Megan Thee Stallion's right to emotional labor
Why do we deny emotional labor the most to the people we rely on for it the most?
I have a distinct memory from the early pandemic days.
It was June 2020, and we were sitting on our second-floor balcony in Detroit playing Scrabble. Kids were riding their bicycles up and down the street squealing with delight and neighbors were barbecuing next to front yard signs proudly announcing the news of recent (remote) high school graduations. We had all settled into a strange, new routine, jarred by disease tragedy, but the air and noise of summer had suddenly, miraculously still managed to deliver a massive dose of joy.
The soundtrack to this unexpected burst of joy? It was one song, and one song only: Megan Thee Stallion’s brilliant, catchy Savage, which drifted up to our balcony and through our windows daily.
The song in question had been released that March and gone viral on TikTok after Keke Wilson, a teenager in Ohio, had invented a choreography to go with it, and its sound and her moves had then inspired millions to post their own video versions.
The #SavageChallenge, a perfect fit for the stay-at-home quarantine most of us were in at the time, was taken up by celebrities like Jennifer Lopez, Kerry Washington and Justin Bieber and many an awkward non-celebrity in between.
According to the Shorty Awards, a social media-focused award show, it received 7.5 billion (billion!) plays on TikTok that month of March 2020 alone, and remains one of the most used songs on TikTok to date.
Over the following months, Megan Thee Stallion went from being a celebrated hip-hop artist to an undeniable icon. Not just a talented rapper, she was a whole, defiant, inspiring mood for our time.
What does this have to do with emotional labor?
This cultural icon who got us laughing and moving through lockdowns, who connected us through music and energy, and lifted hearts across the globe – has become an unwitting emblem of the shameful hypocrisy, cruelty and unfairness that so often lies at the heart of emotional labor exchanges.
Namely: the people we expect – and even rely on – to bring us happiness are often the very ones we will turn around and neglect the most.
Her story in the public eye over the last couple of years is a story about who we as a society decide should be cared for, who deserves to be protected, and who we will thoughtlessly disregard and send off to emotionally fend for themselves.
A few weeks after that memory I have of children on bicycles and the delicious fumes of meat meeting grill, Megan Thee Stallion, whose non-artist name is Megan Pete, attended a pool party in Los Angeles at Kylie Jenner’s house.
People have poured into the details and specifics of that day, but for the sake of brevity, I will keep to the main events, the facts that were presented in court and agreed on by a jury.
Megan left the party with two people who she then considered friends. One, Kelsey Nicole Harris who had worked as her assistant, and a second, Canadian rapper Tory Lanez, whose non-artist name is Daystar Peterson.
After leaving the party in a car with a driver, the friends got into a fight. They stopped the car in the hills of Hollywood, and Megan got out. Tory Lanez followed, pulled a gun on her and shot her in both feet. Before bullets reached her flesh, Megan Thee Stallion chillingly recalls Lanez shouting at her “Dance, bitch!”.
When police arrived on the scene, a petrified Megan did not immediately reveal to them that she had been shot. That was the summer of mass protests decrying police violence against Black people after the killing of George Floyd. Her car companions and she were all Black, and moments after she had thought she was about to die, she had been afraid to escalate the incident any further.
Her gunshot wounds were confirmed in hospital where she spent four days, and she soon after reported the incident. Two-and-a-half years later, on December 23, 2022, Tory Lanez, real name Daystar Peterson, was found guilty on three counts, including assault with a semi-automatic handgun.
The events of that day were traumatic enough for her, but instead of feeling rallied around and overwhelmed by comfort and healing after the incident, the artist faced an added degree of trauma many victims of gendered abuse know well. As a celebrity who was not just a woman, but Black, commentary reached fever pitch.
She was called a liar, she was mocked, she was belittled, she was cyberbullied, she was dragged. People wrote they empathized with Tory Lanez, and they too would have shot her. Meanwhile, in the runup to his trial, Tory Lanez and his music received support from beloved male cultural figures like LeBron James and Canadian rapper Drake, who referred to the incident in a song and described Megan as lying.
How could someone who had given so much happiness to the masses not then be adequately and unequivocally protected when her own well-being was so harmfully attacked in return?
In an article in Rolling Stone last year, she is quoted as being bewildered at people casting her as a villain in an incident that involved her being victimized, but she also seems acutely aware of the ways in which racist beliefs denied her mass empathy. People projected strength onto her, she reflected.
Projecting strength onto a woman, especially a Black woman, is rarely simply a compliment recognizing self-sufficiency. It can often be a ruse to deny giving someone any help, to justify indifference toward them and their lived experience, to cast them as more masculine and unworthy of the genteel protection white women are given under benevolent sexist rules.
Strength is a stereotype pushed onto Black women specifically to justify extractive, unidirectional emotional labor. All of it from them but none of it back to them.
And it’s not that Megan Thee Stallion doesn’t perceive herself as strong, she just thinks she should still be treated with care and thoughtfulness. She thinks she should also get to receive emotional labor even as she gives it. In that same Rolling Stone piece, she is quoted as saying:
“It’s a gift that I’m so strong, but I feel like it’s also a curse because it makes things get kind of lonely sometimes. Everybody’s kind of like, ‘Well, you good. You got it. I ain’t messing with you.’ So I feel like it makes people treat me not as delicate as I would like them to.”
Happy new year to all, but especially to Megan Thee Stallion, who is indeed the baddest and who therefore, especially, deserves our collective love and protection.