TW: Pedophilia, sexual assault/abuse/harassment, statutory rape
The screenshot above are of the lyrics to I Like the Crotch on You by R. Kelly. The track is on 12 Play. But some of y’all would still rather blame the victim instead of the creepy man drooling over babies.
But in a world of social media, there’s really no excuse. And if it took Surviving R. Kelly to convince you that Robert needed to be canceled or that there is a huge pedophilia problem in the black community (and America, in general if we’re really being honest), you’re part of the problem.
I don’t keep up with most celebrity news, but this was everywhere. And Jim DeRogatis’ July 2017 Buzzfeed article on the “Pied Piper’s” cult was breaking news that was on my timeline for weeks.
It’s real hard to defend a man who calls himself the Pied Piper of R&B when he’s accused of statutory rape and pedophilia. I have no idea how ya’ll do it. FYI, I don’t care how good you think 12 Play is. It isn’t good enough to give a man a pass for preying on underage girls.
Beyond that, we KNOW he married Aaliyah when she was 15. There is nothing at all that can convince me that child marriage is okay. I don’t care about what her family says to save face and distract us from the fact that they failed her.
There’s also a point to be made that he’s on video peeing on a 14-year-old. Police found child pornography in his home. Even if you never saw the video, you HEARD about it. The facts were that the child was 14 and there was video of him peeing on her. Chicago jurors let that man go because they wanted to keep playing I Believe I Can Fly at kindergarten graduations.
Maybe part of the reason I can’t relate is because I was so deep into the Boondocks (both the comics and the show) and most people I know were, so I don’t personally know many people who need the docuseries as a reason to cancel Robert. Aaron McGruder did a great job of being real about the situation even in joke form.
Huey’s monologue is THE SAME EXACT point we’ve been making.
However, what I will say is that #muteRKelly has been around for a year or two. Maybe you didn’t know the specifics, but I’ve been looking at my FB memories and I’ve been sharing R. Kelly shit since I was in college, I guess that’s why I’m shocked that people can say that they just saw that he was a problem within the last week.
Unfortunately, at this point I’m convinced that some people who didn’t know just didn’t want to. And that’s disheartening as fuck.
TW: Pedophilia, sexual assault/abuse/harassment, statutory rape
I have a question for ya’ll. Do you blame the pig for letting itself get killed and made into ham for your sandwich?
Do ya’ll blame the drunk driver or the victims of car accidents for being on the road in the first place?
Do ya’ll blame black men for being killed at the hands of police? (I know some of you do, but if that’s your feeling you’ve absolutely come to the wrong blog. I’m gonna tell you right now, reading further will spike your blood pressure.)
If you answered no to all of the questions above, then why the FUCK would you think its the fault of teenage girls – CHILDREN when they fall for the advances of predators?
The strange thing is, that we (and by we, I mean the black community) have this thing about children acting “too old” or “too grown” while simultaneously never allowing them to be children. How can children be children when we punish them for being just that or we assign them adult qualities for doing things that aren’t inherently adult-like?
Black parents call children too grown for asking too many questions or for wearing their hair a certain way. Ya’ll fussed and cussed about North West’s red lipstick in those holiday photos like the lipstick turned her from a cute toddler into a salacious sex kitten just like that.
I don’t know what kinda red lipstick ya’ll own. I love Fenty Stunna as much as the next girl and I rarely feel like a sexpot the minute I put it on. I mean maybe paired with the right outfit, all of the Kilowatt highlighter, and a nice shoe, but that’s beside the point. The point is that I certainly don’t think a little red lipstick is to blame for predatory ass men manipulating and raping children who cannot consent.
I remember being in high school and having crushes on men way out of my age range. I’d get butterflies when they spoke to me, I’d think about them when I should have been doing my homework. Let’s be honest, older men were way more attractive than the scrawny, high-pitched voice boys I went to school with. They seemed smarter, more sophisticated and finer because they’d survived puberty and lived to tell the tale.
HOWEVER, crush as I might, nothing ever happened. One, every grown ass man I ever crushed on knew that I was A CHILD. Beyond the fact that my parents would likely have gone on a murdering spree if someone over 18 even asked about me, those men had the good sense to know that there was nothing – absolutely NOTHING that I could offer them.
Now, of course, I got a little lucky because my parents didn’t find one thing cute about an older man asking about their daughter. Hell, when I was 13 or 14 a young man in high school tried to date me. He was 16 or 17. My parents shut it down. They told him, they told his mama. They told everyone at the studio I danced at (which is where I met him) that nothing was cute and nothing was happening.
But obviously, everyone doesn’t have my parents and a lot of children fall through the cracks and into the grasps of predators everyday. The fact that some would rather blame the helpless for being targeted instead of the person committing the crime is high key sick and THAT’S why your uncles, brothers, and fathers been getting away with this shit for years.
I’m looking at aunties and babysitters too because we ALSO need to talk about the fact that losing your virginity in grade school to a grown ass woman is rape too. There is no 8-year-old boy “smooth” enough to seduce a woman 8+ years his senior. He was taken advantage of, manipulated, and raped. Ten-year-old boys don’t want pussy, they wanna play with their Legos. If you’re one of those people who look at news reports of women teachers having sex with their underage students, and think no wrong was done because she was attractive then you are also a part of the fucking problem and you need to figure that out and straighten up.
I would like to pause for a second to say that pun tho.
Listen, we got to protect our children instead of punishing them for being children. Times up on people who think it’s the victim’s fault for being preyed on. Half of us are STILL being manipulated by trash ass men, but we expect babies to have the tools to protect themselves. Babies. And yes, they’re still babies even at 16 and 17.
I’m routinely dragged by Facebook memories when my posts from high school resurface because I was young and embarrassing. I can only forgive myself because I was a baby and I’ve since grown.
I still know very little about men and how to be in a healthy, committed relationship, but I didn’t know shit then and I didn’t know I didn’t know shit. And I’m subsequently still in the process of unlearning a lot of the problematic shit I retained between getting my first period and going off to college. What I do know is that we shouldn’t have to plead with you this hard to believe children instead of protecting predators.
Predators keep people around them to protect them from the consequences of their trash actions. And to be honest, some of the biggest protectors of pedophiles are the ones they don’t pay.
You kiddos have no idea how groundbreaking this was. Like there’s a reason THE lesbian website for a billion years was called After Ellen. She changed everything.
oh man you know that feeling that’s like kind of an ache right between your heart and your stomach? like nostalgic knowing of pain? that’s how the scared look in Ellen’s eyes makes me feel.
Look at her hand too and how nervous she is. Every gay and lesbian person knows this feeling, because we know there are assumptions and consequences and there’s no telling how someone will react.
And let no one forget that she suffered consequences for this. It wasn’t just a moment of cathartic unburdening and then business as usual.
Right, she lost her first TV show. She worked hard to get up to where she is today.
You can see the moment where she’s like “I can’t just like and make up a name. I can’t just pretend that the person I felt a deep connection with doesn’t exist.”
