50 Cent, a man who was famously shot nine times, is scared of showing the tip of his penis on TV. Or is he?
When it comes to the strange world of entertainment, we rarely get what we want—a superhero movie that doesn’t hate women, for example, or justice for Barb from Stranger Things. We do, however, get what we deserve. How else can we explain these surreal first days of August, a month that has inexplicably but undoubtedly been characterized by a steady parade of celebrity wieners? A-list genitalia aficionados will recall that the seeds of our current crotch crop were planted earlier this summer, when Draymond Green unwittingly ushered in this era of overexposure. The basketball superstar’s series of indecent offenses—two nut-tapping scandals and one leaked Snapchat—formed an evocative and phallic trio.
But while Green’s inability to resist the siren call of his own genitalia, as well as the genitalia of others, makes him a prime candidate for psychoanalysis, it doesn’t explain why summer 2016 has left the internet drowning in a sea of D. First came Orlando Bloom paddle boarding with his girlfriend Katy Perry, Legolas’s bow exposed for the entire world to see. Unfortunately, Bloom and his thigh shadow’s nautical adventure wasn’t an outtake from a raunchy “Rise” video, so much as another example of paparazzi invading the privacy of their celebrity prey.
This episode of full-frontal with Orlando Bloom quickly escalated into a third arms race between Bloom and his longtime nemesis Justin Bieber. Biebs, who famously called Bloom a “bitch” in Ibiza in 2014 only to be subjected to Orlando’s bitch slap, felt the totally mature need to show off his superior equipment. Now, just days after the Orlando Bloom leak, Bieber has been spotted skinny-dipping in Hawaii. Instead of banding together against their shared enemy—the paparazzi and swimming trunk tan lines—it appears that Bloom and Bieber have raised the stakes of their rumored beef. Unfortunately, Justin’s de-robing may have been a tactical misstep; even his fellow Canadian Seth Rogen has sided with Bloom in this battle of the bulge.
So while August has already given us more than its fair share of phallic phenomena, this weekend introduced us to our very first celebrity penis mystery. The member in question belongs to one Curtis James Jackson III, more commonly known as 50 Cent. Since 2014, 50 Cent has devoted his energies to Starz’s Power, a crime drama he produces and stars in. While Jackson’s character Kanan has a recurring role, last Saturday marked the first time that 50 Cent took his viewers to the candy shop. In the controversial scene, Kanan is recovering from a series of horrific burns, just minding his own business. His cousin Jukebox (Anika Noni Rose, is that really you?) deploys her girlfriend Candie to go see if Kanan’s hands still work. This display of familial goodwill culminates in a shot of 50 Cent painstakingly beginning to pleasure himself, sans penis prosthetic.
But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. The real-life plot thickens: Jackson, who initially gushed to TV Guide about his penis’s “debut,” became strangely irate prior to its premiere. In a series of now-deleted Instagram posts, Fiddy raged at Power’s executive producer Courtney Kemp, calling her a “bitch” and accusing her of lying about the explosive ep. He urges Kemp to “kiss my ass,” because “this shit is not funny.” Specifically unfunny shit includes the fact that “Now my auntie G can’t watch POWER because my d!ck is debuting tonight. SMH you motherfucker.” 50 Cent feels duped: “The shit wasn’t in the first 3 edits…Nah yal got me fucked Up.” After promising that he had calmed down, he politely asked Kemp to call him because “BITCH I CAN’T BELIEVE YOU DID THAT WITH OUT TELLING ME FIRST, WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOU!!!!!”
Before you start worrying about the poor woman 50 Cent is “SCREAMING” at, let’s check back with that earlier TV Guide interview, where he talked about the editing process in detail. The rapper explained, “First it was supposed to be darker [after footage was edited.] You couldn’t see it on the screen. [A producer] was like, ‘I gotta show you! When you put it on the screen, you can see it.’ I don’t care.” Unless we’ve got a hip-hop Jekyll and Hyde situation on our hands, it’s probably safe to say that 50 Cent’s subsequent surprise was just an Instagram troll, potentially designed to inspire new viewers to consider a Starz subscription.
The social media “beef” continued, with Kemp publishing a response on Instagram, “@50cent must lie because you knew what we were shooting during 404. Yeah that’s your [eggplant emoji] you signed the waiver like everybody else.” This also feels like a troll, as no sane producer would respond to a complaint from a close colleague by dragging them on social media. Plus, Kemp’s clap back is still up on her Instagram. That’s the most reasonable option, considering an alternate reality in which 50 Cent, who was once one of the hardest rappers in the game, has transformed into a guy who’s ashamed of his hard-on. If the rapper is, in fact, just having a laugh, this will go down as his greatest prank since forcing a nation of white girls to mispronounce “Fiddy” in the early aughts.
