Okay, so.

I’m getting so tired of people acting like the problem with the Grammys’ decision to allow Chris Brown to perform — and his continued success — is the message it sends to women. I’m tired of people saying that the problem with x, y, or z is that women will see it and their response will be to decide that violence or abusive behaviour within their own relationship is acceptable. Do you know why I’m tired of that?

Because women are not responsible for male violence. Male violence does not happen because women “allow” or “accept” it; it happens because men engage in it. Most women in abusive relationships could not leave regardless of whether they wanted to or not. Most women in abusive relationships do not have the resources to leave. If every woman in the world decided that no level of abuse was acceptable in her relationships with men, guess what? — the problem of male-on-female violence would not actually be resolved. Because not only is it not up to women to prevent it from happening but women are in fact incapable of preventing it. But if every woman in the world decided that a certain level of abuse was acceptable in her relationships with men and every man in the world simultaneously decided that he was never going to beat a woman male-on-female violence would evaporate.

So, the problem with the Grammys’ decision to allow Chris Brown to perform and the wider ongoing glorification and “forgiveness” of Chris Brown is not the messages it sends to women and it’s a derailment of the whole conversation to pretend that it is; it’s the messages it sends to men — the message that it’s okay to beat (black) women, that there will be no real consequences for you, that society will gather round you in an orgy of forgiveness. Why do people seem to think that men are above this kind of social indoctrination? Why is the focus always on women in these discussions?

It’s funny because if you say that women who say fucked-up things about domestic abuse are not talking in a vacuum but in the context of a society which itself sanctions abuse you’ll immediately get accused of “blaming the fact that women think abuse is okay on men” — as if the reason that male-on-female abuse happens is because women think abuse is okay rather than because men think abuse is okay. And men will be absolved of their complicity in sending these messages: e.g. “Ken Ehrlich had no choice but to allow Chris Brown to perform in response to his successes in the business; it’s Chris Brown’s fan base who’re controlling this, and that’s all women.” — as if the men who are in control of the industry are secretly not in control, as if all they do is respond to market pressure, as if they’re not the gatekeepers to success in the music industry, as if society itself would have collapsed under the weight of millions of disgruntled Chris Brown fans if he had not performed at the Grammys. As if the reality is not that Ken Ehrlich chose to put Chris Brown on that stage because he doesn’t think that what Chris Brown did to Rihanna was that big a deal, because he thinks that he himself was the true victim of the attack, and as if “What Chris Brown did to Rihanna is not that big a deal,” is not the message being sent to men and women by that choice.