Can we just stop? The woman is confident in her body and owns it, she cropped her daughter out of a selfie, and she has had lenses surrounding her since she was a teenager; in what way does that make her to blame, at all, for being robbed at gunpoint? In the days since Kim Kardashian-West was robbed at gunpoint in her Paris apartment during Paris Fashion Week, she has once again resumed her role as a hot source for gossip and speculation around the world. I read a few of the articles about her in the aftermath of the ordeal. In most of them, these publications commented on her celebrity on her hit television show, Keeping Up With The Kardashians. She was lauded as a media personality and fashion icon, as well as being recalled as the wife of rapper, Kanye West. But it wasn’t just these articles that bothered me. On my college campus, I heard a group of young women discussing the robbery while waiting to order my lunch one day last week. I heard one individual remark, “Well, when you put your life out there, you can't be surprised when something like this happens.” Another member of the group quipped back with, “If it even happened, you know she likes attention. I bet it was staged.” What followed was murmurs in agreement and after a few moments passed, I heard another student chime in with the remark that inspired this article: “This is karma for what she did to Taylor Swift.”
In what world is it acceptable to equate a traumatizing, and violent armed robbery to anything other than a crime that deserves punishment? Though we do not, and probably never will, know the full details of what occurred in Kim’s hotel room, we do know that a crime was committed where she was held at gunpoint and millions of dollars worth of her personal property was stolen. She is the victim and survivor of an attack, so why is she being treated like the criminal in this situation? Enough with the protestations of, ‘she brought it on herself for being on TV and being a celebrity.’ Tom Brady will soon be back on television every Sunday throwing a football, but I guarantee you that if he was robbed at gunpoint of his Super Bowl rings, we would not be having this same conversation. We wouldn’t have articles blaming him for taking one too many pictures on his recent vacation with his family; we wouldn’t overhear conversations about how he was asking for it; and nobody would say that he loves attention so he probably doesn’t care.
The reason that you don’t immediately feel every sympathy for Kim Kardashian-West and her situation is because she is a woman who is seen as vapid, selfish, shallow, she is unapologetic about her sexuality and that bothers some people. The patriarchy is alive and well, my friends; and Kim Kardashian-West is yet another person to be at the receiving end of its sexism. Bad people did a bad thing to her; they committed a crime, she did not. The same way that a survivor of sexual assault is never ‘asking for it’, Kim Kardashian-West was not ‘asking for it’. So before you throw the woman under the metaphorical bus, think of how you would feel if your mother, aunt, sister, or daughter was robbed at gunpoint in their home. Would you immediately say that they shouldn’t have posted that last selfie in their bedroom? Would you say that it’s not a big deal because they can have enough money to replace the items that were stolen? If they don’t deserve to be treated that way, then why does Kim Kardashian-West? Just some food for thought.
