2. He’s old. This man is 36 years old and he’s singing songs about raping women on an awards show while a girl born the year he turned 16 does a bump and grind on his crotch. Let’s do a little age calculation. When she was one, he was 17. When she was 5, he was 21. When she was 10, he was 26. When she was 15, he was 31. Does this not sound like pedophilia to anyone other than me? Why isn’t this man in jail? As the grandmother of a soon-to-be 10 year old, my gut reaction is to cut off or at least prune certain extremities. It works with my hydrangea bushes. Mostly, it scares me that I am reacting this strongly to a man I don’t know doing things on television to a young woman I don’t know when I don’t watch television. Putting this in a climate change perspective, which is really what matters, I keep thinking about what happens when it’s excruciatingly hot and no one has many clothes on. Am I going to trust this man around anyone in my family? Am I going to trust anyone humming this little ditty as we work together in the office, walk together along the sidewalk, stand together in the park? Would I invite this man or anyone who knows or sings this song into my garden to pick tomatoes or on to my front porch to sit in the rocking chair? I think not. Well, not unless I keep the pruning shears close at hand. The cultural acceptance of his public pedophilia is also frightening.
3. He’s demented or he’s desperate. This is purely my judgment. I take full responsibility for this opinion, but this is someone who was abandoned by his babysitter when his parents were out of town and left to fend for himself at age 11. I’m thinking that did some emotional damage. Otherwise, how can you explain any of his songs? Granted, I haven’t listened to them, but I pulled a few lyrics off the internet just to see if they were anything like his most recent one and well, let’s just say his vocabulary is a tad limited. Of course he has a couple that he says are self-reflective and they show real promise of someone actually thinking about life and trying to rise above his mundane animal instincts, but then he obviously let that go and sunk back to where he is now. So what’s this got to do with climate change? Not much. I checked to see if maybe he’d written a song about climate change or global warming since he had that reflective phase and all. No, not really. He’s pretty clear about the things he’s interested in and it revolves almost exclusively around sex. He did write one about the sky, but it wasn’t about pollution. It was about looking up when you were unsure of whether you were ever going to be rich or not. I guess that works, too. At least if you’re looking up at the sky, you might notice that it isn’t really blue, but sort of a casual grey, kind of blurry. Hmmm....maybe there’s a connection here? Naw. I don’t think so.
4. He’s Alan Thicke’s son. This really doesn’t need much explanation. Alan Thicke played a stay-at-home psychiatrist on a television show. That’s pretty scary. Who would go to a psychiatrist who works from home and has kids coming in and out of his office all the time? You might go once, but you sure wouldn’t go again. As for the climate change connection, Alan Thicke actually did write an article in 2011 in the Huffington Post about how “Boomers” couldn’t explain climate change to the next generation. I would beg to differ with him on that. It isn’t that hard. Raising children to behave in a responsible way is hard, which he considers himself an expert. He wrote a book about parenting since he played a psychiatrist on television. I like to pretend I’m a concert pianist because I took lessons when I was little, but I don’t go around insisting on signing autographs for strangers on the street who obviously don’t recognize me behind my Jackie O sunglasses.
5. He wasn’t criticized after the Miley Cyrus incident. What’s up with that? She’s barely out of her tweens and he’s a man going through a mid-life crisis. They had to have rehearsed this song and her performance multiple times before the show aired so it wasn’t like he didn’t know what was going to happen. To me, this is blaming the incest survivor because her uncle/brother/father/grandfather tried to rape her and got caught. To me, she acts like someone who has been sexually assaulted in addition to sexually exploited. To me, this is a young woman who needs intervention and counseling before she ends up in jail like so many other Disney girls. The fact that no one said boo about him and all the angst was directed at her scares me. Have we returned to the pre-1970‘s when women had to fight to keep from being blamed for sexual assault? Oh, that’s right. Women are still being blamed for sexual assault, including young women on television in front of millions of viewers. So what’s the climate change connection here? Other than believing we are living in a cultural climate that needs some drastic changing and feeling my temperature rise every time I think of this man and the media storm that follows him around, I can’t think of anything truly relevant. But then, I don’t think he’s relevant and that doesn’t scare me.
6. He has naked girls dancing around him and they defend it. My mind boggles. Of course there were two other men in the video (and yes I tried to watch some of it and gave up), but no one seems to talk about them. Maybe it’s normal for that to happen to those men, but apparently not to Robin Thicke. I wouldn’t know and not that it really matters. I would argue that the women were not behaving in a way that indicates they believe their bodies are sacred. I guess if you’re a model, your body is just a piece of baggage that you haul around for display purposes like a rack for clothing. If I said that, I would be criticizing the women and that wouldn’t be compassionate or kind. So, I would rather argue that if a woman was behaving in a way that indicated that she had not been treated in an honorable way in the past, that she wasn’t special, that her body was not sacred or worthy of respect, then a man who is older, more experienced, more mature, more worldly would gently take her aside and explain those things to her. He wouldn’t joke or laugh about it. When women behave that way, I try to remind males that these are their wives, daughters, grand-daughters, grandmothers, mothers, aunties, and nieces. How much humor is in it then? Most respond with, “Eeeww!” If you still think it’s funny after envisioning your Aunt Lucy dancing nude around Robin Thicke, then I’m guessing you will end up on one of those weird daytime talk shows where everyone throws furniture. What’s scary to me is that so many people around the world watched these women behave in that way. It’s embarrassing. They can make excuses for their behavior and talk about it being about owning their sexuality all they want (yep, I have a certificate in Women’s Studies so I pretty much know this one). Their behavior degrades them and all women. Their behavior makes a mockery of the women who live covered from head to toe each and every day, who are caned in public because they were raped, who are thrown on to the funeral pyres of their husbands, who can’t go to school, who can’t drive, who can’t work, who can’t go out of their houses for fear of being stoned. They didn’t make a statement about owning anything. If there is a climate change/global warming connection, I would make it with those women in countries who are experiencing the worst problems resulting from it today, the women who struggle every day to feed their families despite a food shortage, the women who live in places where their lives are held in the palms of the men around them, the women in places where their survival depends on honor-- their own and that of the men who surround them. Now, that’s scary.
