Soap.com Article: Why Do Men Watch Soap Operas?
Why do men watch soaps, anyway?
Soaps.com’s newest columnist, John Beadle, ponders the question we all want to know.
Unemployed:
I don’t fall into this category, only because I was already watching soaps before I was unemployed. But I imagine that many a new soap watching man fan was lured in slowly by their wives who were watching. It only takes one storyline or cliff hanger really. It starts with recognizing a few of the characters, “Hey isn’t that Jack?”, and then giving a damn about what they are doing, “Wasn’t he sleeping with Sharon yesterday? Why is he with Phyllis now?” Before you know it, you are actually sitting down to watch segments of imaginary people or one imaginary person. But since everyone intermingles with everyone and the schemers are mixing all the storylines, you find that soon the one storyline you thought you cared about now encompasses the entire show.
Men Are Confused By Soaps – So They Start Watching More Than One:
For whatever reason, once a guy gets wrangled into one storyline, and then adds a second soap to his TV viewing day, he’ll start to think two different soaps are actually that first soap he was secretly watching. He doesn’t even know that Ridge isn’t on Days and he just looks like John from One Life To Live. He unwittingly gets sucked into that similar storyline which then intertwines and now this poor guy is a fan of multiple soaps. It could go downhill from there as this confusion continues. Plus there is a wearing down effect and soon this guy is watching Melrose Place
at night instead of NBA basketball.
Sex Is Rampant On Soaps:
Women like to point out there is too much sexploitation on the TV men watch. This might be because those women are worn out from watching non-stop sex scenes all day on daily soaps. It isn’t the type that men are used to. The bimbo with implants laughing about how cool the dude with a large belly is while he drinks down his beer is not present. Instead, the type is usually fit muscular dudes with their shirts off whisking women up off their feet and carrying them off to the bedroom. A lot of women are carried off to the bedroom in soap operas. Often, and confusingly, he makes idle talk (called romance) with the girl before she starts to unbutton his shirt. This is steamy, passionate – with plenty of skin, hot sex going on during the daytime. Usually seen once each show. Sometimes the whole day is full of it. I think Wednesday is ‘all day soap sex’ day.
You Are A Gay Man (Mostly Myth):
This leads me into dispelling the myth that only gay men watch soaps. Now, certainly plenty of gay men watch soaps but I’m positive there is at least one non-gay man who is watching them too. That would be me. I firmly believe there are many straight men out there watching soaps. We just don’t admit it. Like when you prefer to take a bath over a shower. That doesn’t make you gay. It makes you a soaker. It makes you appreciative of life and the moments it has to offer. Maybe only sensitive men who can follow multiple storylines at once like soaps? Maybe a lot of those men are gay but surely not all of them. If I was braver I’d ask some of my male friends if they watch soaps but I think I’d rather tell them I prefer baths to showers. It could be though that more gay men watch soaps than straight men… So I had to list it.
Raised By Women Who Watched Soaps:
One of the reasons I watch soaps is due to the fact I was raised by women. So soaps were on the TV all the time. From early childhood I wondered why that guy with the German accent and funny mustache was keeping this very hairy, shirtless man in his basement. I wondered if he would ever get out. I worried about him. This hooked me some. I was also curious back then about a different kind of soap that had monsters in it called “Dark Shadows.” My mom would trick me into taking an afternoon nap with her and if I did I could watch “Dark Shadows” when we woke up. Little did I know that she was going to watch it regardless if I watched or if I played with my Leggos. Often, I played with my Leggos behind the couch because the werewolves on the show frightened me. It became convenient though to have this additional “soap knowledge” I picked up by watching TV with mommy. I found I had the answers when my sisters would be talking and catching up on one of their soaps, “Is Michael with Julia yet?” “No. Victor still has him locked up in the basement!” I liked the funny looks it got me. Plus at 5 years of age your brain is like a sponge. I was as familiar with the cast of Guiding Light as I was with “The Muppets” when I was growing up. Thanks mom.
You Were A Total Momma’s Boy
(See above.)
College:
Some men, who may not be momma’s boys, find themselves interested in soaps during college. It is an experimental time of life. Many young boys who were spared from the soaps and instead worked on cars or built furniture will now find this new media belching all day long out of the TV located in your doom room’s shared “Den”. During the day, the girls of a co-ed dorm generally have the TV tuned to a soap opera. Boys who want to be around girls and are just sitting there trying to get idle conversation in, quickly learn that they need to discuss what is playing on the TV. The motivation is there so they pick up a few names and storylines and act interested in the hopes of getting a date later. They are not intimidated by the other boys in the dorm who already know all about the soaps because they assume those guys are gay. But their game backfires when the male soap viewers actually get reeled in by this game they play. Pretty soon, they actually want to know if Adam is really going to steal Ashley’s baby and give her to Sharon. By the end of the 1st semester at most co-ed dorms you will find a mix of sexes watching the daytime soaps and often the “Be quiet!” is coming from a male who is trying to hear what Robert Scorpio has to say.
