Last week, while I was unable to even see straight because of personal stressonomics, I tried to point out on the internerd that while it is obviously very disturbing that all those girls were posting stuff about how Chris Brown can “hit me anytime” (do they know they sound like retired, cigarette-wheezy hairdressers laying out in Boca Raton when they talk like that?), it is equally obvious that girls are interested in men who hurt them. ??!! It is the guy-with-a-motorcycle writ large, the need for dramatics writ even larger. It’s partly about needing to get hit to get off; it’s partly about something so much bigger than sex. (ha, “Bigger than sex!” Impossible!) I know very few women who have not been in an abusive relationship, at some point, if not physical than emotional, which, DOY, is just as bad.

Is that such an impossibility to understand, normals? To my tweet, one girl said “I’ll bite” and asked what I meant; a smart friend played dumb; some jag told me he’d hit me whenever I wanted him to. (Which, as I tweeted to him then, is why we Can’t Talk About Things.) I mean… IS IT? Is it so hard? It can’t be that I, in this harsh fog of distraction and waiting around for the Diet Cokes I had delivered to arrive (really), was the one who was pointing this out? There is obviously some element of those girls being provocative for the sake of it. Buuuuut. Being all shocked by their sexual gnarlsism is demonstrative of the worst kind of possibly willed naivete.

ALSO, look. Chris Brown is a monstery monster who should be in jail, and it’s appalling that our culture is the kind of culture that is cool with him. BUT, do you know how many other people who performed at, organized and attended the Grammys are also monsters? Probs not. Of course not. Do you know how many other musicians, actors, writers, newscasters, teachers, are monsters? Hunter S. Thompson was a horrifically abusive motherfucker and I call him “my favorite.” Salinger was a dick. Hemingway was maybe the worst. Powerful, charismatic, talented people, the people we love, are often monsters. How is it that Monster Chris Brown is somehow an outlier in his monsteryness?

Like, consider that I have 342 Facebook friends. If half are men, and one in four women are sexually assaulted by age whatever, it’s more than fair to say that a portion of those men have done violence to a woman. My sample is obviously way skewed toward men who are gay, or straight and cool, kind, feminist and lovely… but, everybody knows their date before they’re a date rapist. I knew mine. He was hot, rich, smart.

Anywaysies, to me, the Chris Brown stuff (and all of this is excluding the fact that one Rihanna has just released two collabos with her abuser, a.k.a. come the fuck on) has been deeply, darkly frustrating about what people seem to think is… normal. I know that being a journalist who primarily writes about other people’s feelings and secrets and desires skews my sample toward the weird, too, but, really. Chris Brown is by no measure uniquely monstery. Chris Brown just got caught.