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.
If this was my blog, I would certainly be taking Jezebel out of my ‘feminist-like’ blogroll…
Since this is not my blog, all I can say is… if this was my blog, etc etc.
I would think a father would have taught his sons to have more respect for their female friends/acquaintances and would have known that posting stuff online is a bad idea without permission (or when the girl is, you know, a 14 year old girl.)
Then there would be no video because the boys would have known better then to do this in the first place.
@filetofswedishfish, that is the same article that made me decide Jezebel is a joke. Especially after they put up a not-pology about how they were trying to “explore different perspectives” or some such bullshit.
As far as the article in the OP: excuse me while I vomit for half an hour. You want to spew your bigotry, do it without exploiting a young girl who has already been exploited to an incredible extreme.
Because women = dirty. Young lady = only does things with her body that her daddy allows her to. Gross.
Interesting author. http://www.theroot.com/views/bound-denzel-principle
FelixBC:
Again with the cats. What did cats DO to MRAs?
What is it with cats?
I think more than half of everyone I know–male, female, neither/both, single, partnered, neither/both–has a cat. They’re a really common housepet. Lower maintenance than a dog and more interactive than a cage pet.
Why do these guys always think of cats as exclusive to Forever Alone women?
It amazes me how twisted and thick-headed MRA’s are. People don’t have sex for “empowerment”. They have sex for pleasure, at least ideally. What’s empowering (although it’s only a small facet of empowerment) is being able to do something simply because it gives you pleasure, not because of duty or coercion, and without the need to come up with some convoluted utilitarian justification. After all, if you do something for yourself, rather than for others, it means you own yourself — and that’s empowerment, contrasted against the idea that women exists solely FOR men, first as daughters, then as wives, and finally as mothers.
This shameful piece encapsulates this bias perfectly: only women are faulted for not thwarting their own desires, lectured on being selfish and not giving enough thought to the preferences and opinions of men. The boys on the other hand are given a pass because they are boys. Men are allowed to do things for pleasure; women must accommodate them and never, ever, ever look out for themselves.
In other words, MRA wisdom can be distilled to the following maxim: Women don’t like sex, and if they don’t do it to honor their fathers, they must be doing it because they are “empowered” man-hated bitches; and women who do like sex are dirty, dirty sluts.
I don’t see the relevance of her race. Stop being so divisive.
It amazes me how twisted and thick-headed MRA’s are. People don’t have sex for “empowerment”. They have sex for pleasure, at least ideally.
well i guess in MRA land women have sex for empowerment, not pleasure, but men just do it for pleasure. which is why rape isn’t about power its about their insatiable sex drives.
ughhhhhh
“My sisters and I all agree that it might be the case for parental (father) abandonment? Whats your take?”
Bull. My father died when I was 4 months old… and I like millions of male children of working single parents know perfectly well that taping someone having sex without their consent (and tip for you, children CANNOT CONSENT) and then posting on the internet is just plain wrong.
It doesn’t take a father to teach you that what those boys did (and the pedophiles who distributed the video AND those piling shame on the victim) is just sleazy, awful and wrong.
Glad to hear that this girls REAL father is doing the right thing as opposed to this blowhard.
Why is this the Amber Cole video? The boys were the ones exposed.
WTF is wrong with this man… No, that’s not right. The question is, what isn’t wrong with this man?
The boys who taped it are his friends. Amber is a slut. He watched child pornography. His main problem is that this young girl had sex, and is apparently good at it. Also, his rights as a father are not respected enough. Feminists and their daughters are all slut who only exist through sex. As a MAN, he has a right to tell what to do to every woman in his life.
…
Wait… He is self aware!?
“You say what you would do, what you would say, but you have no idea. We are all great parents with other people’s children.”
Nope, that actually doesn’t make any sense.
“Why can’t this be about my daughter? No, this is not about blame.”
Because she did nothing wrong. Whoever taped that and whoever watched it should be blamed, at the very least.
Also, apparently having poster of shakira make you a slut, or vulnerable, or confused, or whatever.
It amazes me how twisted and thick-headed MRA’s are. People don’t have sex for “empowerment”. They have sex for pleasure, at least ideally.
I think this may be a matter of confusing cause and effect. Sex itself is not “empowering”, it’s something that people want to be empowered to do, or not do, as they see fit.
Does the author here know anything about Amber Cole’s actual family situation? I don’t think it’s public knowledge even which parent or parents she lives which, much less details like her mom being too “empowered” and her dad shut out of her life against his wishes.
If he’s going to rail against the situation in an entirely fictional family, he could have the common decency not to use a real person’s name.
No. Of course not. Why would he bother with things like “facts” and “research”? Jimi Izrael is projecting because he has a young, teenaged daughter. His relationship with her is not as consistent as he’d like it to be and he seems to blame her mother, a woman he’s described as both “wonderful” and “disengaged”.
He doesn’t know anything about Amber Cole’s father, their relationship, or anything else. It’s quite clear that he doesn’t give a shit. Amber Cole’s father isn’t going on and on about how when he was a kid he would’ve friends with the guys who did this and he isn’t using what happened to his daughter to grind his axe about women who didn’t date him.
Jimi Izrael’s daughter has a long road ahead of her.
Quick: What are their names?
He’s like two inches away from enlightenment with this observation.
“He’s like two inches away from enlightenment with this observation.”
You think he’s suddenly going to realize underage sex is bad? You have more faith in him than I do.
budmin:
I don’t know about fathers specifically, but yes, if the boys who put the video on the internet had been properly brought up, this wouldn’t have happened.
That said, this society does tend to assign fathers qua fathers the task of teaching boys about respect, particularly respect for women.
Hold the phone.. Holly Pervocracy Put your troll gun back in the holster. I like most dudes would consider myself to be an Authoritarian. (It’s not about slut shaming as much as it’s about bad decision shaming)
My question is to wonder if the classic approach to fatherhood would have changed matters. I blame the father because I would’ve blamed Myself okay.
Cuz that’s what men do we defer to authority..okay..
I could understand your push 4 prose idiom but my hope is for prevention..okay
Budmin – If I’m going to blame fathers, I’d blame the boys’ fathers. The boys are the ones who made the really bad decision here.
I don’t know what you’re going on about with the “men love authority” thing but I suspect a lot of the men you’re speaking for would like you to stop it.
Budmin – I like most dudes would consider myself to be an Authoritarian
Can you expound on just what you mean by this? If you mean that there’s a culture of “manliness” that’s very hieriarchal in our society, sure. But I don’t think most men would
consider themselves to be an “Authoritarian” explicitly, or even unconsciously. I genuinely want to hear more about your perceptions in this area.
Re the whole damn Jezebel article – I just can’t do anything but puke.
Misandry and female privilege hurt everyone, and this is a textbook example. When women ride the cock carousel till the cows come home, valuing looks over literally everything else – even integrity – this will happen. Because even the worst douchebag can get women (so long as he’s lucky enough to be born a Pittclone). Tell the feminists to stop, cut off misandry and female privilege at its roots, cut off female arrogance and shallowness, and this won’t happen, because assholism will be considered a negative trait, rather than a neutral one.
“I like most dudes would consider myself […]” People, could you please stop talking for anybody else but you?
“It’s not about slut shaming as much as it’s about bad decision shaming” What’s the point? You recognize a bad decision in that it has bad consequences. Why would you add shaming to any problem?
“I like most dudes would consider myself […]” People, could you please stop talking for anybody else but you?
I second this. That shit is really annoying and presumptuous.