In the Never Forget Category: R Kelly’s Twitter Account Blows Up With Snarks About His Thing for Underage Girls, Not Questions About His New CD

This is HILARIOUS. And just desserts, too.

The Twitterverse has lit up since yesterday regarding #AskRKelly, an account created by the singer to promote his new CD, Black Panties, which has been come in for mixed critical acclaim. However, instead of reading Tweets by avid fans about music, Kelly got smacked down via Twitter about everything else, including his notorious sex tape, his predilection for underage girls, his fashion taste, his sexual quirks, and his video closet series. And the hits just keep on coming, even after Kelly pulled the plug on the account yesterday and then reportedly snuck it back online today.

A screenshot from The Boombox of some of the better Tweets "asking" the singer R. Kelly about past and present peccadillos (Courtesy: The Boombox)

A screenshot from The Boombox of some of the better Tweets “asking” the singer R. Kelly about past and present peccadillos; I’m sure other sites (Vibe!) have “greatest hits” as well (Courtesy: The Boombox)

And you wonder why certain celebrities do not have Twitter accounts? Or shouldn’t? This is why.

Despite the fact that people are giving themselves high-fives over their Tweets being picked up by the likes of HLN or The Vibe, it doesn’t mean that their grasp of what rape culture is has improved. I only have to refer to the gang rapes of young women by school athletes or the bullying of the same young women to the point where the child and her family must move away to another town and another school to escape the harassment and the splitting of communities and towns. Several times, however, the harassment continues at a new school. And in extreme cases, the girl commits suicide from the victim-shaming and -blaming.

We haven’t heard one peep from the girl, now a woman, regarding what happened to her when she made that sex tape with Kelly nearly a decade ago. Even when it was called illegal and child pornography, people still got copies to watch for themselves, many for prurient reasons, and to brag that they saw it. I refused to see it, even to critique it. To me, it was simply piling on her degradation and her pain. I just wonder what this woman’s life is truly like, because she is now old enough to have children herself. At the time, she and her mother were considered predatory, wanting to hurt the singer’s career, and only after his money. Mindsets still haven’t changed much from there. Or the propensity of parents and guardians to “sell” their children to celebrities so that they could bask in the spotlight as well.

I’m heartened, but only by so much, by this display of guerrilla theatre foisted on R. Kelly, much as he would like to live his reputation down. Because it is going to take more than a couple of days on Twitter to straighten out how we are to value girls and women and protect them from harm and abasement, and in particular, girls and women of color.