Ciara Just Pissed Off a Lot of Single Women With a Video She Shared on Twitter
A decade after singing about being an independent woman who refuses to let men dictate her life in songs like "Goodies" and "That's Right," Ciara is under fire for reposting a video on Twitter in which a pastor seemingly reduces women to nothing but wives and girlfriends—as if a woman's worth can only be derived from the men in her life. In the video, which Ciara posted on Twitter on Saturday night, Pastor John Gray, who has his own show on the Oprah Winfrey Network and has posted openly homophobic statements on Twitter in the past, encourages women who are looking for a relationship to carry themselves like wives. "A wife is not the presence of a ring, but it is the presence of your character. Too many women wanna be married, but you're walking in the spirit of 'girlfriend,'" he says, adding, "When you carry yourself like a wife, a husband will find you." Ciara captioned the video, "#LevelUp."
The Twittersphere was largely unimpressed with the fact that Ciara, who called off her engagement to rapper Future (the father of her three-year-old son Future Zahir Wilburn) in 2014 and married NFL star Russell Wilson in 2016, had endorsed the video. While some took a more lighthearted approach to criticizing the sexist video—"This Ciara business is another reminder that Rihanna is always right," one person tweeted—others took the post much more seriously. "Ciara is doing what many women do when they overcome trials and get married. She's using her marital status as a weapon against women who are not married. And it's clear that she's tied her value and sense of self-worth to her marriage, otherwise she wouldn't have shared that," writer CiCi Adams tweeted. "Ciara telling women to 'Level up' and live 'like a wife' so they can b married is astounding to me. Didn't you need grace, mercy & compassion when you were being dragged up and down the Internet for the Future situation? How quickly ppl forget when they reach a perch of privilege."
Others, however, were supportive of Ciara's decision to repost Gray's sexist message, although many of those supporters appeared to be men expecting women to cater to them and conform to their ideals. "We love a Queen who knows herself worth and has no problem admitting she had to grow to get there! #LevelUp" one Twitter user wrote.
On Sunday Ciara attempted to clarify her endorsement of the video with a message about self-love and self-respect. "I was once that girl wanting to be loved a certain way but was making the wrong choices. I found myself at my lowest moment. I was a single mom sitting at home, and I then realized that the perfect love I was looking for was how God loves me, how He wants me to be loved, and who He was calling me to be as a mom and as a woman. That's when I realized married or not married... I needed to love myself. #LevelUp."
Related: A New Study Shows Advertisements Are So Sexist, Men Get 7 Times as Many Speaking Roles as Women
