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Margaret Pilarski

editorial assistant

i'm a feminist, and if you're reading this then you are too, you just might not know it yet. i like to eat cheese and travel, but i'm usually broke and/or spending my money on shoes and cocktail rings. i love dogs, rain, and driving offensively (and putting the last comma in a listed series). i'm se...

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a big bowl of Seriously Disturbed for breakfast

i was catching up on jesse jackson’s obama comments and the nutball talking heads’ response (”well it’s good, well it’s bad, white people this, black people this,” acckkk).

anyway, i scanned the other popular stories for the day and happened to see that “flavor flav said he lost “it” at 6.” ummm, so i clicked it, thinking it was either a joke and “it” was his pet kitten, or there was some other explanation and celebrity virginity-losing wasn’t being made public and more importantly, considered NEWS!

ugh.

so i clicked it. i knew i shouldn’t have. once i did, i just couldn’t stop. it was like watching a brawl between soapy women in bikinis unfold in front of you – you know in any other case you might intervene, but the whole thing is so bizarre and unworthy that you just keep watching with that look on your face that says “omg i can’t believe THIS is the state of humanity.”

i now know that bruce willis lost “it” at 14 in a hotel laundry room, and beating him almost by half, sean connery lost it at 8. EIGHT. and richard pryor comes in at a whopping five years old. yeah, five years old, with a six year old girl.

to me, this doesn’t sound like sex. it sounds like sexual abuse, acting out, and these men being preyed on by older women – ike turner at age 6 with a “middle-aged next-door neighbor named Miss Boozie.” if my 6 year old were spending quality time with anyone called miss boozie, i would yank them right outta that house and sanitize them immediately.

not only is this being paraded around as “news” but the men are also being congratulated in a way, “ike turner started his notorious relationship with the female gender early...”  – uh how about because he was sexually abused and probably never dealt with it, he continued to abuse women in the future. how about that abc news?

and clint eastwood “started pleasing the ladies early in life” at 14? yeah right. like any 14 year old, i’m sure he was bumbling about with his pants and doing the jackrabbit hump to some poor girlfriend, not “pleasing” her. whoever wrote these captions is depraved and overpaid.

anyway, i’ll tie it all back to reality with these cases of female teachers sexually abusing young boys. often, there is hardly ever any compassion for the male student, he’s usually congratulated for “catching” the older woman. gender stereotyping does no favors for women OR men. a victim is a victim. sure, cases are complicated and ages vary, but there is absolutely no reason to gloss over the fact that young boys can also be victimized by women and that doesn’t make it any less wrong than an older man abusing a younger girl.

these celebrity “losing it” stories just glamorize an unfortunate or private time in many of their lives that has been cheapened and now presented to the public as fodder. and, even more worrisome, i’m sure young people are clicking away at this thinking, “damn, richard pryor was having sex at 8? i’m 12, i should really get to it!’

the sex education in this country is appalling, and until we address sex, relationships, and our bodies with a little respect, we’ll keep seeing news stories like this.

gross.