Kehlani and Kyrie and Nick and D’Angelo
by Lena Potts
This week saw two basketball sexual indiscretion scandals emerge: singer Kehlani reportedly cheated on Cleveland’s Kyrie Irving, and Laker D’Angelo Russell videotaped teammate Nick Young possibly talking about cheating on fiancee Iggy Azalea.
Honestly I wasn’t even aware that Kehlani and Kyrie Irving were together until Monday, when Instagram blew up with news of her alleged affair. Kehlani’s ex-boyfriend, PartyNextDoor (actual name, of course), posted a photo of them holding hands with the caption, “After all her shenanigans, still got the r&b singer back in my bed”.
The internet didn’t really ask questions like, “who openly publicizes their cheating?”, or “who the hell is PartyNextDoor:”, etc. People instead decided that she was for sure cheating on recent bae, Señor Handles (Kyrie), and proceeded to turn her into the internet devil.
Instagram was especially harsh on the 20 year old singer. All of Monday night, the “Explore” feed on my Instagram was saturated with Kehlani the slut. The images sought to expose the hypocrisy between her lyrics of loyalty and her actions, held sweeping sympathies for Irving, warned men to watch out for hoes like her. They created ways of degrading the personal value of a celebrity completely unconnected to anyone’s actual life because of situations completely unconnected to their career (in this case, as a singer). Kyrie Irving was the innocent man whose heart was taken down by a tatted Jezebel, in a system that frames cheating by male professional basketball players as the norm, the expectation.
A lot has been said about the viciousness of the internet, so I’ll spare us another rundown. But there is something to be said about the transformative power of Instagram as a medium in spreading information. Instagram, unlike Twitter and Facebook, doesn’t have a great way of spreading links to full articles or outside information. People generally put them in their bios, but that requires someone seeking further info to see a post, be interested enough to click on the poster’s info, and then click on the link in their bio, if there is one. That’s two too many steps in the immediate information age. Instead, people put whatever they can into an image, meme-style. It’s generally a few words to a couple sentences, and this limited text can spread faster than you can say “Damnnnnnnn Daniel”. This is how, Monday night, I knew that Kehlani cheated on Kyrie Irving. I didn’t know anything about the photo that started the rumor, which is far more ambiguous than the info presented in the memes about it.
On Tuesday morning Kehlani posted a photo of herself in a hospital bed, a tube taped to her arm, with a long caption explaining that the spiral of the previous day had made her attempt to take her own life. I woke up to a completely different Instagram.
These posts were everywhere, and they’re funny because they lampoon the fickle sentiment of the internet- she’s the devil for cheating, but an angel when we almost lose her.
As the Tuesday drama of Kehlani’s hospitalization unfolded, the other big basketball scandal of the week blew up.
Despite current media reports, there are Los Angeles Lakers in 2016 who aren’t Kobe Bryant. One of those is D’Angelo Russell, who recorded his teammate Nick Young (currently engaged to Iggy Azalea) talking about hooking up with a young woman he met at a club. Reports differ on whether or not the video was taken and posted on his Snapchat or just kept on his phone. Regardless, the video got out. Uh oh.
The D’Angelo Russell rage is so deep that he was booed by his home crowd multiple times on Wednesday night. Kobe was asked to comment on it, “insiders” are talking about the deep lack of trust between players, he has reportedly been shunned by his teammates, and what seems like half of all internet people who have anything to say about this are upset with Russell’s egregious breach of the holy Bro Code (please learn more about Bros in my new favorite commercial).
D’Angelo Russell has spent the last couple days looking very sad and sounding very sorry, probably because all of his bros hate him and everything. According to EPSN, “Russell said he feels like he has put Young’s personal life in jeopardy.”
While I don’t support publicly outing people for maybe cheating when it has absolutely nothing to do with you, it also is not at all D’Angelo Russell’s fault if Nick Young’s personal life is in jeopardy. If you cheated and got found out, that’s your fault breh.
Russell has repeatedly made it clear that this was not meant to get out, and it doesn’t seem that anyone really believes he leaked the video- after all, why would he? In a time when secretly Snapchat filter-ing your friends into a dog without their knowledge is a legitimate hobby, none of these events are surprising or interesting. This is all only a situation because Nick Young may have confessed to cheating. In all of this, Russell has taken the fault for disrupting his team, creating distrust in the locker room, etc. Young has yet to make any sort of apology for “disappointing his fans” or other vague things celebrities apologize for in cheating scandals.
Of course, there have been wonderful creative minds who have connected these incidents. The connection? Basketball? No. Alleged cheating? No. It’s that Kehlani and D’Angelo Russell, on trial for cheating and publicly outing a cheater, respectively, are untrustworthy.
