photo via popsuede
Dear Harpies:
I could really use your advice.
My friend has been discussing about the Tiger Woods scandal for a while now. Mostly, I just shrugged and let her say how she felt about it, nodding and listening the best I can, when, honestly, I was entirely done with that whole topic long ago. But I was caught completely off guard was when she discussed the mistresses. “I don’t how he could do such a thing!” she said, “His wife is so pretty. They’re [meaning the mistresses] not even pretty!”
I have to be honest here. I hate that phrase, “They’re/She’s not even pretty!” I fucking hate it. To me, it’s just a cheap way of saying, “I don’t agree with this woman’s choices. It makes me uncomfortable. But I can’t explain it to her because I don’t have the intelligence so now I’m just going to go after her looks instead.”
I told my friend just that and she disagreed. “I don’t mean it like that. I mean, usually guys go after girls prettier than their wives. It makes more sense.”
“You make that sound like that is a legit excuse for a man to cheat on his wife.” I told her and then I asked,” What if the wife wasn’t beautiful? What if the mistresses were pretty and the wife was ugly? Would you still be as upset?”
Gradually, the topic went elsewhere and while my friend forgot about the argument. I couldn’t stop thinking about it all day.
I don’t condone anyone cheating on their loved ones but something about the wife’s and mistresses’ looks being brought into discussion irritated me. I think that sort of thing should not be discussed, I think what should be discussed is, to put it plainly, is merely the act of cheating itself. I don’t care if the husband, the wife, or third party is hot, what I do care about is the terribleness of someone’s terrible action of hurting their spouse by cheating.
Am I wrong here? Am I reading too much into this?
–A Reader
BeckySharper: Ugh, I’ve heard this with regard to both Tiger Woods and Jesse James’s girlfriends. And it’s nothing new, when it came out 20 years ago that Prince Charles was happily shtupping Camilla Parker-Bowles—there was such a hue and cry of “OMG, why?? She’s so ugly! Diana’s WAY hotter!”
PhDork: That’s the first thing that’s totally fucked up about this: women are valuable for their bodies, first, last, and always. Fuckability.
But the second thing, which to me is even worse, is that turning a dude’s philandering into a female beauty discussion is about MAKING IT THE WOMAN’S FAULT.
If the other woman was prettier (whatever the hell that means, to whoever the hell says it), then it’s the wife’s fault for being a dog. If the wife is prettier, then it’s the wife’s fault for being beautiful (read: tempting) BUT [frigid/bitchy/shallow/fill-in-the-ladysin].
Occasionally, it’s the other woman’s fault for being overripe/trampy/whatever Tina Fey said the other week (since men are slaves to giant boobs), but if we’re playing the Why’d He Do It? game, the answer is never “Because SHE…” It’s “Because HE…”
BeckySharper: And even if you focus on his actions, victim-blaming is always with us. No matter how egregious the man’s wrongdoing, there’s always someone out there who wants to take a swipe at the woman, which is wrong and deserves to be called out (so STFU, Jim Carrey, you nasty judgey weirdo!)
PhDork: If your friend brings this up again, shut it down. Maybe you can say “talking about who looks like what takes the responsibility off the male shoulders where it firmly belongs,” if you think she might be able to hear that.
If not, maybe you just say “I’m not having this discussion again, Maxine,” or simply change the subject. Repeatedly, if necessary. But regardless, don’t go there. There’s nothing to be gained from hashing it over again. Your brain cells have got a lot better things to do, even if hers don’t.
Becky Sharper: In terms of shutting down the victim-blaming, I often give the blamer a hard look and say, “Really? You’re blaming the victim here?” It’s quite effective. Some people actually don’t seem to realize that they’re victim-blaming until you flat-out tell them that’s what they’re doing (which indicates a huge problem with the way our society thinks, but that’s a whole ‘nother post).
And I totally second Dork’s advice not to bother reopening the conversation. That just invites conflict, and your glorious bitch-energy could be better used for something else. If your friend has a bee in her bonnet on this issue, rest assured, there will be ample opportunties for her to bring it up again in the future and you can shut her down then. Cheating is here to stay. You’ll likely wind up having this conversation again. We all will.
Can I poke my sheltered head out from under a rock and ask why the mistresses are considered victims? I thought that it had been consensual and there was no foul play. So how does one person become the victim when they entered into the affair, knowing that the other person was high profile and married?
