I’m just… of course it’s her right, but she’s also in the public eye and she doesn’t HAVE to do that (the music etc), so I’m a bit confused… It sends the wrong message. :/
It’s up to her really. She could have used her position as a recognisable, world famous celebrity to really influence a generation of impressionable females and make a stand for girl power showing that women don’t need to be weak and subservient to men…but instead she perpetuated the popular Twi-led view that women should be proud to have an aggressive boyfriend who treats them like a piece of meat.
I wrote the below in a livejournal post back in March 2005. It’s sadly still relevent.
Having seen the disgusting figures that one in five teenage girls are hit by their boyfriends, and that 43% of girls surveyed think that it’s “ok”, coupled with the rise in teen pregnancy makes me wonder what these girls are doing?
Well, it makes you popular with the guys if you have sex…and all these films, adverts and magazines girls are fed the message that finding and keeping a man is the ultimate goal and the ultimate status of cool. You can’t open a girls’ or woman’s magazine without finding surveys on what clothes guys find attractive, how to get a date, what sex tips to use etc. The implied message is that to take part in mainstream culture you have to have a man.
The result is that girls find their self-image depends on sexual relationships and they become increasingly prepared to take a man at any price, violence being the extreme end of the scale. I can, sadly, name a few girls of my acquaintance who have at some point put up with bullying behaviour or given into sexual demands they secretly didn’t want rather than lose a man. Sometimes this is not even a case of girls acting on misguided love but because they believe this is what they should be doing. As one friend who was sexually coerced told me, “Maybe I’m just uptight; isn’t this what everyone else is doing?”
Until we address the way our culture presents sex and relationships to young girls, I’m afraid we will continue to see results like these - teens getting pregnant or girls putting up with violent or abusive behaviour just to keep a guy.
