Jezebel has apparently decided to gin up some page views by running a bizarre, victim-blaming, slut-shaming, skeevily prurient screed on Amber Cole, the 14-year old African American girl who was videotaped giving oral sex to some boys; the video got posted online and, despite the fact that it was, you know, child porn, went viral. The story itself is appalling; so is the screed, written by a guy pretending (for rhetorical effect) that he’s Cole’s father. It reads like something you’d find on The Spearhead.
The piece starts off melodramatically:
I am Amber Cole’s father. I am angry, confused and completely at a loss. I love my daughter. I want to guide her without suppressing her. That is not always easy. Children need protection from their worst inclinations. That is not always easy. I am trying to convince her that the world will still love her if she keeps her clothes on.
Just to remind everyone again: the author is not actually Cole’s father. (And Amber Cole is apparently not her real name.)
The screed quickly descends into an attack on the girl’s mother that reads like something you’d read in the comments section of The Spearhead or In Mala Fide:
She would listen to her mother, if her mother was not busy. Doing something, anything that is not parenting. I want her mother to spend less time being “empowered” and more time being aware and engaged with our daughter.
And it only goes downhill from there. We get a section essentially blaming girls at large for the incident, because they allegedly ignore the “nice guys” who would never make such a tape. We get a section blaming the “mother’s boyfriend, Karrine Steffans or Kim Kardashian” for teaching the girl to be “proficient at such a difficult act. … I want to know why my 14 year-old knows so much about oral sex.”
And then we get a ridiculous race-baiting rant about white feminists and the Slutwalks:
White feminists can teach their own little girls to find empowerment through their crotches – my brown little girl cannot afford to be that carefree and cavalier with her life choices. Slutlife is the hard, lonely vocation of rich, educated, privileged white women who will fuck The World, contract social diseases and still, somehow find a husband. No black woman ever got far being a slut. I want to know what kind of women “slutwalk,” while young impressionable girls of all kinds look on with wonder and admiration.
After placing blame for the whole thing on just about every girl and woman in the world, the author comes to the father:
I am Amber Cole’s father. Don’t ask where I was that afternoon, because you already know. I was at work, just like you. I do not live with her, cannot always talk to her, cannot always be there. Not the way I want, and there are few laws to help me. To protect me and my rights.
Because that’s the real issue here: Father’s Rights.
And then the big reveal:
I am Jimi Izrael. I am not really Amber Cole’s father. But she is my daughter.
You do not think so. But she is your daughter too.
Go read the whole thing. It’s appalling. Then read Jeff Fecke’s takedown of it on Alas, a Blog.
Ironically, Jezebel ran an excellent piece on the subject about a week ago.
WTF, Jezebel? Are page views really that important?
EDITED: I reworked a bit about the (real) father that I originally formulated badly.
“Empowered” means “having power.” It means being able to make one’s own decisions and put them into effect.
When did it become a sneering synonym for “naughty woman who thinks she’s too important to do her womanly duties?”
The article itself isn’t even the worst part (and yes, it’s horrible). The worst part is that there are comments going “omg I totally agree with this thank you for writing it”.
Jezebel is one of the Gawker group sites isn’t it? They ALL seek page views by shoddy journalism and ‘baiting’ various groups.
I’m not saying Jezebel can’t run proper, insightful stories but this kind of thing coming from that kind of site does not surprise me.
I read that piece yesterday and wondered where the hell I was.
There are valid concerns re: Slutwalks and feminists of color, but that “article” was neither the time nor the place to bring it up.
Jezebel fails and fails on purpose. I think their next headline may well be ‘Sexual assault just happens: cool it ladies who are not really ladies because you are skanks’.
You don’t need to bring up race or feminism or sexuality or even whether she consented to the blowjob/recording to know what’s wrong with this. This is a sex video of a 14 year-old. It’s child pornography and it’s illegal. GET IT OFF THE INTERNET!
How could they not see that this person was faking? Oh wait< they were exploiting the situation Tooo! I get it.
