Love is all around... as is violent and toxic behaviour

IF you were to look at St Valentine’s Day purely through the lens of social media, you’d think that romance, at least of a sort, was indeed alive and well. Women in particular went on Instagram and Facebook en masse to declare love, amid a sea of roses and romantic verse.

You’d almost be swept away by it all – the wall-to-wall commercialisation of affection. Maybe, just maybe, love is all around. Close your eyes and for a minute, you can imagine a world where women – adorned with flowers, gifts and cupcakes – are respected, honoured, adored. Mothers, daughters, wives and girlfriends – all celebrated in this global ritual of love.

Unfortunately, I didn’t have to stray too far from the sepia-tinted metaverse of Instagram to remember the reality of what many women face, and it’s far from bouquets and saccharine-sweet confessions of love.

Last weekend, Chris Brown (below) played two sold-out concerts in Dublin’s 3Arena. That means that a whopping 26,000 people bought tickets to see him in this country alone. This is the same Chris Brown who, in 2009, beat up his then-girlfriend Rihanna.

On the weekend of the Grammys, Rihanna had discovered that Brown had been cheating on her and the two had an argument in his Lamborghini.

Brown himself explained it thus: ‘Like I remember she tried to kick me, just like her beating s**t, but then I really hit her. With a closed fist, like I punched her, and it busted her lip, and when I saw it I was in shock, I was ‘f***, why did I hit her like that? So from there she’s… spitting blood in my face, it raised me even more. It’s a real fight in the car, and we driving in the street.’

He went on to bite Rihanna too, leaving her with injuries that shocked everyone when pictures of her badly bruised face were released. He received five years’ probation, one year of domestic violence counselling and six months of community service. So did he learn his lesson?

Well, considering that since then he has had various other legal issues, including a five-year restraining order granted to his ex-girlfriend Karrueche Tran after she shared threatening texts and voicemail messages from the singer, as well as a $20million lawsuit accusing him of drugging and raping a woman on a yacht in Florida in December 2020 – not to mention being taken into custody in Paris when he was accused of aggravated rape with two other men in 2019 – it doesn’t seem so.

Yet hundreds of thousands of people are paying to go see him on his current European tour – including those in Dublin this week.

Even more disturbingly, many of them are women.

It seems that despite the #MeToo movement and all the hopes we had of a safer future for our daughters, toxic misogyny continues to be deeply ingrained in our lives.

Indeed, a depressing and timely insight into young relationships was given this week, juxtaposed with the roses and romance on Valentine’s Day.

A relationship quiz at toointoyou.ie, a Women’s Aid website set up to help young people determine if their relationship is healthy or abusive, revealed some shocking statistics.

DATA from the quiz, which has been taken almost 20,000 times since its launch in November 2022, shows that 93% of respondents, who are aged 1825, said their partner has threatened to post explicit or intimate images or videos when they have a fight, while 83% said their partner has already hit them once and they’re afraid they will do it again. This is a snapshot of young love today, and misogynist abuse is not just the preserve of teens and women in their 20s. Last weekend, Niamh Farrell, lead singer of Dublin indie group Ham Sandwich, revealed she was on a Dublin Bus when a group of teenagers ‘spat’ on her. Posting on Twitter, she said: ‘Fed up of feeling scared of gangs of 12-year-old children tbh [to be honest].’

I can completely relate. At almost 44, I’m still afraid to walk alone in the dark, and continue to feel intimidated by groups of males, just because I am a woman.

This week also marked the tenth anniversary of the death of Reeva Steenkamp, who was murdered by her boyfriend Oscar Pistorius on St Valentine’s Day 2013.

Reeva paid the ultimate price of toxic masculinity, of which there are many shades. Speaking to the press, her parents said that, a decade on, the pain is exactly the same.

Unfortunately for women the world over, so is the fear.