On Chris Brown, Tolerance, Domestic Violence and Victim Blaming
I've been going back and forth on whether to post this or not but I've decided to just go ahead with it. Some of this isn't my story to tell but I don't think the context is completely apparent without sharing my mother's story, as well.
On Chris Brown, Tolerance, Domestic Violence and Victim Blaming
I'm appalled at the way that Chris Brown has been allowed back into the fold, allowed to perform not once but twice, to an audience of millions of people on television, live and in person in front of a star-studded gala that happened to have his victim in it and I'm appalled at the way that women think it's a-ok to tweet things like "I'd let Chris Brown beat my face as long as he kisses it". I'm appalled and upset at the society that thinks that it's all right to let Chris Brown to shine once more.
But I'm also appalled at myself. When I first read the tweets by the women listed on the Buzzfeed compilation, my initial, gut reaction was to wish it upon them. I hoped that they would experience what it felt like to get a fist to the face by someone they loved so that they wouldn't ever ever tweet, say, think something like that ever again. I wished for them the same experience that I went through and that isn't fair of me. That's vindictive and evil. There is no reason for it, even if it is a human reaction. No one, not even a woman that says that she wants to be bashed in the face by a man because he's hot, ever deserves to get beat.
The following is my way of working through this. Please note that the following contains graphic descriptions of domestic violence and child abuse.
I am the third child of four. My older sister is 8 years older than me, my brother is 5 years older and my younger sister is 3 years younger. I was a daddy's girl when I was very small, I tailed after him for everything. I can remember learning how to make pancakes with him when I was four, standing on a chair in the kitchen while pouring batter on the griddle and that first time I flipped a pancake without breaking it. I remember my dad insisting on coaching my t-ball team (my mum helped) and then moving on to softball. I remember my dad trying desperately to get me to catch a ball even though I never was very good at it. I couldn't run, I couldn't bat and I could barely catch but my dad continued to coach and encourage me. He would read me a bedtime story at night and he'd tuck me in to go to sleep. He'd braid my hair and he'd spend hours ensuring that my hair was brushed (it went to my knees and was a complete pain to care for).
I never understood why my older siblings hated my father. Sure, he was tough if you didn't bring home the right grades. Education was important to him. It still is. And, sure, my dad would sometimes yell at us, especially if I did my own special version of cleaning the room that I shared with my sisters (three girls in one room, you try living in that) by shoving all the dirty clothes under the dresser rather than dumping it in the hamper. But, for the most part, my dad doted on me. He'd bring me a special treat whenever he'd run to the closest movie rental place.
We lived on twenty or so acres and we ran wild. My siblings and I had to play with one another because we were it. The driveway was over a quarter mile long, the bus-stop was over a half mile away, literally uphill both ways because we lived in the middle of a hill so we'd have to trek up and down and up and down. When it snowed, my dad would fight the tractor out of the shed, strap the snowplow on it and then plow out the driveway. I can remember riding on the tractor, taking the steering wheel from my dad as we sped along the grass in the summer. We only worked about four acres of our land, the rest went back to woodland. I remember standing on a large balcony and staring out with my dad as he pointed to where the deer were feeding. We'd run wild in those woods, too, playing Pocahontas or Lewis and Clark or William Penn (hey, we lived in the middle of bumfuck Central Pennsylvania, what can you expect?!).
My dad would read me a story at night, every night, and tuck me into my bed, the lower bunk with my little sister on the upper one, and then he'd kiss my forehead and ask me to never hate him as much as my older sister did. I would agree with him, nod frantically and tell him that I could never hate him.
One day, when I was eight, my siblings and I were playing hide and seek and I was the furthest out. I was so far out, I'd made it to the back edge of our property, somewhere none of my siblings had ever made it to. I was giddy with the excitement of winning, of going so deep into the woods that it felt like I was the only one that existed, that the light dimmed because of the giant branches of leafy trees and I knew that when I returned to the house in my own time, I would be victorious. I was so far out that I never heard the dinner bell, a giant antique bell that was so loud the neighbors heard it and timed their own meals to it.
