Ray Rice’s punches are love taps compared to the ones Chris Brown throws at HIS girlfriends…
CBS Sports pulled pop superstar Rihanna’s intro to Thursday night’s NFL game between the Ravens and the Steelers following the public release of a video showing Ravens running back Ray Rice beating his wife, then-fiancée, in a casino elevator.CBS said it did this to “maintain a proper tone,” which was a euphemism for “What we don’t need is to begin a nationally televised NFL game featuring the team that just dumped its star running back because this video shows how incredibly blase the league and the team had been about the fact that he cold-cocked a women with a performance by a pop singer who epitomized the enabling domestic violence victim until Janay Rice arrived on the scene.”
In case you have forgotten, in 2009, singer and recording star Chris Brown was charged for a violent attack on Rihanna, during which, the police report says, he bit her, slammed her head into a car radio, and punched her in the face multiple times. Rihanna then re-united with Brown, announced that she was planning on recording a duet with him. She also refused to agree to a restraining order requiring Brown to keep away. Both performers had received two nominations for Nickelodeon’s Kids’ Choice Awards before the incident, and they both planned on attending, giving young girls a wonderful lesson about how they should stand by their man even after he breaks your face. (Brown was finally persuaded to withdraw.) The two actually did reunite at least once, in 2013, while Brown was still serving his probation for the first incident.
Rihanna doesn’t comprehend the cognitive dissonance her connection with the Thursday game would have sparked; she’s not what I would call an ethics whiz. When CBS asked to use the pre-recorded intro this Thursday (because, of course, nobody is thinking about domestic abuse and the NFL anymore—what is the matter with these people???), Rihanna was furious, tweeting…
“CBS you pulled my song last week, now you wanna slide it back in this Thursday? NO, Fuck you! Y’all are sad for penalizing me for this.”
Thus proving she still doesn’t get it.
Send her some flowers, Chris!
Yes, Rihanna, actions have consequences, and when a major pop star openly returns to a domestic abuser, she is lucky if the worst that happens to her as a result is being penalized by being kept away from public events that the public connects to the problem of men beating women.
The NFL should no more be promoting Rihanna than it should be promoting Janay Rice.
ADDENDUM: While I’m booking this train wreck and reading USA Today, I’ll give the paper’s contributor Sharyn L. Flannagan a seat between Rihanna and Leslie Morgan Steiner. In this essay, she tells the story of how she stayed with her abusive partner after one beating, but not the second one. This, apparently, is completely reasonable in her view. She objects to criticism of Janay Rice:
“Why are we looking at her actions, either in provoking him or what she did afterward? Why aren’t we asking why he hit her and how to make sure he never does it again?”
Huh?
- We’re looking at her actions because they enable and excuse abuse, putting her at peril and also anyone she influences, which as a public figure, may be a substantial number.
- Who isn’t asking why he hit her, not that any reason would justify it?
- All the discussion and debate is over how to stop domestic violence! And one obvious way to make certain he never hits Janay again would have been for her not to marry the man!
Then she closes her essay with this stunner:
“But I would never put up with it after the first time: Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. Sadly, it’s not that cut-and-dried for everyone.”
Unless I’m misreading that, she seems to be saying that every man deserves one free punch.
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Source: Mediaite
Ethics Alarms 
I had a very sad conversation with a 12-year old girl last year. She told me all about how Rihanna “hit HIM first”.
That’s why it’s so important that celebrities acknowledge that they are role models…whether they should be or not.
Yep…
Wouldn’t it be nice if we saw public service announcements aimed at preventing and reducing domestic violence, with the same ubiquity, frequency, urgency, creativity focused on making real impacts, and persistency as we have seen with anti-smoking PSAs since the 1960s? Granted, it would be a long, slow, halting, uphill battle. But wouldn’t such a campaign eventually brai… er, eventually persuade and educate the general public, in ever larger numbers, to modify behavior toward a better world?
Naw – it’ll never happen. Not enough money on the line. Too hard to shake down whole industries for encouraging domestic violence, as could be done with Big Tobacco. Too much old-time-y religion like Islam catching on in the society. Never mind. As you were. (Rihanna: DUCK!)
// Then she closes her essay with this stunner:
// “But I would never put up with it after the first time: Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. Sadly, it’s not that cut-and-dried for everyone.”
// Unless I’m misreading that, she seems to be saying that every man deserves one free punch.
I do not believe that she is saying that at all; she is saying that by the time the physical violence begins, the victim has already become isolated, trapped, and scared. Physical violence is usually the escalation from subtler forms of controlling behavior. It is the boiling frog myth; who the hell would stay if the opening act in a relationship were a punch to the face? It is a simmering process where the victim’s external support network is dismantled and self-esteem crushed, replaced by a corrupt sense of deserving the abuse.
This is a phenomenon that has existed for thousands of years, exploiting lizard-like survival instincts deep within human nature. It is perhaps comparable to telling a person suffering crippling depression – feel happy! Feel scared that if you leave your abusive partner, that no one will support you and your partner would hunt you down? Leave anyways! If that worked, it would have been done already, and abuse would not be a worldwide public health issue.
This is a public health issue. Abusive relationships exploit the human need for community. The community must put up institutional barriers to educate and prevent abuse from beginning, and support those who fell through the cracks and want to escape. (Of course, society cannot protect victims from themselves, when they have all the resources in the world to leave, but stay because “it’s complicated”…)
Overcoming abuse requires acknowledging the limits of human nature; an exploited and isolated individual often cannot do this alone. This has been empirically shown; ethical decisions must be based in reality.
1. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me means that the victim is not accountable until she has been beaten twice. And that’s crap.
2. The earlier assumptions regarding spousal beatings were related to the concept of a wife as property, and not co-equal in the relationship. That concept is thoroughly discredited.
3. The frog story is a myth, but even if it were true, getting punched in the face is not equivalent to raising the heat subtly. Even the apocryphal frog is smart enough to hope out when the heat goes to boiling suddenly.
We’ll see if this guy starts something or how long he holds out.
Here is another woman talking about her experience staying with an abusive NFL player. Dewan Smith-Williams has come out to talk about how the NFL and police were unhelpful when she was being abused by her husband. She then says she is worried the next woman is going to end up in a body bag, but she is still married to her husband (and is studying mental health nursing). She also supports Ray Rice being reinstated to play in the NFL.
This is the reason you can’t have meaningful PSA’s about domestic abuse. It’s too hard to find victims who don’t support their abuser and you can’t criticize them for supporting their abuser without someone claiming you are ‘blaming the victim’. What can you say on the PSA? “Domestic violence is not acceptable, except to the people who are on the receiving end who still want to stay with the person who is beating them, and that’s OK because we don’t want to judge and it’s complicated, but don’t do it anyway”. Yeah, that’s a convincing argument.
Like I said, there isn’t enough money in combating domestic violence to make it worth doing a PSA campaign. If the day ever comes when a “link” can be made between full-contact sports and domestic violence, the pro leagues just might be big enough to be worth a shakedown to somebody.