She was the queen, she really was.
However, I have been sickened by descriptions of her life. The impregnating if a twelve year old described as ‘fell pregnant’. The Daily Mail and Mirror talking about this as her ‘wild love life’, insatiable’ and being pregnant at 12 as ‘sexually precicious’. She had ‘an affair’ with Sam Cooke when she was 12 and he was 23.
Not once is the exposure to her father’s drug fuelled orgies raised as a safeguarding issue or seems to raise the question of sexual abuse in tne minds if these ‘journalists’ who write that she was 12, TWELVE, and go on to use this language.
Shocking, shocking.
I believe that as well as the feminist issue here, there is a racist context: those insatiable young black women.
Amidst listening to so many Aretha anthems in the various broadcast media last week, this commentary brought fury and bitterness.
Have some fucking R E S P E C T, newspapers!