In case you needed yet another reminder of how disgusting men can be to women, Charli XCX suffered more public lechery at the hands of Dutch radio host Giel Beelen this morning. After brief conversation about a track played on the Giel! show, the presenter asks her to record a radio drop saying “good morning in the most sensual way.” Before she has a chance to do so, he asks if she has her “hands on [her] body” and accuses her of “fingering [her]self.”
The exact reasoning is unclear because only audio (below) has surfaced of the gross encounter, but it seems Giel couldn’t see XCX’s hands out in the open and so made a wild assumption about where they actually were. She plainly asserts that they’re behind her back, and follows with, “I wouldn’t do that for you.” The “Break the Rules” singer ultimately takes it in stride and records the drop anyway, but she took to Twitter later on to register her understandable anger.
“Just got asked if I was fingering myself on the radio,” she said. “s/o sexism. It’s the best.” Beelen then retweeted her comment adding “I don’t care, i love it ;-) thx was fun!” So either something was lost in translation, or he’s even more boorish than we might have initially thought.
But as Charli notes in her sarcastic shoutout to the patriarchy, this sort of thing isn’t an outlier, but symptomatic of the same sort of societal problem that allows journalists to ask Sky Ferreira about her body, and lets dudes think they can literally assault people onstage just because they’re women.
