On Sunday night at the Billboard awards show, Miguel, in a very misguided attempt to outperform the other artists, jumped over the crowd and landed on a woman, snapping her neck back.  Within minutes, the entire Black internet community was creating memes about it, making fun of it, laughing at her pain.  First and foremost, and hear me clearly, just like your grandmother used to tell you, it is not funny to laugh at someone else’s pain.  It’s simply not funny.  She wasn’t walking down the street when she stumbled over a crack, she could have been seriously injured, paralyzed or killed even.  There’s nothing comical, funny, amusing, or entertaining about someone being hurt.  I almost can’t believe I have to say it but if you don’t want it happening to you, or someone you love, and you wouldn’t appreciate someone laughing about it if it happened to someone you know, you shouldn’t be laughing at it.  We, as a society and culture have de-evolved to the point of insanity, where it’s funny to laugh at someone being hurt.  That’s sick and it’s sad.  The tenants of every world religion says “Do unto others.”  But what’s MORE disturbing is the number of people who justified, rationalized, and defended laughing at her pain.  There is something tragically wrong with a society where people can’t say, “Hey, you know what, I was wrong, I’m sorry.”  And finally, the entire situation was sexist.  “Bitches be like, Tricks be like, Chicks be like.”  What did she do to deserve being called a bitch?  Standing near the stage was her crime?  If he had landed on a male, the commentary would have been about how Miguel needed a beatdown.  Black people, we should be ashamed of our collective behavior and sadly we aren’t.  We are doomed as a people if we can’t show the most basic compassion and empathy. 

I’ve been reading different forums, chatting with different people online, really exploring when people first started having sexual feelings and across the board, I’m hearing people say that they were aware of sexual arousal at young ages and they were punished, shamed, made to feel bad about it.  It made me remember when I was a little girl around 5 or 6 and I would “touch the button” (that’s what my little mind called it) when I was in bed.  I didn’t know anything other than it felt good.  I remember vividly that my grandmother would smell my fingers in the morning and tell me that it was wrong and I learned very quickly to hide my behavior.  I have read story after story of people experiencing sexual arousal at all ages of childhood.  Yet, we live in a society that tells us that we can’t be sexual until we are 18 or we can’t be sexual until we are married and that it’s wrong to express your sexuality and just tons of beliefs that make people act out in unhealthy ways behind closed doors because they don’t know how to express themselves sexually in a way that is validating and mature.  I know I had a relationship dissolve because my partner has so many conflicted ideas about good girls and bad girls and the shame of sexuality that he couldn’t come to terms with his own fucked up concepts surrounding sex. 

We’re doing it all wrong.  We are trying to hide sexuality from people, to make it bad and wrong, and all we are doing is making people more unbalanced and fucked up over it.  It just makes perfect sense to me that if everyone experiences some sort of sexual arousal at a young age, and we as a society and culture as so obsessed with suppressing and denying sexuality even exists, that we are going against the natural order of things.  I think people would be less obsessed with sex, less driven by the compulsion of sex, less fixated on being “freaky” on the down low if we raised people with a healthy sense of sexuality. 

Unfortunately, Ms. Burruss had other obligations and won’t be able to make our scheduled interview today. I will post any information about a rescheduled date and time ASAP.