As the Internet exploded trying to find the “Becky with the good hair,” I did my Brooklyn-bred part to raise awareness. “Becky,” I told people, was not the girl’s name with whom Jay-Z purportedly cheated, but in fact slang. It originally meant any basic white girl, and its pop culture origin may have been in Sir Mix-a-Lot’s “Baby Got Back” when a white-sounding girl says “oh my God, Becky, look at her butt” in the song’s opening. As I know from my close watching of the show “Love and Hip Hop” on VH1, “Becky” is now any girl you don’t like, no matter her race.
The language is important because it gets to what Beyoncé is doing with the lyric. She’s cutting down another woman. She’s not calling, say, Rachel Roy, by her name. She’s calling her “a Becky,” a nobody, some girl that her husband deigned to cheat with. As we know from the end of the Lemonade video, Beyoncé and Jay-Z are going to be okay. But that Becky, she’s going to have the Beyhive (Beyoncé’s online fanbase) sicced on her. It might be more than one Becky, even, trying to steal Bey’s man, and they’re all going to get it.
It’s not unusual, of course, for a woman to reconcile with a cheating man and put all the blame for the affair on the other woman. But it certainly isn’t “feminist” — the word Beyoncé had lit up on stage behind her during her set at the MTV Video Music Awards in 2014.
In fact, it’s the furthest thing imaginable from “empowering to women” to let the man who made vows to you off the hook while attacking the woman who didn’t. And, given Beyoncé’s “I’m not bossy, I’m the boss” self-portrayal, it’s unfortunate that she went the route of attacking other women, when her actual gripe is with her husband.
It’s not the first time Beyoncé has openly addressed cheating (ostensibly by Jay-Z) in her music. On her album B’Day, the song “Ring the alarm” is an eyes-open take on what Beyoncé would lose along with her man to another woman. “She’ll be rocking chinchilla coats if I let you go, at the house on the coast if I let you go, she gonna take everything I own if I let you go, can’t let you go.” In “Irreplaceable,” on the same album, she tells her man to “call up that chick and see if she’s home. Oops I bet you thought that I didn’t know, what did you think I was putting you out for?”
In “If I Were a Boy,” on the album I am…Sasha Fierce, Beyoncé imagines a woman behaving the way a man would: turning off her phone so everyone thinks she’s single, not showing love to the woman in his life. But would a man address his rival in a song so that his supporters could attack him? Why did Beyoncé? If Beyoncé cheated on Jay-Z, would he rile his fans up to go find the other guy and leave nasty comments on his Instagram? Unlikely. Rachel Roy took to twitter to say she respects “love, families, marriage and strength” and noting that bullying shouldn’t be tolerated. It’s interesting that she includes strength. Is that a dig at Beyoncé for being weak and taking Jay-Z back?
In the aftermath of Lemonade’s release, there has been a lot of talk about how it’s “strong” to stay with a man who has cheated. It’s not strong when the woman forgives the man but continues to rage at the other woman.
And, frankly, it’s not strong to stay with a man that did that to you even if you get a great album out of it. “Well, they have children together,” people say when looking to excuse why she might take him back. That’s right, they have a child together so you’d think Jay-Z would be more circumspect about taking chances with their relationship.
It’s hard not to judge women who proclaim their strength so often and so proudly yet stay with men like this. She’s not some girl, Beyoncé reminds him on the song “Don’t Hurt Yourself,” which includes the lyric: “You ain’t married to no average bitch, boy.”
And, if she had left and never looked back, it would be clear she isn’t. She didn’t do that, so now she makes lemonade from the lemons that are her marriage. It should leave a sour taste in any real feminist’s mouth.
