Rude Girl: The Rise and Rise of Rihanna

There was a time when you couldn't be a celebrity because of your breasts. Actually, in those days, it wasn't called 'being a celebrity' - if you were talented enough to be famous, you were a star.

There was a time when you couldn't be a celebrity because of your breasts. Actually, in those days, it wasn't called 'being a celebrity' - if you were talented enough to be famous, you were a star. I'm not saying that Marilyn Monroe's breasts weren't extremely helpful on her road to success; I'm just saying there was a lot more to it than that. Back then, you had to have the whole package, and that included grace, style and upholding societal ideals in public.

These days, there's no such thing as 'behind closed doors', so if the modern equivalent to Marilyn Monroe was about to overdose on sleeping pills, she'd tweet about it first. Boobs are now the thing you're most likely to be famous for, closely followed by leaking a well-edited sex tape with a Z-list rapper. After that, reasons for fame become even more dubious; being an American teenager with the complexion of a heroin addict worked for Cory Kennedy, whereas if Conan O'Brien follows you on Twitter the number of others following you could grow by... ooh... about 90,000.

There are still a couple of people who genuinely seem to have star quality these days; Beyoncé, for example, is the whole package. Beautiful, obscenely talented at just about everything she turns her hand to, and as humble as they come. Then there are people who take fame to new, dizzying levels, and who I sometimes see and think... what's happening to the world? Who taught you about decorum? Why isn't finishing school a public-eye pre-requisite any more?

I'm talking about Rihanna, of course. Now, I am all about Rihanna. Every single song she ever releases worms its way into my subconscious and stays there forever, or at least until she brings out another one. What's My Name was my song of 2010. And 2011. And probably 2012 as well.

That being said, she's no Whitney Houston (so please, God, don't let them pick her as the lead in the biopic). Her vocals are robotic and can be almost grating at times. But still, she sells. Loads. Looks like you don't need the world's greatest voice to sell records. Or consideration for your millions of followers, in the form of taking responsibility for your actions. Or an enormous amount of intelligence.

I don't mean to be rude, but over the past year or so, Rihanna has been behaving less and less like we might expect someone in the public eye to behave. Although I'm all for a bit of rule breaking, there are a few things that someone who millions of six-year-old girls look up to should avoid.

Really? What a fantastic message to send out to your fans, RiRi. Don't forget, not so long ago, this guy bludgeoned you, near strangled you, and you went on to have a restraining order put on him. That was the right reaction. Allowing him back into your life effectively condones physical abuse and is therefore the wrong reaction, particularly when you do so in such a public way. As one Twitter follower so aptly observed, Chris Brown shouldn't be remixing your single - just like he shouldn't have remixed your face. Sort it out.

2.Using the word c*nt on your Twitter feed.

You don't know how much mothers all over the world are hating on you right now. If you're going to pick a swear word to bandy about, make it one that isn't so phonetically perfect. At least then, when they start shouting it in Waitrose, no one knows what they're saying. The same goes for your charming necklace collection.

I am a smoker. I have been since I was 16. One day, I suppose, I'd dearly love to quit, but for now I'm addicted, and I don't hold it against you that you want to light up on holiday. I do hold it against you that what you smoke on holiday is weed, because no matter what anyone says about it being 'healthier than smoking a cigarette' or perhaps 'not even a real drug', it has been linked to depression and, in some cases, psychosis. If you're going to do it, don't do it where you're going to be photographed for all of your impressionable fans to see. I also find it weird that you glamorise it in your videos. The reason why I started smoking is because I thought it was cool. How sad is that? Thanks to you, an entire generation are growing up with exactly the same ideas, and therefore exactly the same capacity for cancer, as me. Well done.

Like I said, I love Rihanna's music. I think there are displays of genuine brilliance in many of her songs, and there is nothing I would rather listen to than Cheers (I'll Drink To That) on a Saturday night. I just yearn for a bygone era, I suppose, when potty mouths and drug abuse were kept very much in the dark, only to be uncovered years later in posthumous unauthorised biographies. No one knows exactly what happened between Rihanna and Chris Brown, or what there is between them now.

What we do know is this: when millions of young girls look to you for guidance, the situation is bigger and more important than what you want. I had thought that if one good thing had come out of the widespread publicising of celebrities' every last bowel movement, it was that issues such as domestic abuse would become less shameful, as sufferers like Rihanna made their stories public. Apparently, though, everything in this social-media-filled, Kardashian-fuelled world we now live in works on a double-edged sword basis, and where Rihanna once taught her fans to publicly identify and fight people that physically hurt them, she now teaches them to brush violence under the carpet in favour of producing sexually explicit, degrading duets with her attacker. And no one is drinking to that.

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