Can’t Find the Remote Control:
No doubt a few men, possibly unemployed, find themselves trapped into watching a soap because they can’t find the TV remote control. They started out watching some morning news show that ran into a daytime soap. Most men cannot keep track of a television remote for longer than 15 minutes and refuse to consider the idea of getting up and touching the TV to change the channel. This leads them into the first soap of the day. They don’t watch at first but the storylines are repetitive and the first time Carly takes off Jack’s shirt and they romp about in the bed half naked for 3 minutes, the guy’s interest is piqued. Pretty soon he is actually starting to care if EJ is the father of Sami’s child or not. This kind of man probably has to stay in the closet and can’t admit he watches the soaps because he is not gay nor secure enough in his manhood to just admit he watches. Or likes baths.
Intriguing Story Lines:
Ok, let’s keep it real – no one is watching the soaps, not even women, for the intriguing story lines. If anything, the fact that the story lines are so predictable is probably what keeps viewers (especially women – who love to be right) watching. Women love to be right. They love moments where they can say, “I knew Sheila wasn’t dead!” When the light bulb goes off in the man’s head and he can figure out that Sharon slept with all those guys and what a mess that is going to make, he’s in. He’s joined the soap speculation game. Soap story lines consist of pretty much “I know something you don’t.” You need a scorecard to keep track of who knows what and who is keeping what secret from whom. Soaps just keep you hanging and people, including men, generally want to know those secrets. We’re all suckers for the cliffhanger stories, especially if they’re mixed in with lots of sweaty semi-nakedness. Once a man is exposed to it a few times, he’s going to be hooked. We are easier marks than women and even though men might not be the target audience of daytime soap operas, they can still be snared by the trap set by daytime writers.
Because The Wife Does:
This goes along with not finding the remote or being raised by women. If you find yourself at home during the day, you’ve probably not watched daytime TV. It is foreign ground. You’re accustomed to watching “Monday Night Football” or “Thursday Night Football” or “Sunday Night Football” or “Special Edition Thursday Night Football,” (which is on Saturday and I have no idea why it just isn’t called “Saturday Night Football,” but it isn’t). So if the wife is watching soaps day after day and you are nearby and receiving some exposure to it, you will become trapped into watching the sex, cliffhangers and/or gossipy storylines. It is just plain human nature and vulnerabilities daytime takes advantage of. And men are human. We are.
We’ve No life. Men Are Just Neanderthals:
I’ve come up with as many reasons as I could think of on a morning’s cup of coffee as to why men would watch daytime soaps. If you don’t fall into one of the categories I’ve mentioned the only one I have left is that men are just a Neanderthal with no life. You are the type of man who doesn’t really decide. You have time on your hands. You sit around at home. You can’t stomach “The Price Is Right” without Bob Barker. The soaps are on. There is only so much “Sports Center” a person can watch. You don’t read. You don’t do crafts. You find the same set of soaps on day after day and you just mindlessly watch until one day you realize that you care about Lily’s baby. You take an interest. You are actually less mindless and have some purpose in your life. But you can’t admit it to your friends. You just have to ponder about all the back stabbing, affairs and plotting from the comforts of your warm noon bath.
– John Beadle
Soaps.com Journalist
TSN Television US Open Tennis Schedule For Canadian Tennis Fans!
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| DATE | TSN | TIME |
|---|---|---|
| Aug 30th | 2010 U.S Open Tennis: Men’s & Women’s 1st Round  |
1:00 PM |
| Aug 30th | 2010 U.S Open Tennis: Men’s & Women’s 1st Round |
7:00 PM |
| Aug 31st | 2010 U.S Open Tennis: Men’s & Women’s 1st Round |
1:00 PM |
| Aug 31st | 2010 U.S Open Tennis: Men’s & Women’s 1st Round |
7:00 PM |
| Sep 1st | 2010 U.S Open Tennis: Men’s 1st Round/Women’s 2nd Round |
1:00 PM |
| Sep 1st | 2010 U.S Open Tennis: Men’s 1st Round/Women’s 2nd Round |
7:00 PM |
| Sep 2nd | 2010 U.S Open Tennis: Men’s & Women’s 2nd Round |
1:00 PM |
| Sep 2nd | 2010 U.S Open Tennis: Men’s & Women’s 2nd Round |
7:00 PM |
| Sep 3rd | 2010 U.S Open Tennis: Men’s 2nd Round/Women’s 3rd Round |
1:00 PM |
| Sep 4th | 2010 U.S Open Tennis: Men’s & Women’s 3rd Round |
11:00 |