By the time I got back to the house, dinner was getting cold. My mother hurried me into the bathroom to wash up and then went back to the table to start serving. I remember that we were having a giant salad and I remember the smell of chicken in the air, my mum makes the best baked chicken you'd ever want to taste. I remember stepping out of the blue bathroom (each of our five bathrooms were colored differently and we referred to them as such) that was just off the dining room and I remember falling backwards as my face erupted in pain. I don't remember my dad appearing and I don't remember the swing of his fist, whether he backhanded me or if he punched me. I wish I could remember but I'm glad that I don't, all at the same time.
My father dragged me into the bathroom, wiped the blood from my split lip and then walked with me into the dining room. I don't remember eating though I must've because I don't remember my mother being upset. I don't remember much of anything that followed until my dad came in that night, read me a story and tucked me in, kissing my forehead and asking me not to hate him.
The violence spiraled after that, almost as if my father felt he'd given himself permission to hit me. He'd waited until I was eight and he shifted his loving attention onto my little sister. He never really hit her, never really abused her but out of all of us, she hates him the most. I remember the first time my dad tried to hit my sister and I leapt at him, fighting back because my sister wasn't going to get hit, not on my watch. I remember fighting, each time, whenever he thought it was right to beat the both of us. I remember running down the hallway, trying frantically to stuff clothes from the hamper into the back of my pants before he came in to beat us for some imagined slight or another. He ripped the front trim off the dresser and he beat us with it, nails and all. He caught me a couple of times where the padding wasn't enough. By the time he was done with me, he was too winded to do more than a quick smack at my sister and I was so happy that she wasn't worse off.
When you grow up with this, you develop coping mechanisms. Pancake days were always 'safe' days. I knew that my dad wouldn't beat me whenever we had pancakes for breakfast. I knew, once I joined the swim team, that he wouldn't beat me as much because the swimsuit covered so little. I hated swim team almost as much as I hated softball but I stuck with it because I knew he wouldn't hit me as often. I knew that if I brought home good grades, I would get at least a blissful week of no beatings. I might even get taken out for ice cream as a special treat.
By now, a lot of people are asking why I didn't go to anyone and tell them, make it stop. The answer is that I did. When I was in fourth grade, we were sitting there in health class and the teacher said that if someone ever hit us, we should tell someone, that there were guidance counselors ready to help us. During lunch the next day, I went in to the guidance counselor's office and I told him. He told me to stop making up stories and sent me back to class. Not only did he ignore what I was telling him, but he called my father and told him what I had said. I was so bruised that night that I didn't go to school the next day. The school thought I had a stomach bug.
I tried again in sixth grade. I figured that I was in a new school and this guidance counselor that had so lovingly guided me through the grieving process of losing my swim team coach, I thought that she would listen to me, that she would help. I remember sitting in her office as she stared at me and then, right in front of me, picked up the phone and dialed my father. "You'll never guess what outrageous story [wook] just told me" she said to him and the proceeded to repeat everything. This time, I wasn't beaten as badly but the mental and emotional abuse got so much worse. My father convinced everyone that I was a liar, that I was making things up and writing stories about it.
No one cared about the bruises. Those were easily explained away as falling out of trees or tripping down the many flights of stairs we had at the house. They were sports injuries or something else. It was then that I realized that no one was going to help me. There I was, eleven and dodging vacuum cleaners thrown like javelins down the hall at me, and no one would help me. I don't remember how soon after the guidance counselor called my dad that I tried to commit suicide for the first time. I just remember doing it and being so fucking upset at myself when I woke up the next morning. So I tried again. And again. And again. By the time I was fourteen, I had tried to commit suicide at least fifteen times. I took pills. I slit my wrists. I stole my father's shotgun but the bastard locked up the bullets. I shot myself with a bb gun. I took more pills. And yet more pills. Nothing worked. Failure on failure on failure.