If you cant compete porn ya might as well match it.
If you cant compete “with” porn ya might as well match it
Commenters at Jezebel indicate that this guy Jimi Izrael has a history of these kinds of women-blaming screeds. According to the article linked at Jezebel, the REAL father of this girl puts the blame where it belongs — on the guys who taped this and violated her privacy by posting it online.
I love that this guy pretends to be Amber Cole’s father and calls the guys who coerced her into this, filmed her and put it on Youtube… his friends. Amber Cole’s real father? He called the cops on them, like a real father would, like I’m sure my father would have done if I’d found myself in the same situation.
I have a question though..Does anybody feel that a good father figure would have stopped this from happening?
My sisters and I all agree that it might be the case for parental (father) abandonment? Whats your take?
It’s pretty telling that Jimi Izrael blames the “empowered” mother, Kim Kardashian, and feminists for this incident, rather than the boys who made the video and the thousands of men (including Izrael himself) who downloaded, watched, and shared it.
However, apparently Izrael is well-known for his issues with women, particularly black women. Ironically, in spite of all his hand-wringing over Kardashian et al, he’s “currently shopping and developing a premium cable sitcom vehicle,”PornStar,” for adult film icon Mr. Marcus.”
Jezebel pulls this stunt every couple of months, sometimes even in complete contradiction to a previous article – “let’s throw something up really revolting and call it ‘generating discussion’ or ‘presenting different opinions’ when we know it will mostly massage our secretly uncomfortable with sex commenters and inflame a lot of other people! Win-win-win!”
All I can say is: fuck this noise. Bunch of emotionally manipulative, exploitative garbage.
God in heaven.
What a perfect storm of bullshit. Child porn, slut-shaming, Nice-guy-ism, soft-bigotry, intersectionality, invasion of privacy, finger pointing, a barely hidden MRA family court screed… and in the middle of it a 14 year old girl.
A 14 year old girl who neither Jimi Izrael nor Jezebel seem to give a fuck about.
And as an added bonus, I’ll undoubtedly get to read all sorts of disgusting, hateful things about women of color to boot. Happy day.
Oh, Jezebel. I used to be a starred commenter over there, probably one or two ish years ago now. They do an epic fail like this every so often to garner page views. I stopped reading after one such article by a guest poster. IIRC, it was a guy talking about how French laydeez are oh totes cool with sexual assault on the street and near rape, because they are so much more laid back, you know? and like, more better than American women and we should just cool it with the Hollaback, you know, cause being cooler with it makes the French ladies sexy and didn’t we want to be sexy?
I guess what I’m trying to say is that I am unsurprised, really. Also, that the piece is garbage. The fault lies nowhere but with the boys who taped it and put it on the internet. In before NWO or someone comes here and blasts this girl and women everywhere for…well, everything.
Also, I hope he gets prosecuted for PUBLICLY ADMITTING to watching child porn.
Budmin (and any other troll who rolls up in here): it doesn’t matter what her family life is like, it matters that three boys TAPED AND UPLOADED THAT MESS ON THE INTERNET.
Are you trolling?
My take is that it’s a case of people distributing child porn, and the blame lies on the people who did that, and not on anyone else. The problem here is not “young girl has sex.” The problem is “boys (and various adults spreading the video and/or finger-wagging at it) use fact that young girl has sex to publicly and illegally humiliate her.”
I’ve never been to the Jezebel site, but I have noticed it linked to on this site under the list of “Antidotes to Boobery”.
Ugh, there is not a middle finger in the universe big enough to express my feelings about this article. Really, Jezebel?
What the fuck does this mean? Seriously? What does it mean?
How would he stop this? Locking her up in her room 24/7 and having a bodyguard follow her around school? The first is illegal and the second is expensive.
Nobinayamu: I think it means, “Hey, do you guys wanna blame the dad? You probably wanna blame the dad, right? Because, y’know…feminists…”
I think a decent any kind of figure could have stopped this, yes. I think said figure would have taught those boys NOT TO TREAT OTHERS LIKE THIS.