Kendrick Lamar’s Mea Culpa Isn’t Coming or Deserved

Onyx Contributor:  H.T. (@517RedHood), Podcast:  Lansing Anti-Hero

Kendrick Lamar at one point in his latest song Humble brought up his preference in women’s appearance, and once again he found himself on the wrong end of a storm of think pieces and tweet threads about how men who decide to hold ANY vocal opinion of a woman’s appearance is patriarchal and aiding the oppression of women.  And this is where I think we’ve reached a point that I’ve been trying to properly convey the problem with for a bit of time.

This sort of outrage comes from the fact that over the years, the demand to be “woke” in whatever the ideal means has risen as has the demands themselves.  If I could nail down the exact time when we got to this point where wokeness reached the painfully out of touch levels it’s reached now, I think it was right about when #MasculinitySoFragile started and right before we entered the age of “CisHet Men are trash”; seriously, we found ourselves at a point where being a straight man who didn’t like stuff in your ass meant you had fragile masculinity issues, not wanting to date trans women meant you were transphobic, and having the gumption to be like any heterosexual male and have physical preferences that you found appealing.

“Now I can’t say I find Tessa Thompson attractive or I hate dark skinned women? Is this life?”

But the biggest mistake Kendrick has made in the age of wokeness is that Kendrick has joined the leagues of heterosexual men who in the name of being seen as the good guys, haven’t on a regular basis gotten in front of a mic or camera and decided to essentially say “I’m a heterosexual straight male and I’m sorry other ones have hurt you”.  Essentially, the Jesse Williams doctrine.  Honestly, I won’t even say it’s necessarily simping or caping for pussy as in many cases these guys don’t need to, nor do I believe that’s why they’re doing this.  I think simply the fact that just to not get labeled problematic and ultimately lose favor amongst these very fickle social justice circles, and thus will reason out any logic set before them if preservation amongst said ranks is their top priority.

This is someone’s reality.

And this is how we’ve gotten to where Kendrick can’t state that he likes women in their natural state because somehow liking women in their natural physical state would be an affront to women who use physical augmentations as a boost to their self esteem which was wrecked because for years men were pushing a standard of beauty that lead to them wanting said surgeries and augmentations, but now it’s sexist that men like Kendrick would rather us go back to when women DIDN’T feel a need to have all these changes that at worse are highly invasive and at best are incredibly pricey because he’s a man and men are the cause of this.  Which raises the question, if a man can’t try to heal the damage other men caused, why do you have all these men of social media making it seem like at best we caused the years of women having body issues and at worse that dating us is a roll of the dice with your safety?

Oh yeah…

If people wanna be mad that Kendrick has the audacity to want women to live life in the natural physical state but be mad about his wife because she doesn’t fit into THEIR ideal of what natural beauty looks like, let it the fuck go.  Despite what Kendrick said in his song, nobody is required to completely change what they’re attracted to just to qualify as “woke” or whatever.  Kendrick nor any man really needs to pay for other men’s sins as you’ll never truly be in the black with such a debt.  At best, be the change you wish to see rather than hope your self loathing will change things.  Be humble, but have a fucking backbone.