| Sep 4th | 2010 U.S Open Tennis: Men’s & Women’s 3rd Round |
7:00 PM |
| Sep 7th | 2010 U.S Open Tennis: Men’s Round of 16/ Women’s Quarterfinals |
11:00 |
| Sep 7th | 2010 U.S Open Tennis: Men’s Round of 16/ Women’s Quarterfinals |
7:00 PM |
| Sep 8th | 2010 U.S Open Tennis: Men’s & Women’s Quarterfinals |
11:00 |
| Sep 8th | 2010 U.S Open Tennis: Men’s & Women’s Quarterfinals |
7:00 PM |
| Sep 9th | 2010 U.S Open Tennis: Men’s Quarterfinals |
11:00 |
| Sep 10th | 2010 U.S Open Tennis: Women’s Semifinals |
12:30 PM |
| Sep 12th | 2010 U.S Open Tennis: Men’s Final |
4:00 PM |
| DATE | TSN2 | TIME |
|---|---|---|
| Aug 31st | 2010 U.S Open Tennis: Men’s & Women’s 1st Round |
2:00 |
| Sep 2nd | 2010 U.S Open Tennis: Men’s 1st Round/Women’s 2nd Round |
2:00 |
| Sep 3rd | 2010 U.S Open Tennis: Men’s & Women’s 2nd Round |
2:00 |
| Sep 3rd | 2010 U.S Open Tennis: Men’s 2nd Round/Women’s 3rd Round |
7:00 PM |
| Sep 5th | 2010 U.S Open Tennis: Men’s & Women’s 3rd Round |
2:00 |
| Sep 5th | 2010 U.S Open Tennis: Men’s 3rd Round/Women’s Round of 16 |
11:00 |
| Sep 5th | 2010 U.S Open Tennis: Men’s 3rd Round/Women’s Round of 16 |
7:00 PM |
| Sep 6th | 2010 U.S Open Tennis: Men’s & Women’s Round of 16 |
11:00 |
| Sep 6th | 2010 U.S Open Tennis: Men’s & Women’s Round of 16 |
7:00 PM |
| Sep 9th | 2010 U.S Open Tennis: Men’s & Women’s Quarterfinals |
2:00 |
| Sep 9th | 2010 U.S Open Tennis: Men’s Quarterfinals |
8:00 PM |
| Sep 10th | 2010 U.S Open Tennis: Men’s Quarterfinals |
2:00 |
| Sep 11th | 2010 U.S Open Tennis: Women’s Semifinals |
2:00 |
| Sep 11th | 2010 U.S Open Tennis: Men’s Semifinals |
12:00 PM |
| Sep 11th | 2010 U.S Open Tennis: Women’s Final |
8:00 PM |
Ny Daily News Article: American Tennis Has A Bleak Future No Young Stars Emerging After Roddick & Williams Sisters.
With U.S. Open on tap, future of American tennis looks blight
With U.S. Open on tap, future of American tennis looks blight
Monday, August 30th 2010, 4:00 AM
Andy Roddick and Venus Williams (below) have won zero major titles in the past two years.
Melanie Oudin has fallen to No. 43 in the world after her stellar showing in the 2009 U.S. Open.
They hate talking about it. But this is the U.S. – as in United States – Open that starts Monday at Flushing Meadows. If we don’t ask the players now, we are not performing our patriotic duty.
So yet again, and certainly not for the last time: Why do Americans suddenly stink at tennis? Or, somewhat more diplomatically, why do we no longer dominate and destroy the rest of the world, as is our birthright?
The players bristle, denying we’ve misplaced our groove. Yet there is no American under 28 years old who owns even a remote shot at an Open singles title, and the juniors pipeline promises little better than solid, second-tier careers.
“You can basically make the stats say whatever you want to,” says Andy Roddick, ranked No. 9 in the world. “Just ask a statistician.”
We don’t ask the statisticians. We ask Roddick and other players what is wrong, and mostly we hear that tennis is now a global sport, and that we were spoiled rotten in the past.
But nearly two decades since Serena and Venus arose, almost mythically, from those cracked courts in Compton, where is that one young guy, one woman, who knows how to smash a forehand down the line with cruel accuracy?
The problem may just be a lack of proper nurturing. There is much new evidence – and the Williams sisters are fine examples of this – that kids achieve greater expertise at sports like soccer and tennis through practice and drills, not through a slew of one-sided tournament matches.
“I don’t think the junior system is the greatest,” James Blake says. “Kids still need to be kids, and they are having a tough time being kids right now. They play a lot of tournaments – too many tournaments. I see them when I’m in the training room, 13-year-olds coming in there with overuse injuries, and I’m thinking, ‘I didn’t even know what overuse was when I was 13 years old.'”
Here are the cold, hard rankings: After Roddick at No. 9 in the world, John Isner, Mardy Fish and Sam Querrey are 20 through 22 in the ATP rankings. Following them, Taylor Dent is No. 70.
Isner is 25 years old, Fish is 28. Only Querrey, 22, has upside growth. Also, there is just one U.S. boy, Frank Mitchell, ranked among the top 25 ITF Juniors. Mitchell is 17 years old, ranked No. 17.
Serena and Venus Williams remain No.1 and 4 in the WTA rankings. After them, the abyss: Melanie Oudin has fallen to No. 43, then Vania King at 74. There are two American girls in the ITF Junior Top 25: Beatrice Capra, 18, is ranked 14th; more promising is Lauren Davis, 16, ranked No.16.
at any meaningful level, is ranked in the Top 10 other than the usual, aging suspects: the Williams sisters and Roddick.
