No, I Have Not Been Ignoring the Debate About R. Kelly; I Have Just Been Facebooking Instead of Blogging Part III

We buy into all the misogynist bullshit about how girls and women are difficult – petty, messy, vengeful, emotionally sloppy, manipulative – as if we don’t see behavior like this from boys and men every day – as if cultural expectations and pressures don’t create and reinforce a lot of these mental and emotional habits in girls and women.

And then we treat our daughters like shit for developing these habits that get foisted on them.

We withhold affection from them when they don’t live up to the impossible societal standards of goodness and purity and all that shit.

We call them names when we feel overwhelmed by hard it is to make them perfect when they’re human.

We press them to do all the domestic shit we don’t want to do because we know the myth of women’s work is bullshit but we don’t want to do the work to debunk it.

We give them the job of winning us approval and validation out in the world by being “pretty little” objects that fit with people’s pastel fantasies.

Or we compete with them when our own cachet in the form of looks and sexual appeal starts to cheapen as theirs is starting to accrue.

We sell their talents for money or worse we sell their bodies for money.

We use them as leverage and weapons against ex-partners.

We make them our friends because friendship requires less responsibility than parenthood.

And then we pretend to wonder why they go out looking for boys and men to give them the love, care, support, and protection that we don’t give them.

And then when they go looking for those basic human needs of acceptance and belonging among these rancid ass boys and men, illustrating for the world how desperately they need it because we didn’t give it to them, we get angry at them.

We castigate them. We label them. We throw them away. We blame them for any and all bad that comes to them while they are out here, just looking for love.

We propagate the fallacy that girls are harder to raise rather than tell the truth – that we do not really raise boys – we let them “be” – but we have been so deeply conditioned to believe that girls need to be broken like wild animals that we wouldn’t dare not raise them, so the effort that we feel obligated to put into them feels like a horrible inconvenience when compared to all we don’t have to do for boys.

Man, I’m telling you.

American society as a whole and the black community specifically has a real problem with girls. We are terrible to girls. We systematically abuse girls.

And we feed monsters like R. Kelly with their poor young bodies and lives. And we need to do better.

We need to do better.

We need to do better.

We need to do better.

WE NEED TO DO BETTER.

But that requires that we take ownership.

We need to own that we do not love our girls well enough. And we never have.