When I was fourteen, I saw my father beat my mother for the first time. Blood streaming down her face from the way that he was hitting her and her broken glasses were digging into her face as the broom swung down, over and over again. I leapt across the kitchen. To this day, I have no idea how I got over the table but I remember leaping it, and I jumped on his back. He shrugged me off, slamming me into the pantry as he tossed the broom down and stormed out of the room. My mother calmly stood up, brushed her hands down her shirt and then went to her room.
By this point, most people are blaming my mother for keeping my siblings and I in this situation. That's where the victim blaming comes in. My mother was a well-educated woman. She was the first in her family to ever attend college and she used that college degree to become a computer programmer in the seventies. She's not quite five feet tall and, at the time, she weighed eighty-five pounds. She'd taken about ten years off from working so that she could raise us kids. She made pennies to my father's dollars.
I could go into how abuse starts slowly. It's an insidious poison that pollutes everything that it touches. It can beat you down so slowly that you're grateful for the beating because at least someone loves you enough to hit you.
Or I could tell you about how a woman might not feel like she had any options. After all, my mother needed to get us kids out of there and there was no way that she could afford all the bills and everything else on her small salary. She couldn't afford a car to take us places and, in Central PA, if you don't have a car, you can't get around. I had never ridden a public bus until I was eighteen and in college. I'd seen public busses but they were completely boggling to me. They still are.
I could tell you about a friend of mine that stayed in an abusive relationship because the local women's shelter wouldn't allow her to take her dog with her and at least her dog loved her.
I could tell you about how people are culturally programmed to think that men are inherently at the mercy of women and how women are the ones responsible for everything bad that happens to them. Get raped? Maybe you shouldn't have worn that skirt. Get beaten? Maybe you shouldn't have opened your mouth. Get beat again? Maybe you should've left the first time.
And it's that last that bothers me so much. My mother did the best that she could for us. She took beatings meant for us. When you say that you don't understand why women stay in abusive relationships, you are saying that they are weak. They aren't. They're scared and alone and lost and abandoned. They're protecting someone or something. They've built up coping mechanisms through a lifetime of abuse and can't find the door in the middle of the brick wall that those coping mechanisms are as they box themselves into a violent situation.
I've seen supposed feminists say that any woman that stays, deserves what she gets after that. That they would never stay but, you know? I hope that "you" are never in that situation to see if you really would stay because I don't wish my situation, my mother's situation, on you. I wish you the happiness and self-certainty that you would leave because I've seen it tested in my own family. My older sister stays with her emotionally/mentally abusive boyfriend while I got out when my (now ex) fiance slammed me into a wall and picked me up by my throat. I saw my little sister struggle with the decision to stay or leave her abusive boyfriend. So I wish you the certainty that you would leave but until you're there, you can't know and what you're doing is blaming the victim for her abuse.
When you say that you don't get why a woman stays and you think that she deserves the beatings that she gets afterwards, you are saying that she is responsible for the man's fists and anger raging at her. You are absolving him of the guilt because it's that dumb bitch's fault for staying. It is the same as saying that she deserves it because she burnt dinner, read his text message, hit him back, said something.
When you say that you don't get why a woman stays, you are saying that she hasn't tried everything. But what if she has? What if she went to the police, what if she told just like she's supposed to and her abuser not only gets a slap on the wrist but gets to publicly shine right in front of her while the world watches? What if you have to watch a bunch of women go on about how they'd love to get beaten because that boy is hot? What if you have to watch your abuser succeed when all you can hear is how he threatened to kill you because you looked at his cell phone? You burnt the dinner. You didn't iron his socks properly.
There is a reason most rape victims don't go to the police. It is because we, the general we, believe that the woman did something to deserve it. She wore tight jeans, she wore a skirt, her blouse was low-cut, she was walking alone in a parking garage, she had too much to drink, she went to a frat party.
There is a reason most domestic violence victims don't report their abusers. It's because they are blown-off, they are told that they are exaggerating, that "pics or it didn't happen", that they're being too sensitive about their husband/partner's verbal abuse, that they should've left when they were first hit rather than after the fiftieth time, that they deserved it because they didn't leave right away.