7. He sang a song about rape. Let me say that again. HE SANG A SONG ABOUT RAPE! Are you kidding me? A song. About rape. A song? Seriously? No one sees a problem with this? Really? A song about rape? Ok, well, let’s sing a song about neutering. That’s a blurred line, right? I mean he really wants it. He really does. He’s an animal. It’s in his nature. He needs to be liberated. Neutering would definitely make him into a good boy. It worked with my dog. I know most men really want to be good. They just get nasty. There’s no blurriness here. I think it’s pretty clear. They want it. It might hurt, but it will work. That said, the only connection to global warming I can make with this is the intense anger I feel that there’s any confusion at all about the problem. There’s no confusion. This is clear. There’s no confusion about climate change. It’s clear. Civilized people don’t sing about rape. Informed people don’t deny there’s climate change. The fact that anyone did sing about rape or anyone denies climate change and anyone thinks either is ok is scary.
8. He is unapologetic. He is a 36 year old man singing about rape while letting a very young woman wiggle her bottom on his crotch in public after making a video with women dancing around him nude and he says what? Not much. Of course, he’s making a bundle off of this so what’s to say? “Golly, guys, I really wish I wasn’t such a big star now that everyone including old women who don’t watch television or listen to the radio know my name and have heard about my song. Durn. I wish I’d done something that would have made the world a better place in some way, but geez, I just never thought I’d make it big and well, now I have so it is kind of a moot point to ask me to be apologetic, right? I mean, wouldn’t everyone have done the same thing? So what if I’ve inadvertently influenced young men, old men, and boys around the world to think of violence against women as cute and not a big deal. It isn’t like I was talking about my mother or anything. She’s safe, right? It wouldn’t be cute if my wife was raped, but hey, if it makes a buck we’ll see if maybe she’ll let someone rape her for my next music video. As long as we make a lot of money and become famous, it won’t really matter. No apologies necessary. I’m sure she won’t mind. Hey, maybe we can get my grandmother in on it, too. Yeah, that’d be cool.” So the connection to climate change? Obviously the same as for the climate deniers who now admit that yes, well, there actually is global warming and well, things are pretty rough climate-wise and you know, in a few years, maybe our children will be able to figure this thing out. If not, then maybe our grandchildren will, if they survive those temperatures or storms. Right now, they’ve got to pull more oil/gas out of the ground to make a buck. To compensate their children for destroying the climate, they’ll buy their kids one of those cute Hummers that get about 18 mpg. No apologies necessary.
9. He influenced young people, middle aged people, old people to believe that rape ends in “y,” as in rapey. Rape is a 4-letter word. Period. Adding a “y” to the end of it, doesn’t make it better, easier to handle, or less violent. It would be like saying temperatures hot enough to buckle pavement this summer are climate changey. Or the polar ice caps melting at a much faster rate than predicted is global warmy. Death Valley hitting 124 degrees in June this year is hotty. Adding a “y” to something we should take seriously in order to make it okey-dokey is a scary thing to do.
10. I know all this about him without doing any internet research. Sure, I looked up the lyrics to his songs for this article and searched on what his Dad was doing out of curiosity, but I knew all the main points about him. I just checked for accuracy and the scary thing was, I was accurate without having done the research. All the research did was fill in some very small blanks. I picked up all this information from scanning headlines as I made my way to the articles I really cared about and from headlines on magazines along the grocery store check out lane. Since I’ve been off email, Twitter and Facebook for about three weeks, the fact that I know so much about him and Miley Cyrus scares me more than I can admit. If anything, that’s the strongest connection to climate change/global warming there is. I don’t need the media to tell me the weather is bonky. I go outside. I run 10 miles. I bike 17 miles. I garden. I walk the dog. I look at the plants. I see the difference in the number of pollinators. I see the difference in the number of birds since last year. I see the change in the color of the sky. I feel the change in the way the sun hits my skin. Just like you absorb the information of the culture if you live in this country, you will experience climate change if you live on this planet. You can’t block out the media. It saturates you. You can’t block out the problems resulting from global warming. They are here. Somehow we have to figure out how to deal with both of them.
I can only deal with Robin Thicke by ignoring him. He isn’t relevant. He is a temporary tempest regardless of whether I believe his song will influence the way someone treats women or not. There really isn’t anything I can do about him or the culture so there’s always the chance that one day someone I love will pay the price for his little song. On the other hand, I won’t ignore climate change. It is relevant. It is a massive storm that is going to influence everyone’s life. However, there are things I can do about mitigating and adapting to climate change. I don’t feel frightened when I can focus my time, energy, and money on the things that are relevant and that I can actually do something about. The more I know about Robin Thicke, the more I see him as a reflection of the culture and none of my actions is likely to make a difference. The more I know about climate change, the more confident I am that I can take positive action and it will make a difference in the kind of future my grandchildren will have. So basically, the reason Robin Thicke scares me more than climate change is I can’t do anything about him, but I can do something about climate change.