Lol wut.
Separately, sure. Cheating is a breach of trust. So is throwing your friend’s business out there. But it seems that, in the Russell/Young situation, Russell is to blame for outing, and Young’s cheating is to be expected given his youth and profession. Meanwhile, Kehlani’s supposed cheating is purely wrong. She victimized Irving, who is a part of the system that condones and ignores Young’s behavior, and her own youth and fame have no currency as excuses.
If you’re a male NBA player, it’s OK to cheat, but it’s not OK to tattletale on someone for it. If you’re a female singer, it is definitely not OK to cheat on your NBA player boyfriend. Confusing rules.
They are, of course, illuminated, when Chris Brown, someone whose opinion no one has asked for since 2009, shares his brilliant thoughts. Brown, in what he labeled an attempt to “ride for my homies”, posted that “There is no attempting suicide”, implying that Kehlani is just out for attention and forgiveness. The clapback was instant, and marked the end of the shifting sympathies; the internet always needs a villain, and why take down Kehlani when Chris Brown makes himself such an easy target? And with this shift, not only were people willing to show Brown to his seat, but there was also an uptick in people calling out the sexist double standard of this entire situation as pure bullshit, memeing and tweeting their way to being heard.
While nothing can be done to fix the damage of an attempted suicide or any number of broken relationships, some of the wrongs here are slowly being made more right. The blatant forms of sexism relevant here are being called out and labelled unacceptable. Hooray! What I haven’t seen called out, however, is something more insidious for its nuance. In a subset of memes and tweets, people are leveraging the type of bias that is so entrenched that it doesn’t look like an “ism”, but rather, it’s disguised as values.
Quite a few images have popped up comparing Kehlani and her misdeeds to the apparent piety of Ayesha Curry (who today landed her own Food Network show). I have nothing against Ayesha Curry (because how can you), but that’s not the point. The point is that they have nothing to do with one another.
The Currys are basketball’s first family. Their entire image is so wonderfully pure and wholesome: high school sweethearts who stay together despite the pressures of his fame; they’re both openly very Christian with adorable, light-eyed but still Black babies.
Ayesha has built herself into a brand tied to, but unique from, her husband’s and has the kind of life America wants from the wife of a famous person (very Jennifer Garner-esqe). She is steeped in domesticity; her job, guest judging cooking shows, maintaining a food blog, etc., dovetails perfectly with her ability to be “at home” with the kids. She’s often photographed with Steph’s mom and sister, with whom she of course gets along perfectly, as well as her daughters, and they form this beautiful halo of lovely women supporting Stephen Curry. She embodies a comfortable status of independently wifely.
These memes are about men being tricked, being turned into “suckas” by, or “settling” for a woman who may cheat, as opposed to snagging the chaste reliability we assume of Ayesha Curry. These are about how mad we are at Kehlani for hurting Kyrie, when the response would have been an overwhelming, “well, what did you expect dating an NBA player”, if the situation flipped. They’re about the perfection of Ayesha Curry, something men should seek in women, even if they’re not expected to behave the same way.
If Ayesha Curry ever cheated on Steph the world would explode. If Steph cheated on Ayesha, we’d be disappointed because he’s supposed to be the shining star, but not in the same way. He will have “succumb” to something- maybe the “nature of the league” or the “pressures of fame”. He will have “slipped up”. Ayesha, if she ever cheats, will be single-handedly responsible for shattering our ideal of true love. Kyrie Irving may never cheat on anyone in his life, and that would be wonderful, but we still, especially in highly gendered, power-pumped systems like American professional athleticism, literally expect infidelity from men. We expect it to the extent that the news in the D’Angelo Russell/Nick Young fiasco is not the potential cheating, it’s why the video was taken and how it got leaked.
Not only does all of this exemplify the ways in which we hold women to unrealistic standards, drastically different to those of men, but it’s also unfair to each of those women individually. For Kehlani, it shows how her image was built to fail anyway. The tattoos, the open sexuality, the cool-girl persona- they could all be used against her as soon as she was even thought to have made a mistake. As for Ayesha Curry, she’s now on a national pedestal, and any misstep by her will feel like an ultimate failure on a grand scale.
This all rests on the concept of loyalty being the woman’s burden. Comparing Kehlani to Ayesha Curry highlights the disparate cultural gender norms we hold toward monogamy, responsibility to others, and behavior management. These women are being held up as opposite ends of a moral conscious we don’t expect men to uphold. Instead, we teach men to chase women who are one way, but not the other, their own behavior be damned.
By the way, it turns out Kehlani didn’t even cheat, but who cares, right?
