What’s the infuriating entertainment news of the week, you ask? Well, Drake went against Halle Berry’s expressed wishes and used a picture of her covered in green slime to promote his new single, and jerks on the internet are mad that Berry thinks that was disrespectful. Now you’re caught up. But there are more sinister forces behind these randoms being rude to an Academy Award-winning actress they’ve never met in order to defend a rich misogynist they’ve also never met.
On Friday, Drake did one of his surprise music drops and released his new single, “Slime You Out,” ft. SZA, and posted about the drop along with the picture in question. The lyrics are not very nice, let’s just say. Drake sings, “I don’t know what’s wrong with you girls / I feel like y’all don’t need love, / you need somebody who could micromanage you,” and other generally un-supportive things about how girls and women are so dumb he’s going to slime them all out after getting with them.
To slime someone out generally means to do someone dirty and get rid of them. According to Time Magazine’s take on the lyrics, in Drake’s new single, it means explicitly to use someone for sex and then drop them. Let your imagination run wild about the connotation of the word “slime” in this context. Drake’s team posted the new song along with a photo from the 2012 Kids Choice Awards featuring Halle Berry covered in that signature Nickelodeon-style green slime.
Berry hit back with a text post on Instagram, saying, “Sometimes you have to be the bigger guy … even if you’re a woman!” She wrote in the comments regarding Drake’s use of the photo, saying he “Didn’t get my permission. That’s not cool I thought better of him…When people you admire disappoint you, you have to be the bigger person and move on!”
Then the assholes started to come for her. People in her comments insulted and attacked her for voicing her upset feelings regarding a very basic boundary. Pretty much right away things devolved into an active demonstration of the pernicious “angry black woman” stereotype, casting an extremely reasonable criticism, issued on her own Instagram, as some sort of aggressive overreaction.
One commenter pointed out that the image likely belonged to Getty Images, and Drake’s production team probably bought the rights to use the photo and didn’t need to get the actresses’s permission. Then it came out that Drake had checked in with Berry to ask for her permission, and she had specifically said no. And he used the picture anyway.
“Why ask if you intended to do what you want to do?” Berry wrote. “That was the f—you to me. Not cool. You get it?” This is not about the legal right to use an image. It’s about basic respect, and the fact that some people think the public can essentially own a celebrity just because they have agreed to perform and appear in public. This gets even messier when we add in the implications of AI and studio contracts aiming to own artists’ very appearances.
“[Drake] did have his people call my people and I said NO,” Berry wrote in her Instagram comments. “I didn’t like that image of slime all over my face in association with the song. And he chose to do it anyway! You see…that is the disrespect.”
Let’s take stock. Drake writes a song about how women are dumb and he wants to “slime” them, which can be seen as a grossly disrespectful sexual innuendo. He asks Halle Berry if he can use an old photo of her face covered in slime (yikes). She says no, and he does it anyway. Does the story stop here? No! Awful people get on the internet and start saying that Berry is overreacting and that she—an Academy Award-winning actress—should be grateful Drake is giving her free “clout.” Barf.
That disgusting rhetoric suggesting that a woman, specifically a Black woman in America, should be grateful to be the unpaid subject of a grossly sexualized photo chosen by a man she seemingly doesn’t even know well if at all, is abhorrent and all too familiar. (It’s also dangerously similar to rape-apologist rhetoric telling victims they should be flattered their abuser was even into them.)
Writer Mars Sebastian broke the situation down succinctly on Twitter, writing: “The Halle Berry conversation is truly reminding me of the sheer number of people who are actually infuriated when people use their autonomy to say no. Which leads them to poke all these holes in what they believe is the ‘logic’ behind the ‘no’ in order to manipulate the situation to make you look crazy or get you to change your mind. Cut it out, oh my god.”
As of this publishing, Drake hasn’t publically addressed Berry’s concerns.
(featured image: NDZ/Star Max/GC Images)
