Written by Duana


You read the title, you look at the pictures below, and you get your email all geared up to send me an angry note. But I want you to hear me out…

…even though I’m about to sound like a giant curmudgeon.

Do you follow Rihanna on Twitter? She’s been tweeting about her tour – having a great time in unexpected places like Edmonton – and her tweets are really funny – like when she says she fell down because she spilled ‘something’ on her patent-leather shoes which then stuck together. Who hasn’t been through that?

She’s also getting drunk a lot, by her own admission. Which – she’s 23, so let me roll back and check out my life at 23 – yep. I pretty much ran out of work every night to hit the bar with my friends.

Then, yesterday, I read the following (in chronological order):

“Apparently I also molested 2 girls in the club! Whoever u are…ladies I thank u! U made my night way 2 much fun! Atleast that’s what I heard.”

“The worst part about having so much fun is not remembering any of it!!!! “

It shouldn’t matter what she tweets. It shouldn’t. Saying one careless thing – the kind of thing millions of girls before her say, hourly – shouldn’t matter. But it does, and I expect your stomach is curdling the same way mine is.

It’s the casualness with which she tosses around that she ‘molested’ a couple of girls and admits she was too drunk to remember what happened. It’s the giddiness at her exploits. I feel like her mother writing this.

Of course she’s entitled to have fun like anyone else, and I constantly say things that would curl my mother’s hair if she heard them (and make Rihanna’s comment look tame). All the time. But. A girl in the public eye has to be more careful about what she says. Especially…(here it comes) especially a girl who’s been in a domestic abuse situation. People will take anything she says in a public forum and exploit it and extrapolate it and say that she has a responsibility to use words like that with the gravity they’re supposed to have.

And then the other part of me takes over and yells at the curmudgeon. She’s a 23 year old. She’s being real and uncensored, unlike 90% of her peers who swear up and down they only drink Vitamin Water. She has no DUIs, nobody is writing in with stories of how horrible she is. Who cares what she says? She’s not hurting anyone. She didn’t accept the mantle of being a stand-up example of never misusing speech just because she was in an unfortunate situation once and happens to have a job in the public eye.
I fluctuate. I believe both things. I wonder if I’m going to have to turn in my woman card for even thinking this stuff. I get exhausted.

Attached – Rihanna leaving a BET Awards afterparty in L.A. the other night.


Photos from Wenn.com