OPINION: Why All Men Want Rihanna

By RK Byers

Recently, my good friend, writer Dimitry Leger and I were explaining via e-mail to another good friend, a popular female writer, what, to us, made the female writer sexy: she’s a “space cadet” we wrote. She’s one of those chicks who you could be looking right in the eye: knowing that in her mind, she’s a million miles away. While our female writer friend agreed with the assessment of her “cadet” status, she couldn’t understand at all why this made her sexy.

“It makes men wanna work harder to be the focus of your attention”, I wrote.

Enter Rihanna: a “singer” by trade, if you call that singing. Quite honestly, Rihanna’s voice sounds like the last moan of an animal that’s been run over by a truck. Her stage performances are atrocious. She just stands there as if she’s been named queen of some country whose language she doesn’t fully understand. And when the camera catches her in the eyes, there’s the telltale look of the “cadet”-a vacant, almost hollow expression that one could easily mistake for Paris Hilton-level empty-headedness if one didn’t look closer.

Make no mistake about it, though-Rihanna is a cutie. She’d warrant a second glance if she were just another girl at the end of the subway platform. Her sense of style is dazzling. She also has a knack for making smash hit records-a knack shared with a fellow “cadet” singer of limited voice but a much bigger catalogue; Madonna. It is yet to be determined if Rihanna will become as iconic and legendary as Madge, but like the older gal, Rihanna already has a track record for leaving men broken, dejected and wondering.

After a rumored affair with pre-marriage Jay-Z that supposedly had the old coot in such a frenzied state that he was reportedly crazy enough to consider leaving Beyonce, Rihanna turned Chris Brown into Ike Turner. She then left Drake mumbling “You the f___ing best!” on wax like a punch-drunk Tourette sufferer.

While the Lauryn Hills of the world turn us on because we know from the door that they’re deep, profound and intellectual, with “cadets” like Rihanna, it’s more of the possibility of depth that lures us in. A possibility that suggests that joys unimagined are there for the taking if only we as men would have the guts to reach for them.

But, of course, being men, there’s only one way we can think of reaching.