So, as the Twitterverse (and most of the world and web) knows Blake Shelton made a mistake in using Twitter to be funny without thinking through what his tweet might mean to various people.
In his post, he said, “Re-writing my fav Shania Twain song.. Any man that tries Touching my behind He’s gonna be a beaten, bleedin’, heaving kind of guy…” My good friend Mark at The Critical Condition started a great conversation about this tweet. In his article he explains that the outcome of this tweet, and the waterfall of follow-up posts by Mr. Shelton (trying to dig his way out of the muck he created) has become almost cliche. He says, “This is a predictable cycle: Celebrity writes something foolish in an online forum. People get mad. Celebrity reacts defensively, blames the people who are upset for being too sensitive, and says if we only knew him or her, then we’d understand how silly we were. Then someone powerful gets to celebrity, which results in a more specific apology.”
I agree. Thanks to the internet there is no such thing as “in the moment” anymore and what you say will live on forever. Hell, even the Library of Congress is collecting your tweets as a historical archive of the human experience… at least since March of 2006. Why is this significant? Because in the past you, or a celebrity, could say something off hand and it would eventually vanish into the ether, remembered by only a few people. Now your comments are open to the entire human population (or at least the 28.7% who are online) and they will never go away.
This means that Mr. Shelton’s tweet, whether intended to be homophobic or sadistic (apparently he intended the re-written lyrics to be from a woman’s perspective), will snowball until people are just tired of paying attention to it. But for the time being he has a sizable population of LGBT people and supporters up in arms.
I commented on The Critical Condition that, while I agree that his comments appear homophobic in nature – and I detest the notion that someone cannot accept and appreciate the diversity of life – the real problem is that he was being horribly inappropriate regardless of who the target would be. Does it matter that he is a straight man re-writing lyrics to suggest that beating another man for making advances on him is ok? Does it matter that he intended the re-writes to be sung from a female perspective so that it was a woman beating a man for making advances? Is one worse than the other? I do believe in the appropriate use of hate crime laws to protect communities from abuse. But in this case he’s just being, well, in my opinion, an jerk.
Did he apologize? Yeah, sort of. Did he mean it? Who knows? It is as vague as his intentions were in the original tweet.
Should he re-apologize, more sincerely, and acknowledge that what he said was offensive? I think so. I’m sure I’ve said things that have been offensive to others and will absolutely apologize when told that I’ve upset someone. But I also try my damnedest to make sure I’ve thought through my words before I lay them out on paper or online. Hell, it took forever to put this post together.
Tommy Karr 