I get the idea of redemption. Perhaps, eventually, Chris Brown will redeem himself. Maybe he'll work through his abusive and insidiously evil treatment of women. Maybe, eventually, he'll figure it out and he'll become a peaceloving hippy like John Lennon did after he was accused of domestic violence. I hope that happens. Maybe Chris Brown will turn out like my father who, after we left when I was fourteen, stopped drinking and turned his life around. Maybe Chris Brown will even go so far as to be able to have a peaceful relationship with Rihanna, if that's what she chooses. After all, I've chosen to have a relationship with my father. He visits me, supports me and helps me. But I choose when and I choose how. He doesn't call me, I call him. And if Rihanna wants to forgive him, then that is her choice. But I don't think three years is enough time to have the world forgive him of his trespasses against all of womankind.
So, no. I don't really wish that those women would get bashed in the face so they would understand the heart-pounding terror that one gets as one runs away from their abuser, knowing that they'll be caught and beaten in the end because their abuser is so much larger than they are. But I do wish that they'd wake up, that they'd volunteer at an abuse shelter and see what the victims go through.
I wish the world would wake up to how we treat victims of abuse, whether that abuse is child abuse or rape or domestic violence or gay bashing. I wish that we'd stop justifying it, putting the onus on the victim to make the victimization stop and I especially wish that we'd start putting the onus on the victimizer. I wish we'd stop justifying that "well, one person lied about it so they're all a bunch of liars" and that we'd start going over the information cleanly.
As far as the Grammys go, I wish the Grammys had made the "in memoriam" presentation a bit longer so we could've seen Etta James be included. Or, maybe, they could've done a longer tribute to Whitney Houston, another victim of domestic violence, rather than allowed Chris Brown to perform twice. I'm certain there were plenty of other people to have performed. Most especially, I wish that the Grammys wouldn't have said that they were the victims of Chris Brown's assault on Rihanna because they were forced to schedule replacements at the last minute. The police report shows this to be a disgusting and appalling false equivalency.
In the end, I wish that felons, instead of their victims, would be held accountable for their felonies whether they're famous or not.
Anyway, if you read this far, I thank you for it. This was, in the end, my way of working out my own feelings about the "celebration of a comeback" for Chris Brown and reconciling it with both those awful tweets and my own history.
On Chris Brown, Tolerance, Domestic Violence and Victim Blaming
I'm appalled at the way that Chris Brown has been allowed back into the fold, allowed to perform not once but twice, to an audience of millions of people on television, live and in person in front of a star-studded gala that happened to have his victim in it and I'm appalled at the way that women think it's a-ok to tweet things like "I'd let Chris Brown beat my face as long as he kisses it". I'm appalled and upset at the society that thinks that it's all right to let Chris Brown to shine once more.
But I'm also appalled at myself. When I first read the tweets by the women listed on the Buzzfeed compilation, my initial, gut reaction was to wish it upon them. I hoped that they would experience what it felt like to get a fist to the face by someone they loved so that they wouldn't ever ever tweet, say, think something like that ever again. I wished for them the same experience that I went through and that isn't fair of me. That's vindictive and evil. There is no reason for it, even if it is a human reaction. No one, not even a woman that says that she wants to be bashed in the face by a man because he's hot, ever deserves to get beat.
The following is my way of working through this. Please note that the following contains graphic descriptions of domestic violence and child abuse.
I am the third child of four. My older sister is 8 years older than me, my brother is 5 years older and my younger sister is 3 years younger. I was a daddy's girl when I was very small, I tailed after him for everything. I can remember learning how to make pancakes with him when I was four, standing on a chair in the kitchen while pouring batter on the griddle and that first time I flipped a pancake without breaking it. I remember my dad insisting on coaching my t-ball team (my mum helped) and then moving on to softball. I remember my dad trying desperately to get me to catch a ball even though I never was very good at it. I couldn't run, I couldn't bat and I could barely catch but my dad continued to coach and encourage me. He would read me a bedtime story at night and he'd tuck me in to go to sleep. He'd braid my hair and he'd spend hours ensuring that my hair was brushed (it went to my knees and was a complete pain to care for).
