AUSTIN, Texas – I recently got into a debate with an old friend of mine over the oft-stated axiom “violence should never be condoned.”
His position, which I’ll freely admit is more admirable and principled than mine, is even retaliatory violence should be considered morally and ethically wrong. Everyone, in other words, should aspire to a Gandhi-like posture of determined, resolute pacifism, no matter what indignity or mistreatment comes their way.
This sounds nice and all, but ever since some thieving bastard stole damn near everything I owned, including a lock-box containing the final correspondence I received from a dearly departed friend, I’ve adopted a different sort of attitude toward retaliatory violence: When it’s visited upon some asshole who richly deserves it and doesn’t cross the line into a disproportionate response, I’m all for that shit.
Accordingly, I’m placing myself squarely on Team Khalifa in the context of the Great Selfie Smackdown of 2017 — assuming all the facts are as they have been reported, at least.
If you haven’t heard, here’s the gist of the story: Popular porn performer Mia Khalifa was recognized by many of her fellow concertgoers at a June 23 show in Austin, Texas. Several fans took pictures of Khalifa, not all of them with her permission.
One fellow identified as “Jared” (and by his Twitter handle @FourthTigerClaw) snapped a selfie with Khalifa, looking quite irritated, in the background. In response to his unsolicited attention, Khalifa allegedly delivered a corrective blow upside the guy’s head.
Jared, evidently thinking the whole thing was funny and/or worthy of his online friends’ sympathy, tweeted before and after pictures, the latter of which purports to display a bruise left by Khalifa’s fist.
Beyond the fact this so-called bruise is scarcely detectable in the photo, my hunch is Khalifa’s blow wasn’t exactly a late 1980’s Mike Tyson haymaker.
For starters, Khalifa reportedly stands 5’ 2” and weighs 121 pounds, which doesn’t make her the smallest porn performer on record by any means, but also doesn’t give her too much to work with when chambering a punch.
Second, Khalifa has no hand-to-hand combat or martial arts training to her credit, so far as I’m aware. That doesn’t necessarily mean she can’t throw a punch, but probably does mean she can’t throw a very good one. Punching is a skill like any other, after all; to become good at it takes practice.
Finally, there is the assessment of Jared himself, who said he didn’t feel the blow was sufficiently harmful to necessitate reporting it to law enforcement.
“Honestly, it wasn’t a big deal,” Jared said of the confrontation. “I was just happy to have gotten a picture with her, but now there’s all this drama and I’m not sure if it was worth posting. I posted just for my friends to have a good laugh at the situation, not to stir social arguments.”
Although it’s good to hear Jared wasn’t trying to suggest he was gravely wounded by the diminutive porn star, when he says it “wasn’t a big deal” I think he’s missing an important point: Just because you recognize a porn performer in public, this doesn’t mean you get to run up to her and snap her picture without permission, like she’s some sort of curious rock formation in a national park.
As many of Khalifa’s supporters and fans have noted in the ongoing Twitter kerfuffle surrounding the incident, the young starlet is quite personable when approached respectfully and with due tact. Some fans posted their own selfies taken with Khalifa, who is all smiles in the photos, including some snapped by Khalifa herself.
“Thank you for asking me nicely rather than jumping in front of me while I was walking & shoving a cam in my face,” Khalifa tweeted in response to one of her fans who defended her on Twitter.
You were the sweetest. Thank you for asking me nicely rather than jumping in front of me while I was walking & shoving a cam in my face https://t.co/1fQK0B5gSi
— Mia Khalifa (@miakhalifa) June 26, 2017
As for how Jared approached his selfie, there’s great disagreement between the now-bruised punter and Khalifa as to how it all went down.
“Since me and my friends had already been ignored when we asked for a picture I just decided to do what the others were doing,” Jared claimed. “I walked ahead of her to the side and took a picture as she came up making sure I wasn’t in her space.”
As Jared tells it, the blow that followed his selfie snap was the definition of a sucker punch.
“Photo clicks and then I hear, ‘get the fuck away from me’ from Mia before she hit me in the face,’” Jared claimed, adding Khalifa was “ignoring everyone for the most part” and he’d seen other fans who “just walked up and took pictures without any type of reaction from her.”
If this is true, though, I must ask why Khalifa would lash out at Jared rather than just ignore him as she allegedly did the other nosey shutterbugs? I wasn’t there, of course, but my strong hunch is the guy did or said something that made him stand out from the crowd — and not in a good way.
Going back to my caveats concerning the sort of retaliatory violence of which I don’t approve, had Khalifa and her friends stomped this Jared dude until he looked like that other Jared dude, I would be inclined to say she’d taken her response too far. Leaving a basically invisible bruise on his face, though? This Jared twerp got what he had coming, or maybe even got off too easy.
Either way, if I ever see Khalifa in public, I’m going to do something she might appreciate more than being asked first about taking a selfie, even if she never realizes the favor I’ve done her: leave her the fuck alone to go about her business in peace.
