$14.5 million!

As I've mentioned before both on this site and elsewhere, I consider myself somewhat of a feminist. While I don't believe in the equality of the sexes per se, I do believe that when a woman does the same amount of work as a man, she should be paid the same amount of money. That's just fairness, people.

Of course the flip side is true as well: even if a woman does ostensibly the same work as a man, her pay should be docked for any time that she a) goes in a back room to cry for 15 minutes at a time, b) shows up on the rag and tries to make it everyone else's problem, and, god forbid, c) actually has the sheer balls to bring her children into the workplace.

Like I said, fairness.

That's said, it's been a while since feminism has had anything to do with fairness. While it's true that a woman still only makes something like 80 cents for every dollar a man makes (they make more like $1.20 if you count the sex industry, but that's neither here nor there), feminist-types have long since moved on to more pressing issues.

Take for example Essence magazine's Take Back the Music campaign, probably hip-hop feminism's crowning achievement thus far. These so-called feminists weren't clamoring for a woman's right to make rap music; female rappers have existed going all the way back to the 1970s, even though a case could be made for limiting female involvement in hip-hop to posing in your underwear.

Instead, most so-called hip-hop feminism today is concerned with silly bullshit like controlling the language a man uses to refer to woman, i.e. censorship. You see, it's not so much that a woman can make a rap album of her own, but she's also got to control what a man says on his album as well. Or else.

Which brings me to the Source sexual harassment trial. In case you haven't heard, the jury awarded the magazine's former editor Kim Osorio $14.5 million for firing her in retaliation for filing a sexual harassment complaint and for Benzino alleging in some radio interview that she fucked Nas and blew 50 Cent.

This would be a ridonkulous sum even if she was raped repeatedly, but it's worth noting that a) she only filed said complaint in the first place after she found out she was about to be fired, and b) we don't know for a fact that she definitely didn't fuck Nas and blow 50 Cent. (My hope is that both of them will be brought in to testify in the eventual appeals trial.)

So essentially this case was a referendum on a man's right to watch pr0n and shout profanities in the offices of a magazine that peddles pr0n videos and profane rap albums. Next thing you know, they'll be coming after our right to engage in such activity in the comfort of our moms' basements, which is all that will be left.

As editor-in-chief of the Source, Kim Osorio made $130,000 a year, which I'm sure is orders of magnitude more than I'll ever make doing anything, but obviously that wasn't enough. And that's the thing with these psycho hose beasts: it'll never be enough until they have all of our nuts in a jar in a back room somewhere at the Essence magazine building.

With the ridonkulous judgment in this case, I'd say they're one step closer.