I never understood why my older siblings hated my father. Sure, he was tough if you didn't bring home the right grades. Education was important to him. It still is. And, sure, my dad would sometimes yell at us, especially if I did my own special version of cleaning the room that I shared with my sisters (three girls in one room, you try living in that) by shoving all the dirty clothes under the dresser rather than dumping it in the hamper. But, for the most part, my dad doted on me. He'd bring me a special treat whenever he'd run to the closest movie rental place.
We lived on twenty or so acres and we ran wild. My siblings and I had to play with one another because we were it. The driveway was over a quarter mile long, the bus-stop was over a half mile away, literally uphill both ways because we lived in the middle of a hill so we'd have to trek up and down and up and down. When it snowed, my dad would fight the tractor out of the shed, strap the snowplow on it and then plow out the driveway. I can remember riding on the tractor, taking the steering wheel from my dad as we sped along the grass in the summer. We only worked about four acres of our land, the rest went back to woodland. I remember standing on a large balcony and staring out with my dad as he pointed to where the deer were feeding. We'd run wild in those woods, too, playing Pocahontas or Lewis and Clark or William Penn (hey, we lived in the middle of bumfuck Central Pennsylvania, what can you expect?!).
My dad would read me a story at night, every night, and tuck me into my bed, the lower bunk with my little sister on the upper one, and then he'd kiss my forehead and ask me to never hate him as much as my older sister did. I would agree with him, nod frantically and tell him that I could never hate him.
One day, when I was eight, my siblings and I were playing hide and seek and I was the furthest out. I was so far out, I'd made it to the back edge of our property, somewhere none of my siblings had ever made it to. I was giddy with the excitement of winning, of going so deep into the woods that it felt like I was the only one that existed, that the light dimmed because of the giant branches of leafy trees and I knew that when I returned to the house in my own time, I would be victorious. I was so far out that I never heard the dinner bell, a giant antique bell that was so loud the neighbors heard it and timed their own meals to it.
By the time I got back to the house, dinner was getting cold. My mother hurried me into the bathroom to wash up and then went back to the table to start serving. I remember that we were having a giant salad and I remember the smell of chicken in the air, my mum makes the best baked chicken you'd ever want to taste. I remember stepping out of the blue bathroom (each of our five bathrooms were colored differently and we referred to them as such) that was just off the dining room and I remember falling backwards as my face erupted in pain. I don't remember my dad appearing and I don't remember the swing of his fist, whether he backhanded me or if he punched me. I wish I could remember but I'm glad that I don't, all at the same time.
My father dragged me into the bathroom, wiped the blood from my split lip and then walked with me into the dining room. I don't remember eating though I must've because I don't remember my mother being upset. I don't remember much of anything that followed until my dad came in that night, read me a story and tucked me in, kissing my forehead and asking me not to hate him.
The violence spiraled after that, almost as if my father felt he'd given himself permission to hit me. He'd waited until I was eight and he shifted his loving attention onto my little sister. He never really hit her, never really abused her but out of all of us, she hates him the most. I remember the first time my dad tried to hit my sister and I leapt at him, fighting back because my sister wasn't going to get hit, not on my watch. I remember fighting, each time, whenever he thought it was right to beat the both of us. I remember running down the hallway, trying frantically to stuff clothes from the hamper into the back of my pants before he came in to beat us for some imagined slight or another. He ripped the front trim off the dresser and he beat us with it, nails and all. He caught me a couple of times where the padding wasn't enough. By the time he was done with me, he was too winded to do more than a quick smack at my sister and I was so happy that she wasn't worse off.
When you grow up with this, you develop coping mechanisms. Pancake days were always 'safe' days. I knew that my dad wouldn't beat me whenever we had pancakes for breakfast. I knew, once I joined the swim team, that he wouldn't beat me as much because the swimsuit covered so little. I hated swim team almost as much as I hated softball but I stuck with it because I knew he wouldn't hit me as often. I knew that if I brought home good grades, I would get at least a blissful week of no beatings. I might even get taken out for ice cream as a special treat.
