Twitter vitriol is rarely intelligent and logical. But if it’s on Black Twitter specifically, it often comes with a healthy dose of misogynoir. Tweets about the announcement of Rihanna’s pregnancy have spawned a lot of people comparing Rihanna to a run-on-of-the-mill baby mama who is pregnant by a rapper.
No matter how successful a Black woman is, there is always some way to tear her down simply because she did not follow the rules and was still wildly successful. The social media posts questioning Rihanna’s decision to remain unmarried (as far as we know) while having another child were all developed with an underlying sentiment that her decision was somehow wrong, but why exactly is it wrong?
What more do you want from her?
She is literally one of the richest women in the world. Does she need to have a marriage to validate what she wants her family to look like? Other celebrities have much wilder and more liberal views on familyhood, but somehow a mom and a dad in a loving relationship is fodder for scrutiny? Men get on the internet and tell women every day that they are wrong for not wanting to have children and then turn around to criticize a woman doing that exact thing.
Nick Cannon and Elon Musk have several kids with several different women, yet people do not question why they are not married; they may challenge the number of children but not the fact that these men are not married to the mothers of their children. Rihanna has one baby daddy. One. One with whom she is clearly romantically involved, so what more does she need to prove? Is a piece of paper whose bond is dissolvable with as little as $400 so important to someone who spends that on an intimate lunch? Rihanna is one of the highest-selling artists of all time. She doesn’t need the validation that comes with a marriage license.
If happiness were guaranteed via marriage, then why do half of them end in divorce?
And exactly what is a marriage affording Rihanna that she does not already have? For centuries marriage was a way for women to be financially secure because we were not allowed to work, own property, or up until only about 20 years before they started making millennials, have bank accounts. Marriage is also erroneously used as a measure of a woman’s desirability. It is a completely illogical notion, especially when applied to Rihanna.
I’ve seen plenty of aesthetically challenged women in marriages, and famous millionaires have publicly embarrassed themselves in the pursuit of Rihanna’s attention. Clearly, she wears the blankets in her relationships. Most often, marriage comes with power dynamics that are always favorable to men. If we are using this same ideology that men seem to thrive on and attempt to implement in their relationships but have selective amnesia about, then she is clearly the most powerful entity in their relationship. Would it not make sense that Rihanna would do the proposing, and you know, settling down?
She and Fast Pebble (I’m playing ’cause I’m jealous) clearly seem to enjoy each other’s company and gush about each other in every red carpet interview. Why does that happiness have to be sullied by Cheeto residue-laced fingers typing their misery away in the pursuit of hers?
While the title baby mama has lost some of its ghetto-bashing fire over time, it seems like people still can’t allow literally the richest singer in the world to escape the anti-Blackness and even poverty adjacency associated with the term. When a teenage Kylie Jenner was pregnant with a rapper’s baby whom she had only been dating a short while, no one batted a lash extension. When her chronically dickmatized sister Khloe wanted to have another baby by the untruest man she could find, no one associated her ridiculous antics with a baby mama.
When men vilify unwed mothers, do they include the mother of their favorite sports star?…or even their own? Rihanna is losing nothing by remaining unmarried. If anything, she is keeping by remaining unmarried. I highly doubt that Rihanna moved into A$AP Rocky’s house, and he is barely supporting his baby mama while working a blue-collar job in the city, and all she does is sit around all day, broke and knocked up.
Rihanna will be alright; you should be too.
