Bill Cosby is a Problem

I'm from Philadelphia and Bill Cosby is a huge part of my experience. "Fat Albert" was as much a part of my childhood as "Super Friends" or "American Bandstand". I saw the HBO specials and I watched "The Cosby Show". I grew up with "Picture Pages" and in a world where comedians found having a Bill Cosby impression up their sleeve de rigeur.

In a way, I have not ever not known of Bill Cosby and liked him as a kind of father/teacher figure. He has been a person who succeeded in my city, a person who attained his goals mentally and intellectually. A smart man. A funny, successful actor. A pillar of our regional community. A supporter of athletics and learning.

His delivery as a comedian and ability as a storyteller influenced me a lot. He did not need to use blue language, because he could make a sound or a facial expression that said a thousand things more than a bad word would.

But I believe women. I do. I have to. Women are abused by rich men and poor men, by nice men and mean men. It's always their word against the other person. But when there are so many women, fifteen, now, that have come forward, it really becomes difficult not to see a pattern, and a bad one. Fatherly, professorial, funny, gentle, interested, gallant, Bill Cosby, who I have liked for all my life, did bad things to women. I liked him, and he was not a good person to those women. He is a person who I felt so sorry for when his son was murdered, and whose wife I wanted to cape for when people questioned her for thinking out loud whether racism killed her boy--

People gave her grief for wondering if racism was why her child was victimized. They seriously did. People with no authority at all wanted to question her lived experience as an educated aware black woman with a dead son. And I would still hit anyone who wanted to grief her for that line of thought.

But I can't stand up for Bill Cosby Himself. After hearing all the stories, I can't. I believe women. so I can't. I can't see how this many women are liars, and their stories are so similar, and plausible.

And I have all the shade for Don Lemon, who seriously asked a victim why she didn't bite an irrumator on his cock for violating her mouth. Because there is no instinct for a drunk and drugged person to do that? Because hard dicks are actually hard? Because when it's shoved in, you open so you can breathe and not feel sick or gagged? Because she did not want a tall, athletic man to smack her teeth in?

I hate like hell to totally understand that this shit was okay with the network PTB--but that's what I think happened. They understood Bill Cosby was a sexual sadist liability, and they were making a shit-ton of money. And that money made the bad stuff ok.

They did not get it is never ok. It is never okay to accept that your star is a rapist and let him go ahead and keep raping. I mean seriously? WTF?

Hold My Butter While I Wreck This Career

It's pretty difficult to have a more disastrous week than Paula Deen in the "managing one's appearances" area as, to all appearances, it was revealed that she had some fairly shocking ignorance that she has to work through. The Daily Beast covers some of the worst from the deposition in the discrimination case filed against her, which includes not only admitting using the "N-word", but also referring to her former employee as a "piece of pussy" and describing an idea for a wedding with African-Americans as servers in as a reminder of a southern plantation, kind of missing the point that the antebellum black servers in those times would have been slaves, and that people might feel some kind of way about that. Deen capped this week off though with one singularly bad day, missing an exclusive interview this morning with Matt Lauer on the Today show (although actually doing that interview would probably have been more ill-advised, come to think of it) and issuing not one, nor two, but three video apologies. The day was ended with the Food Network deciding that they really could not go ahead and renew her contract, y'all.

What has been particularly bad about this is that Deen herself doesn't seem to have grasped that it really isn't a question of how awful "the media" has wanted to depict her, but how awful keeping ignorant opinions about people and using hurtful language really is. People can refer to the recoil at racist or sexist language as "political correctness", but at then end of the day, it's only simple correctness to treat people fairly and respectfully, to consider their feelings, and not making the effort to do that as soon as you realize that your prejudices and the real world are colliding is just foolish. It seems like Deen hadn't really come to that level of introspection about it, and her apologies as a result seem awkward and forced. She seems to realize that her wounds are self-inflicted, but she still doesn't quite see how she got them.  And that is a shame.