By now, a lot of people are asking why I didn't go to anyone and tell them, make it stop. The answer is that I did. When I was in fourth grade, we were sitting there in health class and the teacher said that if someone ever hit us, we should tell someone, that there were guidance counselors ready to help us. During lunch the next day, I went in to the guidance counselor's office and I told him. He told me to stop making up stories and sent me back to class. Not only did he ignore what I was telling him, but he called my father and told him what I had said. I was so bruised that night that I didn't go to school the next day. The school thought I had a stomach bug.
I tried again in sixth grade. I figured that I was in a new school and this guidance counselor that had so lovingly guided me through the grieving process of losing my swim team coach, I thought that she would listen to me, that she would help. I remember sitting in her office as she stared at me and then, right in front of me, picked up the phone and dialed my father. "You'll never guess what outrageous story [wook] just told me" she said to him and the proceeded to repeat everything. This time, I wasn't beaten as badly but the mental and emotional abuse got so much worse. My father convinced everyone that I was a liar, that I was making things up and writing stories about it.
No one cared about the bruises. Those were easily explained away as falling out of trees or tripping down the many flights of stairs we had at the house. They were sports injuries or something else. It was then that I realized that no one was going to help me. There I was, eleven and dodging vacuum cleaners thrown like javelins down the hall at me, and no one would help me. I don't remember how soon after the guidance counselor called my dad that I tried to commit suicide for the first time. I just remember doing it and being so fucking upset at myself when I woke up the next morning. So I tried again. And again. And again. By the time I was fourteen, I had tried to commit suicide at least fifteen times. I took pills. I slit my wrists. I stole my father's shotgun but the bastard locked up the bullets. I shot myself with a bb gun. I took more pills. And yet more pills. Nothing worked. Failure on failure on failure.
When I was fourteen, I saw my father beat my mother for the first time. Blood streaming down her face from the way that he was hitting her and her broken glasses were digging into her face as the broom swung down, over and over again. I leapt across the kitchen. To this day, I have no idea how I got over the table but I remember leaping it, and I jumped on his back. He shrugged me off, slamming me into the pantry as he tossed the broom down and stormed out of the room. My mother calmly stood up, brushed her hands down her shirt and then went to her room.
By this point, most people are blaming my mother for keeping my siblings and I in this situation. That's where the victim blaming comes in. My mother was a well-educated woman. She was the first in her family to ever attend college and she used that college degree to become a computer programmer in the seventies. She's not quite five feet tall and, at the time, she weighed eighty-five pounds. She'd taken about ten years off from working so that she could raise us kids. She made pennies to my father's dollars.
I could go into how abuse starts slowly. It's an insidious poison that pollutes everything that it touches. It can beat you down so slowly that you're grateful for the beating because at least someone loves you enough to hit you.
Or I could tell you about how a woman might not feel like she had any options. After all, my mother needed to get us kids out of there and there was no way that she could afford all the bills and everything else on her small salary. She couldn't afford a car to take us places and, in Central PA, if you don't have a car, you can't get around. I had never ridden a public bus until I was eighteen and in college. I'd seen public busses but they were completely boggling to me. They still are.
I could tell you about a friend of mine that stayed in an abusive relationship because the local women's shelter wouldn't allow her to take her dog with her and at least her dog loved her.
I could tell you about how people are culturally programmed to think that men are inherently at the mercy of women and how women are the ones responsible for everything bad that happens to them. Get raped? Maybe you shouldn't have worn that skirt. Get beaten? Maybe you shouldn't have opened your mouth. Get beat again? Maybe you should've left the first time.
And it's that last that bothers me so much. My mother did the best that she could for us. She took beatings meant for us. When you say that you don't understand why women stay in abusive relationships, you are saying that they are weak. They aren't. They're scared and alone and lost and abandoned. They're protecting someone or something. They've built up coping mechanisms through a lifetime of abuse and can't find the door in the middle of the brick wall that those coping mechanisms are as they box themselves into a violent situation.
