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These violent delights. . .
So, reports suggest that Chris Brown and Rihanna have reunited at P Diddy’s home in Miami somewhere. (Honestly, lifestyles of the rich and the famous. . .) For those of you who have been without sight and hearing for the past fortnight, the back story to this love story is that Brown was arrested on the evening before the Grammy awards and charged with assault, a charge that, it later conspired, was for quite a brutal assault on then-girlfriend, Rihanna.
I guess I’m writing this post from a confused place; I respect and admire Rihanna for going to the police with her allegations, and I am, fairly typically (for a human) disgusted with his actions. But further reports – which, I’m afraid, you’ll have to Google yourselves as they are manifold – suggest that his was not the glorious upbringing, which would imply that his problems are just that: problems. I don’t believe that anybody is beyond a second chance, and I feel so sorry for them both to have to go through anything like this under the watchful and vindictive eye of the public.
I know what it’s like to feel a rage that wants to be expressed through physical violence; I don’t know at what point you stop attempting to restrain yourself and give in to what can only be described as your baser instincts. I know what fear feels like, but I don’t know what it must feel like to be afraid of someone you love; obviously none of us know if Rihanna is afraid of Brown. She must have a level of understanding that is deeper than we are.
Because, above all, I don’t believe that any woman goes back to a man who has beaten her out of stupidity or naivety. Maybe a lot of them do it out of hope; maybe they do it out of faith; maybe they do it out of love. What I hope is that Rihanna’s decision will be taken as Rihanna’s, and won’t be used as an example to women – or men – anywhere of how “forgivable” violence is. These things are case-by-case, or they should be.
We’ll just have to wait and see how it all pans out, but I hope that this one event doesn’t ruin either – or both – of their lives.
Is it because I have no sense of humour that Newton Emerson’s column in today’s Irish Times makes my blood boil? Or could it be because it is an unhelpful and entirely too common attitude to women in the workplace, over a century after women began to fight for that very right?
Is Emerson going the way of the esteemed Kevin Myers – to the Irish Independent?
Maybe next week he could write a column about how black people should go back to slavery in order to help the economy; but then again, maybe not, because, well, jokes about women are funny – jokes about black people are racist.
This evening, driving home, I turned on the radio; I usually avoid it – unless the dreadful Spin 103.8 is playing their “10 hits in a row” and I don’t have to listen to their buttery, Celtic kitten accents – but The Knife just isn’t that relaxing after a hard day at the office (spent falling in love with the new Jaguar XFR and speculating about what kind of car a man at the office drives; he was offended at the insinuation that he might drive a Ford, but he said his own vehicle is “not dissimilar” to the new Focus “in terms of performance”. The mind boggles) and I was hoping for some Journey or, at the very least, a bit of Coldplay to soothe the elevator-lover in me.
But alas, no – my car radio, which has a mind of its own that is usually entirely lovable and quite often directs me toward the hidden gem of East Coast FM, where they play good music and tend not to talk so much (perhaps due to the Wexford accent. . . but I digress), decided to boycott FM104 and the newly-branded Dublin’s 98 (am I the only one irked by this?) which, although hardly radio gold, may at least have provided some relief from the cloying tones of Brian and Clare on whatever chart Spin 103.8 professed to be championing.
Do you think that people on the Luas make rash judgments when they see that I’m reading a book called Intercourse? Today I had an overwhelming urge to brain some dude who was smirking at me. Bah!
© RSA
On Sunday afternoon at the ungodly hour of 12.30pm or thereabouts, I was halted in my tracks by a Garda checkpoint. My first instinct was to turn the car, but I was in the inside lane and the only turn was left; I figured that any dramatic veering would be deemed “suspicious”.
My second instinct, lagging only marginally behind my first, was to feign illness. I’m pretty sure I would have got away with it, and everything – I was sweating, my heart was beating at an astonishing rate and I felt quite certain that I would faint (which has happened me twice before and, both times, as a result of extreme panic).
And I wasn’t even drunk. I had been out the night before but a solid three hours’ sleep (see, I’m still young!) and a large breakfast had fully absorbed the pitiful amount of beer needed to satisfy my thirst, but the guilt, the immediate desire to stand up and say: “It was me! Lock me up and throw away the key!” knew neither logic nor reason. Read the rest of this entry »
But, aside from that, I can’t help but wish Kate Winslet was as good an actress in real life as she is on the silver screen.`
I’m glad she won this year, if only so that, if she ever wins again, we won’t have to endure that nausea inducing faux shock that she seems so fond of.
As a late addendum to this post, and following a conversation I had with Lenny, I now think that Meryl was, in fact, being punished for inflicting the travesty that was Mamma Mia! on however many millions of people who now own the DVD.
Andrea Dworkin, I discovered you too late in my life to have been able to avoid the many regrets that you have alerted me to – in what I’ve done, said, and, more often than not, not said. I’m looking forward to the next few months, in which I will devour all of your work and – hopefully – come out the other side alive and, for want of a less clichéd word, empowered.
The public censure of women as if we are rabid because we speak without apology about the world in which we live is a strategy of threat that usually works. Men often react to women’s words – speaking and writing – as if they were acts of violence; sometimes men react to women’s words with violence. So we lower our voices. Women whisper. Women apologize. Women shut up. Women trivialize what we know. Women shrink. Women pull back. Most women have experienced enough dominance from men – control, violence, insult, contempt – that no threat seems empty.
Those of you who know me well might find it difficult to imagine how I identify with the above quote; I assure you, I do, occasionally and when the mood strikes me, shut up.
That’s people marching against the public service levy, today in Dublin’s city centre. Not to get too poetic, my heart swells at the mere thoughts of it. I can’t help but hope that this is a prophetic vision of days to come, when we all stop being so apathetic about the state of our nation.
In other news, I thought of some genius placards for the march, but me ma was having none of it. Examples:
We’ve been civil for too long.
Civil servants = civil unrest.
How would you like an uncivil service?
And so on. You don’t have to tell me – I know I’m a freaking genius.
