So maybe I am getting to be a grumpy old man

[fpb]

I guess maybe I sound like Disgusted from Tunbridge Wells. But I ask you:
- Michael Jackson behaves so as to make it almost certain that he was a paedophile. He destroys his face in a crazed attempt to make it look less like the pure and very black kid he was and more like a caricature of a white person. He dies of a disastrous combination of unhealthy living and drugs. He is practically canonized, underage kids - especially blacks - carry his face on their t-shirts and put it on their walls, and it is his doctor, who is no doubt a villain but did what he was told - who is scapegoated for his shameful death.
- Boy George abducts, rapes and tortures a male model. He is quite rightly sent to jail - if for a ludicrously short term. Within a few months of being let out he is all over the BBC and other channels, grinning all over his ugly pasty face, and being consistently treated as a respected veteran of the industry.
- Rihanna is brutally beaten within an inch of her life by the kind of boyfriend whom an old-fashioned father would have horsewhipped out of the county. Now her latest album is about sado-masochist sex and the pleasures of pain, all intended to make money.

We profess to hate racism, to hate rape, to hape sexism and violence. And yet, when a black singer insults his own descent by trying in public to destroy his own skin colour and features, blacks insist on making a hero out of him. When a woman celebrates sexual cruelty and seems to condone actual violence done against herself, the press and television give her space. When a man becomes guilty of the abduction and rape of another man, he is treated as though he deserved to be treated as a gentleman. Is it possible to have a more mixed set of messages?

Comments

[starshipcat.livejournal.com]

This sort of repulsiveness is why I've pretty much given up on the entire celebrity media industry. I haven't gone to a movie theater in years, I seldom watch any TV except the weather and the news (and even then I grab the remote at the first whiff of any sort of "entertainment" or "celebrity" news), and when I'm given a gift certificate to get music, I almost always use it on old favorites from my childhood, typically by people who either have slipped into obscurity or who have passed from this life without making a disgusting scene of themselves.