Khloe Kardashian, left, and Kris Jenner arrive at the The Hollywood Reporter’s Women In Entertainment Breakfast on Wednesday, Dec. 10, 2014, in Los Angeles. (Photo by Richard Shotwell/Invision/AP)
As a feminist, I don’t believe in woman-on-woman social media crimes; too much violence is inflicted upon women by patriarchal structures in the first place. But feminism isn’t a sorority, and it isn’t (and never was) a way to give women a pass for bad behavior — which is why Khloé Kardashian thoroughly deserved the dragging Amber Rose inflicted upon her scalp on Instagram and Twitter on Monday afternoon.
Khloé Kardashian is third in the series of capital Ks that make up the Kardashian sister triumvirate; she is also older sister of Kendall and Kylie Jenner, two young ladies for whose childhood all of America pretty much mourned as we watched their family’s exploits on “Keeping Up With The Kardashians.”
Kylie Jenner is of particular need of prayer cloth. She has a 25-year-old rapper boyfriend. She just turned 17. The age of consent in California is 18.
Where is her father? Where is her mother? Does she have a praying grandmother? Where is CPS
Apparently, model and former exotic dancer Amber Rose is the only celebrity brave enough to conquer these hard-hitting questions.
In an interview with the “Breakfast Club” just a day before #TheDragging, Muva Rosebud, when asked if she thought it was appropriate that Kylie Jenner was dating the rapper in question — Tyga, who reportedly left his (adult) wife Blac Chyna for the teen — Rose said hell no. She agreed with me, and most of conscious America, that it is wholly inappropriate for a twenty-five-year-old man to date a 17-year-old girl, an individual whose life and sexuality, already at risk of damage by the demands of her attention-seeking mother and sister, deserve protection from the pain and guilt that usually accompanies the attention of men too old to be “just hanging out” with girls only just shy of 18.
When Khloé K. found out about Amber Rose’s comments, she turned into the type of protective big sister that you get when you wish for one with a monkey’s paw.
Instead of acknowledging how inappropriate it is that a man eight years her baby sister’s senior sniffs around the girl on a near-daily basis, she set up a poorly-constructed attack on Amber Rose via Twitter.
“Please don’t talk about us in interviews, mama,” Kardashian tweeted.
Then, to her ultimate Twitter demise, Khloé quoted Amber Rose speaking about being a stripper since she was 15, then went on to say, “Please don’t worry about my sister who has a career & her shit together at ONLY 17 [insert frog and tea emojis] people who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones.”
The clap back was swift and deadly:
“I’m happy u brought up the fact that I was a stripper at 15…” Amber Rose begins in a Tweet directed to Khloé Kardashian. “I’ll be that lil whore to support my family like ur older sister is a whore 2 support hers. We’re even. [insert kiss emoji] #MuvaGivesFacts.”
I suppose it is a hefty order to expect people born into privilege to recognize the benefits that that privilege allows them.
A woman stripping since she was 15 years old in order to support her family was a child when she started and has no business shouldering that type of financial responsibility or pretending to foster the sexual responsibility that it takes to be successful in that type of business. It should not have been a hefty order for Khloé Kardashian to see the way sex sells and the way that her own sister Kim’s manipulation of the public’s problematic views of sex and intimacy contributes to her own continued wealth — but, luckily for her, Amber Rose made her aware of that fact with just one Tweet.
I’ve written before that I do not believe in sluts, and that because of it, shaming women who are merely sexual beings or who participate on whatever level with the media’s obsession with sex do not deserve mistreatment.
But Khloé Kardashian’s comments highlight the much more insidious problem of slut shaming: ignoring its consequences as it regards the intersections of sex, race and privilege.
Khloé Kardashian, a rich white woman with rich white sisters with a taste for rich black men but no room in her mouth for racial consciousness, can accept and is praised for over-plumped lips and an over-filled ass and the pictures on the internet to show them both off for attention; Amber Rose, however, a woman of African descent, can be and is constantly shamed for the knockout figure and full pout and having the audacity to do roughly the same thing but for even less coins.
I am not a Kardashian fan. I believe that Kris Jenner prospers off of selling the public perception of her daughters’ sexuality, solely to keep an already wealthy family in the public eye for the obtainment of coins that only comes with the oiliest kind of relevancy. Luckily, I’m not a member of that family, and I never have to be; I date men, and only brother of the Kardashian/Jenner clan Rob, and we don’t seem like each other’s types.
But North West, a black child, will have to grow up surrounded by aunts whose public behavior is marked by their appropriation of black culture and fetishizing and harvesting of black bodies, male and female. And Kylie Jenner, despite her grown-up Instagram and barely grown-up boyfriend, is just a girl, too, with her girlhood threatened every moment that no one, except Amber Rose, tries to protect her from the very loss of girlhood that she herself probably experienced.
Problematic as they are, the Kardashians aren’t villains. But I believe the public has to be careful, in its unsteady fandom that it builds for the sisters, that they don’t make them the epitome of beauty standards or sex standards for women without recognizing the sex and beauty standards on which they stand themselves.
Sierra Mannie is a senior classics major from Canton, Mississippi.
