Celebrity News
Reading through the Oregonian last week, I hovered onto the news article for one of the Portland School District’s “Little Miss” “Princess” winners. I have a basic objection to these things, wondering why we’re awarding high school girls the title of “Princess”. What caught my eye was in the bullet-point list of things:
News story she follows regularly: Last month’s arrest of singer Chris Brown for allegedly assaulting his girlfriend, singer Rihanna.
I don’t know if that qualifies as a real news story, but following that Celebrity Crunch is what tends to qualify as “following news” in the teen years, and I gather to poll a high school, selected down to those who think they follow the news, on what news story they are most following, it would poll ahead of, say, the Geitner Plan. Chris Brown’s assualt on Rihanna does allow taking stock of societal attitudes, and it’s not pretty. This sounds about right in terms of dynamics.
As a Boston teenager myself, I’ll tell you that, unfortunately, you’re pretty spot-on. I witnessed a conversation between an 18-year old guy and a 17-year old girl in which the girl insisted, “It’s not his fault, she started it…” and the guy kept incredulously repeating “…but he still beat her.” Girls won’t believe that someone they thought they knew could do something so horrible. I see it also when an instance of rape or sexual assault happens inside our own school – when it’s a classmate that we know, we don’t want to believe that they could be guilty. It’s pretty frightening.
 That it’s not pretty suggests it’s a “Teachable Moment”.
I may well note I know not from Chris Brown and had barely ever heard of Rihanna — who I most know from a radio commercial that urges people to vote on an Internet site to rank various pop songs. I don’t hear that commercial anymore. I know not what either sing.