Together, Roddick and Venus Williams have won exactly zero major titles in the past two years. Both have battled health or injury problems this season. Yet without Serena Williams in the draw, Venus and Roddick represent the only chance, really, at this Open against the greedy, grasping Swiss, Belgians, Danes, Spaniards and Russians.
Roddick opens Monday against Stephane Robert of France. Venus plays Roberta Vinci of Italy tonight. They should move on easily. They’d better. There is no backup. The weight of a once-mighty tennis nation rests on two pairs of shoulders.
“I didn’t really feel much of a responsibility to be the guy in the top 10,” says Roddick, who recently fought through a case of mononucleosis. “I figure that should fall maybe on some of the guys that have never been in the top 10.
“All the numbers that are being reported as far as apparel sales, participation, TV ratings, this, that, and the other, are up,” Roddick says. “So I have a hard time dealing with the question that says, ‘What’s wrong?'”
Yes, we know. The euro talks as loudly as the dollar. We should enjoy Roger Federer‘s angled forehands, Rafael Nadal‘s diving saves. And for now, we’re willing to do that, only because Roddick is still knocking 140mph serves and the Williams sisters occasionally win majors.
But time is running out on tennis around here, whether or not anybody wants to admit as much. People will always come to the Open, a special event. The TV ratings, however, are certain to shrink, as long as we stink.
All we can do is buy some time at Flushing Meadows, starting Monday with Roddick and Williams. Late autumn for tennis here, in late summer.
Vibe Magazine Article: Fantasia Says The Media Are Racist & Sexist. Why is Alicia Keyes & Le Ann Rimes Affairs With Married Men Ignored By The Press But She Is Scorned?
antasia Speaks: How ‘The Shade Issue’ Affected Her Press Coverage
Prior to her suicide attempt Fantasia Barrino naturally faced a barrage of negative press surrounding her affair with Antwaun Cook and the lawsuit his wife Paula filed against the former American Idol.
But does she think her African and more ethnic features had anything to do with the excessive and sometimes mean-spirited tone of the coverage she received about her personal life? Say, versus the media’s nearly mute opinions on the controversial love lives and choices of other female entertainers like Alicia Keys or white singers like LeAnn Rimes or Britney Spears?
“Yes, I do. I really feel like it does. I was on Nancy Grace, CNN, every gospel station and in every magazine and every newspaper,” she told VIBE about the scandal before her O.D. “It was on. You would have thought I was the President or something.”
But the VH1 Fantasia For Real star says the response wasn’t a surprise. She’s says she’s gotten subtle backlash because of her looks since her Idol days.
“I’ve battled and have had to deal with that before. Lord forgive me and I don’t want to offend anybody,” she says, “but when [I did Idol] it seemed like everybody there was Barbied out. Slim, long hair, light eyes, light-skinned. And here I come with my dark skin, full nose, short hair and full lips — it was hard.”
Fantasia says she even believes she’s passed over in the red carpet coverage spreads of many popular magazines for the same reason. “They never put me in those magazines [featuring] the red carpet. Everybody there has long hair and everybody is bright-skinned, and I was like, ‘But wait a minute. They never gave me that.’ That bothered me,’” says the singer whose new album, Back To Me debuted as the number two pop album and number one R&B album in the country. “And then I tried hard to find people to dress me and they still would not put me there [in those magazines].”
But she says she’s since made peace with her beauty’s place in the industry. “One day I was like, ‘that’s okay’, but I had to get to that point,” says Fantasia. “ I am a dark-skinned, full-lipped sister and it’s all right.” —Ronke Idowu Reeves
LA Times Article: Soul Singer Fantasia Barrino Talks About Her New Album, Affair With A Married Man, Depression, & Recent Suicide Attempt.
Fantasia Barrino opens up about her dark days and her painful healing process
August was supposed to be Fantasia Barrino’s comeback month.
For three years, the “American Idol” winner had been working on her third album, recording 100 songs with a variety of producers around the country, selecting tracks that would speak to how far she’d come in her troubled life. To outsiders, everything seemed on track for the Aug. 24 debut of the album, “Back to Me.”
But behind the scenes, something else was brewing that eventually led Fantasia to the sad events of Aug. 9, the day she tried to end her life by taking sleeping pills and an entire bottle of Bayer. In a lengthy interview with The Times in Los Angeles on Wednesday, Fantasia opened up about the events that preceded that dark day this summer when she couldn’t fight the desire to “sleep forever” and the painful recovery process she just began.
“I always covered up everything so well,” Fantasia said, sipping a glass of Malbec after she taped “Lopez Tonight” on Wednesday and returned to her Beverly Hills hotel. “I’m always the bubbly life of the party. And, for so long, I pushed and pushed and pushed. And, this day, I had no push in me. Look at all this stuff I’ve been through at the age of 26. All of it just overloaded.”
