Last year when Mac Miller overdosed, everyone blamed Ariana Grande for breaking up with him, saying she pushed him over the edge. Everyone knew he suffered from addiction but still held her responsible for allowing him to die. And that reaction didn’t just come from nowhere, there’s a whole precedent in the literature, in the media. Like the way tabloids talk about women—and it’s not just tabloids, I mean, it’s a bigger problem, obviously. But we demand all this emotional labor from them. We reward loyalty and punish women for choosing independence—for choosing survival, actually.
