GQ magazine set the Internet ablaze earlier this week with a profile of soul singer and sex symbol D'Angelo. The article detailed his struggle with self-image and his ultimate self-exile from the music biz and the throngs of fans who loved his body more than his songs. According to Jezebel, that part of D'Angelo's story brought up a compelling counterpoint to the objectification women face everyday.
From Jezebel:
The idea that D'Angelo was subjected to the level of physical scrutiny that's built into every woman's life and then immediately went insane is … interesting. I mean this in the most sympathetic way possible—D'Angelo comes across as deeply endearing in Wallace's profile—but it makes me feel proud of women in a dorky way. Somehow, we handle it without taking an 11-year hiatus from our jobs. We've been conditioned to handle it because we have to handle it. And it shouldn't be that way, but right now it is, and we can deal. [F—k], it makes me feel like every woman on earth deserves the longest, most donutty, guilt-free fatso coke binge in history. Meanwhile, men, the ones who are dishing it out to us every day and making us handle it—well, it seems they can't really take it at all. Weird. Dishing, meet taking.
I would have expected that, when confronted with this phenomenon destroying one of their own, men would have a revelatory moment, a moment of empathy for women. Ha, PSYCH. Instead, D'Angelo gets the opposite. He gets "some Kate Moss shit" from his inner circle. Instead of becoming a sympathetic figure, he's feminized and dismissed in exactly the way that mouthy women are dismissed. Because, I guess, if you recognize that it sucks to be objectified, you'd have to stop objectifying people yourself. And that would obviously blow.
Read more at Jezebel.