort of behavior is not acceptable.  Period.

I was delighted to hear that Brown was charged with two felony counts, including felony assault and making criminal threats.  Hopefully that news alone will be enough to make guys think twice before hitting their girlfriends or wives.

Teaching women right from wrong may be another story entirely.  If the rumors are true, and Rihanna has, in fact, taken him back (or married him), then I’m not sure that these coffee shop girls will ever learn their lesson.  Will it take her being beaten to death before they stop and take notice?