Let's Stop Using People's Genius – or their Mental Illness, For that Matter – as an Excuse for their Shitty Behaviour, Shall We?
Yes, I'm talking about Kanye West. But also about a lot of other people.
Trigger warning for Kanye West, domestic abuse, violent imagery, misogyny… basically everything bad. I’m sorry, it’s just the way it is.
Kanye West released the music video for Eazy this week, in which he is depicted kidnapping and burying his ex-wife Kim Kardashian’s new boyfriend, Pete Davidson. In the song, he raps about the “best divorce ever”, his kids, the fact that he bought the house next door to them – “what you think the point of really being rich for?” – and announces that he won’t be having any more counselling: “I don’t negotiate with therapists.”
Because violent, threatening behaviour is totally okay as long as you’re rich and famous, the video is still up on YouTube (I’m including the link because we’re all grown-ups, and if you want to watch it, you will, whether I link to it or not). I’ll even grudgingly admit that the song is a bit of a banger; I’ve heard it twice and it’s almost unseated We Don’t Talk About Bruno as the most powerful earworm of 2022. Almost, but not quite.
The fact that Kanye is threatening violence shouldn’t come as a huge surprise; he went from publicly begging her to get back with him in late 2021, to alleging that she was keeping the kids from him at the start of this year… and now to using his “art” to act out his jealous revenge fantasies. What we should in fact, find shocking, is how unashamed he is in publicising these thoughts.
That could probably tell you a little about my character. “I mean, I’m not super bitchy,” I told someone last week. “At least not to people’s faces.”
On the one hand, we could think it positive that these thoughts are, at least, out in the open – but actually I think it speaks to just how accustomed we are to accepting misogyny and violence as aspects of our everyday lives.
To an even greater degree, it also belies a general lack of empathy and compassion for someone like Kim Kardashian who has, by dint of living her life entirely in public, profiting from (someone else’s exploitation of) her sexuality and her use of her own body as a publicity and marketing tool, been categorised as someone who is, at best, knowingly entering into a deal whereby respect and privacy are too much to expect and, at worst, “asking for it”.
The fact that Kanye West has been publicly battling with what Kardashian has acknowledged, both in aired episodes of Keeping Up with the Kardashians and in interviews, as mental health issues, is brought up again and again to excuse his erratic behaviour.
Paired with the rhetoric of Kanye’s talent – a now-deleted Instagram post that accompanied the release of Eazy was bombarded with effusive comments about his artistic genius – it begins to feel a little like Kanye can do no wrong or, even if we do acknowledge his wrongdoing, we entirely excuse it. (See also: Roman Polanski.)
It reminds me a little of when people make excuses for their friends’ rudeness. “Oh, she’s just very blunt,” they’ll say, as if somehow you can get away with being a dickhead as long as it’s a firmly entrenched personality trait. “She’s always been someone who just says it like it is!” they’ll announce, right after someone has been blatantly insulted by that very truth-talking.
And before someone uses the phrase “be kind”, I’ve been thinking a lot about how we direct those words at women and girls, while allowing men to get away with the very same behaviour with very little admonishment – and how, honestly, kindness is a bit like respect and, in my opinion, should be earned.
In a way, these are all just thoughts – nothing revelatory, nothing shocking – but isn’t all opinion writing “just thoughts”? (It is.) Please, do share yours. Let’s all have opinions, out in the open.