Kanye West Brings the Crazy Lady-Hating
Allow me to share with you the message that Kanye West recently tweeted to his 2.5 million followers:
I know, right? Mind: blown.
First, let us deliberately set aside the rumors of homosexuality which have repeatedly dogged Kanye's heels. Granted, repressed homosexuality could certainly account for the theatrically over-the-top misogyny which West trots out at the least provocation. But if West identifies as straight, that's nobody's business but his own.
Now here's the most confusing thing about this tweet: if you blanked out everything but the last bit, I would cheer. Kanye West! Advocating safe sex behaviors to his 2.5 million followers! Hooray!
So does it dilute the awesomeness if his reasons for advocating the use of condoms are bizarre, misogynistic, and possibly indicate a state of borderline clinical paranoid?
Um… I'm going to give that a solid "maybe."
Part of me thinks that Kanye West is just one giant act of performance art. That he's sitting back with a team of advisors coming up with the craziest, most controversial stuff to say, just to get more headlines. Like Tracy Jordan, but without the lovable charm. I mean, look how far this one little tweet has gone!
And clearly for a lot of people, the usual messages about safe sex (responsibility; disease) just aren't getting through. What if it takes spreading fear of a female bank account-harvesting scheme to get guys to wear a condom? Is that such a bad thing?
Oh wait… yeah, it totally is.
Mind you, Kanye has already laid the groundwork for this nuttiness with his song "Gold Digger." (Imma give you three guesses what rhymes with "gold digger" in the song.) The narrator of the song (never make the mistake of assuming that the narrator is the singer himself) tells a woeful tale about a man who married a woman who had gotten pregnant. He supports her and her child for eighteen years, until he finds out that "it" was a child by another father.
The narrator also wags his finger disturbingly at black women, warning that if they don't treat their men right, "he leave your ass for a white girl."
In a funny way, this crazy-ass tweet is sort of a sequel to that song. An encapsulated version, if you will. In "Gold Digger" he advised men to have their fiancées sign a pre-nuptual agreement in order to prevent them from being financially harmed by a woman who planned to take everything in a divorce.
Now (in the sequel) he just advocates wearing a condom in the first place.
The real question is, why did it take him six years to figure that out?
(Could it be related to the fact that Kanye West is open about the fact that he hates reading, going so far as to call himself "A proud non-reader of books"? I suppose that if he is one of the 50% of Americans who are functionally illiterate, it might explain a lot about why he was a little slow on the uptake regarding the facts of life.)