The Daily Tar Heel
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The Daily Tar Heel

We all put our feet into our mouths sometimes. Try imagining saying something you shouldn’t and having the whole world discussing your gaffe. For celebrities, mistakes are magnified. Kanye West, oversharer extraordinaire, is one who doesn’t learn from his verbal missteps. I woke up last Friday morning and did my usual scroll through Facebook. All my go-to sources, Refinery29, Nylon and the like, reported on Kanye West’s new song “Famous” and its misogynistic language directed at the songstress of my soul, Taylor Swift.

In case you missed it, the lyrics go, “I feel like me and Taylor might still have sex ... I made that b*tch famous.” I was honestly not surprised West wrote lyrics like this; after a while, artists master shock value, and he is no stranger to this. What I was surprised about was West’s open support for Bill Cosby, which he voiced over his Twitter account that same week. As a general fan of West’s music, despite his public displays of arrogance, I had to put my phone down and ask myself, “Why is it OK for him to say things like this and everyone pass it off as typical Kanye?”

As with so many celebrity blunders, I tried to apply West’s latest mistakes to the immediate world around me. Why do we slap men on the wrists for misspeaking, but never attempt to correct these verbal aggressions? Why do many men feel like they own women’s bodies, and worse, why do they feel like they can exercise dominance over women through their words? Granted, Swift herself has misspoken so many times, specifically demonstrating her lack of intersectional feminism knowledge, but we can pass off West’s lyrics, that will forever live on in a recorded song, with the excuse, “Kanye will be Kanye.”

Boys will also be boys, right? We can tell ourselves they will grow up eventually; or maybe, like West, they won’t. Taking his lead and feeling entitled to use their powers in speech to make women feel unsafe is not OK.

Luckily, Swift got the chance to use her words to combat West’s lyrics in her acceptance speech for the album of the year Grammy. Unfortunately, not all women get the chance to speak directly to our harassers and stand up for ourselves on national television. Like Swift said, we need to remember as women we are responsible for our success, and no one else can take credit for our accomplishments. At least Swift had the chance to silence West for one small moment.

Being considerate with our words is so important; misogynistic speech is a form of rhetoric that no longer has a place in our society. Those who use it no longer will have excuses made for them. They will become a minority so long as we make them know this type of language is no longer acceptable. Unfortunately, Taylor Swift isn’t the first or last woman Kanye West disrespects, but let’s hope those who listen to him see the occasional error of his lyrics, and maybe one day he will, too.

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