Physically, Fantasia could still fool you into thinking that life is perfect. She showed up to the Times interview and photo shoot dressed in a sexy semi-sheer black top and tight pants and a new short hair-do. But when she opened up about the tragic turn her life took recently, it’s evident it will be long before she conquers her feelings of shame, guilt, and confusion.
The 26-year-old single mom’s well-chronicled life has never been easy. But she has always shared her struggles openly, revealing in a book and Lifetime movie how she had been raped as a teenager, dropped out of school and became pregnant two years later. Winning America’s hearts on the “Idol” stage in 2004 changed her life, but it didn’t necessarily make it easier. Her lifelong dream to share her singing gift with the world had come true, but with it came the perils of suddenly having money and being famous. Her first album, “Free Yourself,” sold 1.8 million copies, but her sophomore set disappointed, posting less than half of those sales. Along the way, she earned eight Grammy nominations, landed the lead on Broadway in “The Color Purple,” and faced more hurdles when she inexplicably missed shows. Eventually, Fantasia revealed she had two tumors removed from her vocal cords, which had threatened her singing career.
Once she recovered, Fantasia decided it was time to take chances again. Last summer, she began filming her popular VH1 reality series, “Fantasia For Real,” an attempt to share her highs and lows as she prepared her new album, continued to be the sole caretaker of her entire family, readied to tour a final time with “The Color Purple,” earned her G.E.D. and overcame her substantial financial problems. When her VH1 series premiered successfully in January, it seemed her fans were as ready for her return as she was.
Unfortunately, for the R&B and soul singer, her long-awaited album’s launch on Tuesday was overshadowed by a disturbing turn in her personal life. What follows is Fantasia’s account of what transpired in her Charlotte, N.C., home and what she’s doing to heal herself.
Before the world learned that Fantasia had overdosed in a suicide attempt on Aug. 9, she had spent three days locked in a guest room in her house, refusing to eat, drink or talk to anyone. Her best friend, her mother and her manager reached out to her many times, but she says she has no recollection of anything they said to her because she was “zoned out.” Her cousin had helped by picking up her 9-year-old daughter, Zion, and taking her out for the day.
For a few months, Fantasia had been dealing with rumors that she was seeing a married man she had met at a T-Mobile store near her house in the well-to-do neighborhood of Glynmoor Lakes. Photographs of Fantasia and Antwaun Cook, a T-Mobile salesman, hit the tabloids and Internet every now and again, and the singer had denied the relationship. It all came to a head on Aug. 4 when Cook’s wife, Paula, filed for divorce and blamed Fantasia for the demise of their marriage. In the complaint, Paula Cook said her husband had been having an affair with Fantasia while living with her and they had videotaped themselves having sex.
This time, the news hit wide, from CNN to national magazines and the local North Carolina media. Strangers were driving by her house at all hours. Although Fantasia had been through worse in her young life, it proved too much, she said. Her mother called to express her pain and disappointment, and the daughter felt as if she was never going to get to a stable place, where her career was thriving and there was no personal drama. She started feeling sorry for herself, wondering why the media were always so quick to criticize and judge her. Nothing, not even thinking about her little daughter, lifted her. She couldn’t stop dwelling on the cumulative pain of the last six years.
“At the time, I wasn’t thinking about anybody,” she said, tears welling in her eyes. “I was so numb. I was so out of it. I’ve never been to that place before. It was so scary. It was the darkest place that anybody would want to be. I wasn’t thinking about anybody. Not even my momma. My momma usually has that power. She’s an evangelist, a pastor, she usually has the power to say a prayer and bring me out of something. She says she prayed for me that day. That’s how out of it I was — I didn’t hear nothing they were saying. And she can usually bring me out of things, but this day, I just kept thinking, ‘I’ve been trying so hard. And every time, I get up, how many licks can I take? How many more punches? How many more blows?’ That’s like a fighter when he’s in the ring. He can’t take but so many punches. Sometimes they take a punch that knocks them out. And I think that day I just got knocked out.”
On the morning of Aug. 9, Fantasia was forced out of her hiding place to meet with her lawyers, trailed by cameras for the second season of her reality show, which premieres on Sept. 19. Because of the ongoing litigation, Fantasia has been advised to say little about her relationship with Antwaun Cook. But she stands by a press release issued by her manager when she was in the hospital, stating that she had had an off-and-on again relationship with him for 11 months and she believed he was separated from his wife when she met him.
“I just want people to know he was a good guy,” she said. “I think everybody hates him right now. He’s like the monster right now. Whatever he’s done was OK because we weren’t really together like that. I was dating, doing my thing. I think when it blew up the first time, it kind of ran him away because when he met me, he was like, ‘She’s really cool.’ Most guys are intimidated by a strong woman, she’s in the limelight, she’s a celebrity. When he realized that I was cool, and I could chill and I could hang, I think he just took a liking to me.