I've seen supposed feminists say that any woman that stays, deserves what she gets after that. That they would never stay but, you know? I hope that "you" are never in that situation to see if you really would stay because I don't wish my situation, my mother's situation, on you. I wish you the happiness and self-certainty that you would leave because I've seen it tested in my own family. My older sister stays with her emotionally/mentally abusive boyfriend while I got out when my (now ex) fiance slammed me into a wall and picked me up by my throat. I saw my little sister struggle with the decision to stay or leave her abusive boyfriend. So I wish you the certainty that you would leave but until you're there, you can't know and what you're doing is blaming the victim for her abuse.
When you say that you don't get why a woman stays and you think that she deserves the beatings that she gets afterwards, you are saying that she is responsible for the man's fists and anger raging at her. You are absolving him of the guilt because it's that dumb bitch's fault for staying. It is the same as saying that she deserves it because she burnt dinner, read his text message, hit him back, said something.
When you say that you don't get why a woman stays, you are saying that she hasn't tried everything. But what if she has? What if she went to the police, what if she told just like she's supposed to and her abuser not only gets a slap on the wrist but gets to publicly shine right in front of her while the world watches? What if you have to watch a bunch of women go on about how they'd love to get beaten because that boy is hot? What if you have to watch your abuser succeed when all you can hear is how he threatened to kill you because you looked at his cell phone? You burnt the dinner. You didn't iron his socks properly.
There is a reason most rape victims don't go to the police. It is because we, the general we, believe that the woman did something to deserve it. She wore tight jeans, she wore a skirt, her blouse was low-cut, she was walking alone in a parking garage, she had too much to drink, she went to a frat party.
There is a reason most domestic violence victims don't report their abusers. It's because they are blown-off, they are told that they are exaggerating, that "pics or it didn't happen", that they're being too sensitive about their husband/partner's verbal abuse, that they should've left when they were first hit rather than after the fiftieth time, that they deserved it because they didn't leave right away.
I get the idea of redemption. Perhaps, eventually, Chris Brown will redeem himself. Maybe he'll work through his abusive and insidiously evil treatment of women. Maybe, eventually, he'll figure it out and he'll become a peaceloving hippy like John Lennon did after he was accused of domestic violence. I hope that happens. Maybe Chris Brown will turn out like my father who, after we left when I was fourteen, stopped drinking and turned his life around. Maybe Chris Brown will even go so far as to be able to have a peaceful relationship with Rihanna, if that's what she chooses. After all, I've chosen to have a relationship with my father. He visits me, supports me and helps me. But I choose when and I choose how. He doesn't call me, I call him. And if Rihanna wants to forgive him, then that is her choice. But I don't think three years is enough time to have the world forgive him of his trespasses against all of womankind.
So, no. I don't really wish that those women would get bashed in the face so they would understand the heart-pounding terror that one gets as one runs away from their abuser, knowing that they'll be caught and beaten in the end because their abuser is so much larger than they are. But I do wish that they'd wake up, that they'd volunteer at an abuse shelter and see what the victims go through.
I wish the world would wake up to how we treat victims of abuse, whether that abuse is child abuse or rape or domestic violence or gay bashing. I wish that we'd stop justifying it, putting the onus on the victim to make the victimization stop and I especially wish that we'd start putting the onus on the victimizer. I wish we'd stop justifying that "well, one person lied about it so they're all a bunch of liars" and that we'd start going over the information cleanly.
As far as the Grammys go, I wish the Grammys had made the "in memoriam" presentation a bit longer so we could've seen Etta James be included. Or, maybe, they could've done a longer tribute to Whitney Houston, another victim of domestic violence, rather than allowed Chris Brown to perform twice. I'm certain there were plenty of other people to have performed. Most especially, I wish that the Grammys wouldn't have said that they were the victims of Chris Brown's assault on Rihanna because they were forced to schedule replacements at the last minute. The police report shows this to be a disgusting and appalling false equivalency.
In the end, I wish that felons, instead of their victims, would be held accountable for their felonies whether they're famous or not.
Anyway, if you read this far, I thank you for it. This was, in the end, my way of working out my own feelings about the "celebration of a comeback" for Chris Brown and reconciling it with both those awful tweets and my own history.