On My Soapbox Again

Today is International Women's Day, and with ironic timing of the very bad kind, the news is breaking that celebrity couple Rihanna and Chris Brown have reconciled despite the fact that he "allegedly beat her on their way home from a Grammy party a month ago and was charged Thursday with assault likely to cause great bodily injury and making criminal threats, remaining free on $50,000 bail." (Vancouver Sun, March 6, written by Shelley Fralic, excerpt reprinted without permission.) To read the entire article:

http://www.vancouversun.com/news/Rihanna+domestic+violence+history+repeating+itself/1359896/story.html

I was sickened by the newspaper article and made a point of bringing it up with my 14-year-old rap-loving son Zack who knew about the abuse but not that they had reconciled. I talked to him about how sick it made me and that apparently some photos had been leaked that showed that she had been really seriously beaten. "Oh yeah," he said "I saw those photos."

I kept my eyebrows in place but I thought to myself that it really is important to talk to him about these issues as he is exposed to so much through the Internet and that while I have no control over that anymore--ie I could confiscate every electronic knickknack we have at home and he would still have access to whatever he wanted when he was with friends--I can offer up some context/Big Mama Zee's* big fat opinion.

I went on to say that I thought that it was incredibly sad, that even a celebrity who has her own money sometimes chooses imagined love over self-respect and self-preservation...that for some women they really feel trapped as they have children and no income of their own...that women believe their abusive mates when they apologize and say that it will never happen again but that mostly it does and that some of them literally end up being killed. "I'm horrified by what kind of message their getting back together is giving teenagers," I said and with that got off my soapbox and let Zack get back to watching his beloved Canucks.

*Big Mama Zee is Zack's rapper handle for me and the only circumstance under which I will tolerate "zee" over "zed."