“He was separated,” she continued. “And I don’t think I would have been attracted to him if he wasn’t. I don’t have to have anybody else’s. He was very honest from the very beginning and when we wasn’t together, whatever he did, was what he did. But that’s all I can say about that. He’s not a bad guy. I’m not a bad girl and he didn’t do anything wrong. My grandma always used to say, ‘You don’t miss your water until your well runs dry.’ And I think when a certain person found out he was kind of attracted to me, maybe they wanted it back.”
Fantasia says details that her lawyer gave her about the lawsuit that morning sent her over the edge. On the way home, she recalls telling her manager, Brian Dickens, she felt as though she was on the verge of a nervous breakdown.
“And he just said what they always say, ‘You got it, Tasia. It’s gonna be all right. You’re strong. Blah blah blah,’ ” she said. “And he just couldn’t tell that this day that wasn’t going to help. I didn’t want to hear that anymore. I’d been hearing that for years and you gotta understand, I don’t have anybody to lean on. I’m the one — I’m the caretaker. I do everything. I can’t say, you know that I’ve got a lot going on today and I need you to take over. I can’t do that.”
When she got home, she went to her bedroom and sat in a chair for hours. Her best friend, mother and her stepfather came in and talked to her at different times.
“I was in such a zone,” she said. “Mouths were moving, but I didn’t hear [expletive] they were saying.”
The one thing she does recall is asking her mother if she thought her music would endure and her mother wondering why that was on her mind.
“I’ve always looked up to Aretha Franklin. She’s my idol,” Fantasia said. “When she goes away, her music will forever be. And I always used to say I want to be like that. My mom said, ‘Yeah, but you’ve got more to do.” And then she went to babbling and babbling and babbling and I was just zoned out.”
Fantasia asked everyone to leave, and when her cousin texted her that she was bringing Zion home, she replied that she needed more time. Dickens had gone to a Kinko’s store nearby.
“I just wanted to go to sleep, at first. I already had trouble sleeping because I’m a thinker,” she said. “That’s something my life coach told me — that I think so much. I’m always thinking about everybody else — how am I going to do this? I don’t give my mind a rest. So at first I just wanted to sleep. And after that, I was like, you know what? At this point, I don’t care if I go to sleep and never wake up.”
She wrote a series of goodbye letters and texted her manager and her best friend that she loved them.
“I wrote to my brother, Teeny,” she said. “He was mad at me at the time. He hadn’t talked to me for a few months over some money. So I said what I had to say to him. And my little brother’s been acting up in school, so I said something to him about how proud I would be if he went to college. I said something to Ricco because he’s been fighting to do his music for so long. I wanted to encourage him. I wrote a long something for Zion and I wrote a long something for my mom. And I sat it in a book. I made sure I wanted them to see it.”
Then she took “a lot” of sleeping pills and an entire bottle of Bayer, and sat in her closet, staring at herself in a mirror.
“I felt like it was never going to end for me,” she said. “They don’t ever let up on me. It’s either my hair is cute but my dress is ugly, or I didn’t like what she said, or look, she’s kicking off her shoes. And you know what made it so bad? I had just received my high school diploma and it was something that I was so proud of and they didn’t say anything about that. And it bothered me because that was one of the things I talked about cleaning up and fixing. They didn’t run with none of that. But they always seem to find some drama about Fantasia. I just felt tired, tired, tired.”
When she awoke in the hospital, she felt angry that she had survived and became anxious about what the media would say next. The excessive amount of aspirin affected her kidneys, she was hooked up to an IV, and there was a nurse assigned to watch her around the clock. But then she started hearing from friends like Missy Elliot, Jill Scott, Erykah Badu and Charlie Wilson, who soothed her by telling her they’d been through similar difficulties.
The nurse assigned to watch her, an older woman from New York, also helped immensely, she said. First, she distracted her with idle conversation, but then she showed her a photo of herself singing in a magazine, reminding her of what she loved to do most and that she needed to focus on the release of her album. She was discharged from the hospital under the condition that she undergo outpatient group therapy. At the countryside facility, she also met with a life coach.
“In the beginning, I thought this is not going to do nothing but send me right to the place I was at,” Fantasia said. “But once I got there, and they took me around, I just started enjoying things about it. It’s a very old house. It has history so they take you through and tell you about the history. The floors are old wood. And I started realizing that it brings you back to life. It makes you appreciate being here. There was like 14 or 15 people in the classroom — CEOs, lawyers, I think I was the only singer. But just being in there with them and seeing that, OK, these are people who are high-powered and have lots and lots of money and they all got to their breaking point. I’m not the only one, you know what I mean?”
Two days after she left the hospital, there was another media frenzy surrounding the beleaguered singer. This time, she had been photographed in a park near her house, filming scenes for her reality show with Cook. Fans and critics alike were alarmed that she was already back at work and allowing herself to be seen in public with the man at the center of her latest woes.
