celebrity

In defence of Jordyn Woods, the most hated woman in the world right now.

 

It’s rarely a good thing when your name is the single most Googled thing in the world.

And Jordyn Woods is no exception.

Woods is the best friend and roommate of reality television star and billionaire, 21-year-old Kylie Jenner.

For years she’s sat on the periphery, appearing in the odd episode of Keeping Up With The Kardashians and Life of Kylie. Her role, however, never exceeded Supporting Actress.

Then, 10 days ago, the whispers began.

It was rumoured the 21-year-old model had been spotted kissing Canadian professional basketball player Tristan Thompson, the partner of Khloe Kardashian, and father to their 10-month-old daughter, True.

Before long, TMZ and Hollywood Unlocked confirmed it, both claiming to have spoken to witnesses.

“Can’t believe Karl Lagerfeld and Jordyn Woods died on the same day,” read the viral Tweet, with the hashtag #JordynWoodsIsOverParty trending all over the world.

The memes were, in fairness, very funny, and many were harmless.

But hundreds of thousands of people typed out angry messages on Twitter and Instagram, sharing the kind of abuse that doesn’t bear repeating here.

With that the pile-on mounted on defenceless Woods. Characterised as ‘The Other Woman’, she was ruthlessly slut-shamed by gossip sites everywhere.

TMZ claimed that Woods, who rarely drinks alcohol, was “blackout drunk” the night the incident occurred, and she had to be told of what happened the following morning.

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“She doesn’t even remember how she got to the party or anything that happened there,” an ‘insider’ told the publication.

Let’s put the journalistic integrity of tabloids to the side for a moment, and assume that Woods was indeed ‘blackout drunk’.

No man or woman should wake up the next morning and learn they had a sexual experience with someone – with no memory of the encounter.

Of course, behaviour is complicated, and if Thompson was equally, or potentially even more intoxicated than Woods, then the lines of consent become even more blurred.

But to put it into perspective, the most hated person in the world right now is a 21-year-old woman who (reportedly) kissed someone she shouldn’t have.

And now, there’s a possibility she was not in any sort of state to make a decision in the first place.

There is, of course, the big, gaping hole, sitting right in the middle of this entire saga.

Tristan Thompson.

There were no Twitter hashtags declaring him ‘over’. No memes where he became a cultural punchline. His name wasn’t trending nearly as much as Jordyn Woods’ was.

If Woods did something ‘bad’, then Thompson did something worse.

But he managed to get away with it.

This week Lena Dunham asked a question worth keeping in mind: “Can you imagine if who you’d made out with when you were 21 had massive public shaming consequences?”

Perhaps another question to ask is: Does the punishment truly the fit the ‘crime’?

No woman should be destroyed for a single sexual choice she made at 21 years old.