Celebrities, they’re just like us! In that women celebrities are reduced to sexual objects that exist for any man’s enjoyment. Ariana Grande is adding her voice to the fight against street harassment after a stranger made a lewd comment to her and her boyfriend, Mac Miller. According to the singer, a fan approached their car to tell Miller he’s a fan. After praising Miller’s work, he said, “Ariana is sexy as hell man, I see you, I see you hitting that!”
https://twitter.com/ArianaGrande/status/813957803136208897
Grande wrote about how she felt simultaneously objectified and invisible, and how incidents like this “contribute to women’s sense of fear and inadequacy.” “I am not a piece of meat that a man gets to utilize for his pleasure,” she said and encouraged women to speak out about these experiences because otherwise, “they live inside of us as shame.”
Many women probably have an equivalent story to Grande’s. If a woman is alone, men often don’t take no for an answer unless they’re told she “has a boyfriend,” aka already claimed by a man (though even that doesn’t work sometimes). If she is with a man, she is stripped of her agency and reduced to a symbol of what that man has attained. No matter the situation, men always seem to let it be known that, in their eyes, women exist only for men.
There are those who will argue that this fan was just trying to give Miller, and possibly Grande, a compliment. Maybe he thought he was. Though it never occurred to him that since he’s a fan of Miller’s, he might compliment Grande on “hitting that,” or just leave their relationship out of his praise.