When The Times asked Fantasia about that day, she said the media had it wrong, and that those scenes had been filmed the week before she was hospitalized. But after The Times verified with VH1 that the shooting took place on Aug. 13, Dickens, her manager, said that Fantasia had confused that day of shooting with a previous one. Additionally, Dickens said that Fantasia’s need for closure had surfaced in group therapy and that the singer got together with Cook for that purpose. That was the last time they saw each other, he added.
Fantasia was not available for a follow-up conversation, according to Dickens. But in her interview, she had explained why she returned to work so quickly, especially to face the media.
“They wanted me to be in [group therapy] much longer, but I realized that the record company and everybody was depending on me, and I had to come back,” she said. “I had an album coming out. They started saying they were going to push it back again, but they’ve already pushed it four times. So I decided to pull myself together. And I couldn’t afford to stay out, to be honest with you. I’m just now fighting my way out of coming out of all this debt. So I had to pick myself up and take baby steps every day.”
This week, she appeared on “Good Morning America,” and “Lopez Tonight,” even though she says she was “very nervous and scared of stepping out.” Her album, met with generally favorable reviews, is poised to end the week in second place, behind Katy Perry’s new “Teenage Dream.”
For the time being, she’s going to pace herself in terms of facing more journalists, but says her therapy is teaching her to be thicker-skinned and is showing her how to make herself a priority.
“There’s a little piece of my personal life that I want to keep to myself from now on,” Fantasia said. “But I don’t want to completely shut up and shut down and let people change who I am. I will continue to be Tasia and that’s an honest, open book. What I go through makes me who I am. If I didn’t go through anything, I probably wouldn’t have anything to sing about.
“I don’t want to be a robot. I want to be human,” she continued. “I want to be able to walk into a grocery store and get in my car and go where I want to go. I want to be able to go to a home where there are young girls who have messed up and say, ‘Look, just last week, look what I did’ and hug them. I don’t want to drive up in my BMW and say ‘I don’t understand why you girls are doing this.’ I will always be Tasia, and with Tasia comes my trials, my tribulations, and my joy and my pain.”
She plans to tour in November, which she’s been dreaming about for years. In the meantime, she says she will continue to work on herself in therapy, realizing that she can’t stop life’s challenges but she can stop creating difficult situations for herself.
“I can make you this promise: I won’t do that again,” she said, fighting tears. “I gotta see my daughter walk across the stage and get her high school diploma and she’s got to go to college. I got to see that! I’ve been a single mom for nine years. It’s just me and her. There’s so much I want to do. I can hang in.”
She paused for a moment, looked down, and added, “I got it.”
Wall Street Journal: Dr. Laura & The N Word Controversy!
Dr. Laura Schlessinger and the N-Word’s Long, Painful Trek Through History
By Jabari Asim
- Getty
- Dr. Laura Schlessinger, whose recent use of the n-word on her radio show caused controversy.
When Jamestown colonist John Rolfe wrote in his diary about the arrival of the colony’s first African captives in 1619, he could not possibly have known he would become a link in a chain of controversy that extends right up to the present. Indeed, the roots of the media’s current fascination with broadcaster Dr. Laura Schlessinger can be traced at least far as back as Rolfe’s memorable observation.
“Twenty negars,” Rolfe wrote, had disembarked from a Dutch man-of-war. Some contend that Rolfe’s early variant of the n-word was merely a neutral term derived from “niger,” the Latin word for “black.” Rolfe’s intentions aside, the word had already acquired a dubious taint by the 17th century. In Reginald Scot’s “Discoverie of Witchcraft” (1584), the author describes an “ouglie divell” with “fanges like a dog, a skin like a Niger, and a voice roring [cq] like a lion.”
By the 18th century, the n-word was widely regarded as an insult by those whom it was used to describe. Speaking for his fellow blacks, the British memoirist Ignatius Sancho wrote in 1766, “I am one of those whom the vulgar and illiberal call ‘Negurs’.” By the 19th century, the n-word’s pejorative status was firmly established. Writing in 1837, black activist Hosea Easton condemned it as “an opprobrious term, employed to impose contempt upon [blacks] as an inferior race.” Easton and other blacks’ discomfort with the epithet in any form—nigger, niger, negur, negar—stands in stark contrast to their acceptance of “Negro,” another term for black Africans that had been part of the English vocabulary as far back as 1555. In their view, “Negro” and “nigger” were far from interchangeable.
While Easton and others opposed the n-word, other blacks of the antebellum period uttered it in field hollers, songs and conversations in the slave quarters. It bears noting, however, that slaves’ vocabularies were as captive as their bodies. Their use of the term is less an indication of their acceptance of it (and the black inferiority it suggests) than a reflection of their attempts to express themselves within harshly restricted circumstances imposed from without.
Almost 400 years after John Rolfe put pen to paper, the n-word remains at the center of a tumultuous debate. Popular among young blacks and some African-American entertainers, the n-word is perhaps even more ubiquitous now than it was at the turn of the 20th century, when it appeared regularly in popular tunes, toys and games and household products such as stove polish and tobacco. The lamentable idea of some modern blacks “claiming” the word provides the backdrop for embarrassing slips of the tongue by such disparate public figures as Dog the Bounty Hunter, Michael Richards, Jesse Jackson Sr. and, most recently, Laura Schlessinger. Their stumbles—and the dust-ups that follow—suggest that the n-word’s long, painful trek through American history will continue, with no end in sight.
Jabari Asim is the editor-in-chief of the NAACP’s The Crisis magazine and the author of The N Word: Who Can Say It, Who Shouldn’t and Why.
LA Times Article: Violence Against Gays & Lesbians Increasing In Northern Ireland!
Attacks on gays in Northern Ireland city increase
Surveys show increasing awareness and disapproval of discrimination against gays and lesbians. But with religious identity and sectarianism still dominant forces, anti-gay rhetoric is not uncommon.
As he left his buddy outside a bar and crossed the street to go home, three youths who’d seen the men embrace accosted Garnon and showered him with verbal abuse. The taunts turned physical when one of the assailants began throwing punches.
Authorities chalked up the beating, which happened in June, as one more in a disturbing rise in anti-gay violence here in Northern Ireland’s second-largest city. Since the beginning of the year, homosexuals have fallen victim to at least 20 attacks in and around Londonderry (also known as Derry), compared with nine such incidents in all of 2009.
Extreme feelings and outbursts of violence are no strangers to Northern Ireland, of course. The “Troubles” that plagued the region for decades before a peace accord was finally reached, brought the deaths of more than 3,500 people caught in a war of attrition that pitted Roman Catholics against Protestants and Irish nationalists against those loyal to the British crown.
The same sort of tribal mentality may now be animating attacks not just on gays and lesbians but also on ethnic minorities, such as the dozens of Roma, or Gypsies, who were driven from their homes last year in a paroxysm of racial hatred by a gang of Belfast youths.
“If you’re prepared to tolerate attacks on a Protestant or a Catholic, it’s easy to move on to justifying an attack on a black family or a gay person because you don’t like them,” said Neil Jarman, the director of the Institute for Conflict Research in Belfast. “The whole business of legitimizing crimes of prejudice becomes easy if you’ve got a culture of … segregation.”
Public surveys have shown an increasing awareness and disapproval of discrimination against gays and lesbians. But the same studies show that about half of Northern Ireland’s residents believe sex between two people of the same gender to be wrong and only a quarter are in favor of civil partnerships.
In a society where religious identity and sectarianism remain dominant forces, anti-gay rhetoric is not uncommon. Iris Robinson, the wife of the leader of the province’s power-sharing government and a former lawmaker in her own right, denounced homosexuality as an abomination. (She later resigned from the Northern Ireland Assembly when she was caught having an affair with a 19-year-old and secretly raising money for him to open a coffee shop.)
Still, the situation for Northern Irish gays and lesbians, particularly in the larger cities, has improved markedly over the years.
Bars, clubs, restaurants and hotels now cater to a more active gay scene. Belfast alone boasts at least eight bars or clubs that welcome a gay clientele.
In part, increased visibility probably has made homosexuals a bigger target. That, combined with better incident reports by police and a greater willingness by victims to step forward, may help explain a steep rise in homophobic abuse and crimes that peaked around 2005. The number dropped the following year, but has been climbing again.
Here in Londonderry, several gay residents said in interviews that being open about their sexual orientation was far easier now; their lives are no longer consigned to the shadows.
But the recent increase in anti-gay violence is evidence that their ideal of an equal society has yet to be achieved. When choosing a route for Saturday’s parade, organizers decided, somewhat controversially, to retrace the route of a 1968 civil rights march in Londonderry that many cite as the starting point of the Troubles, after British-backed police charged the crowd with their batons.
“It’s great that it’s a celebration and it’s great that there’s a Mardi Gras atmosphere, but at the core of it, it’s about rights,” said Sharon Meenan, one of the parade’s organizers. “While times have moved on and it’s great, we’re not quite there yet.”
Police have yet to determine an explanation for the surge.
“They’re trying to discern if there’s any major pattern to it,” said David McCartney, who heads the local office of the Rainbow Project, a drop-in center for gays and lesbians. “It’s a cause of major concern for us, because so much progress has been made. We’ve changed so many attitudes.”
Indeed, the attacks come as activists prepare to celebrate a landmark Saturday: the city’s first gay pride parade, with a hoped-for attendance in the hundreds. By contrast, Belfast, the provincial capital, has hosted an annual gay pride parade for two decades; this year’s procession at the end of July drew about 10,000 spectators and several thousand participants.
The spate of gay bashings here in Londonderry and the effusive celebration in Belfast encapsulate the ambivalent attitudes toward homosexuality that persist in Northern Ireland.
The first same-sex couple to tie the knot in a legally recognized civil union in Britain were lesbians in Belfast, in late 2005. Yet not long ago, in a semi-rural neighborhood outside Londonderry, thugs terrorized a gay male couple by killing their pet cats and spray-painting a warning on their door: “You gay bastards are dead.”
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