I think we were talking about victim-blaming in the context of the wife, not the mistress. The wife is the one hurt by the affiar, and yet there’s always speculation about what she did to “cause” her husband to cheat.
Even when people say the wife is prettier than the mistress, it’s not a compliment, because it comes with the assumption that there must be something about Wifey that’s so drastically wrong that it would cause her husband to fuck someone less attractive.
Additionally, the comments about the mistress’s looks are just nasty and unnecessary, and in the case of Tiger Woods/Jesse James, also contain a healthy dose of slut-shaming.
I would say, “Oh I thought this was about (philandering husband)being a sleazy unfaithful piece of shit, not whether or not these women are sufficiently pretty or not.”
Anyway, the mistresses did not betray any trust with anybody. Who cares that they knew Tiger was married? Tiger on the other hand most clearly betrayed a trust.
In re: “Pretty”: Back in Nov. when the details were unclear, my m-i-l was blaming the wife for the attack. Like many people she does not have any clear insight into DV and how it plays out, and why assumption is almost always 100% wrong.
Here’s what m-i-l said that I DO hold her responsible for: “She’s so pretty (the wife), you wouldn’t expect someone like that to resort to violence.”
I said, what What WHAT?! Did you really mean what you just said?! Then we both dropped it. I was too shocked to continue the discussion.
Later that evening I felt like crap thinking about it. I couldn’t find a way to cast a favorable light on what my m-i-l said, but I really really wanted to find a way. Here it is many months later and I still remember the convo.
Who cares that they knew Tiger was married?
I do. If you know a man is committed to someone else and you utterly disregard that commitment and the feelings of the other person involved, that’s a moral failing on your part. No, you yourself are not required to honor his marriage vows—that’s his job—but you can’t actively participate in his betrayal and immorality and remain morally straight yourself.
I like that PhD mentioned “fuckability” because that’s what this conversation is really about. A woman’s fuckability is based largely on what other men will think of a man for fucking her (and that encompasses all meanings of the term) – which is why her beauty factors in. It’s all part of this horrible jumbled belief that having a symmetrical face or small sized waist will somehow make her vagina feel better to a man’s penis. Besides the obviously offensive reduction of a woman to the sum of her parts – this mentality robs everyone involved of satisfying sex.
I’ve purposefully avoided listening to discussions of this topic. I didn’t find Bill Clinton’s affair to be relevant news, so that of a golfer and whoever this Jesse James person is (wrestler? musician? porn star?) certainly don’t qualify. I did stop once during a channel surfing moment because one of the major news networks had the words “KINKY TIGER SEX” on the screen. Sadly, it was not a story about orgiastic big cats. It was just one of the mistresses describing her sex life with Tiger Woods. In the 20 seconds or so before I surfed away, I heard her saying “It was always wild and crazy. As far away from boring, married people sex as you can imagine…” I don’t bring this up to shame the wife. I don’t feel she should have been “better in bed” to “keep her man.” I just feel it represents the misunderstanding at the root of the Reader’s conversation with her friend.
@Becky I agree with your objection to the mistress as a person who has committed a moral failing. Yet I think her’s is not the same moral failing as his. I think it’s less, plenty less.
There’s always been far more blame on the other woman, and that’s exactly opposite what it should be, for me. I want to get to the place where the blame is on the married party. So for that reason, I don’t want to focus on her moral failing. I want to focus on his.
I don’t want to solve the problem of a mistress having moral failings. I’d rather solve the problem of why there isn’t more societal blame on a man who cheats.
Beyond the ‘who should we blame’ thing here though is an interesting concept of the powerful feeling they are exempt from the rules. And powerful could be defined many ways. I never buy though the ‘and I have a normal life too’ story of the rich and famous, theres no way to me that they could have a normal life, and therefore, feel (some of them) that normal rules apply to THEM. Just me thinking aloud, Im not joe-splaining.
This sort of thing is also distressing because it’s a way of policing the beauty standard. Dan Savage will get a letter, every so often, from a guy who says, “I’m in a great relationship with a beautiful lady who I love, BUT I’m only attracted to women who [don't conform to the beauty standard in x way]” and then they end up cheating on these women with the women they’re actually attracted to. I don’t know what James’ deal is, I don’t know what’s up with Tiger Woods and his apparent sexual hang-ups regarding class or whatever, but obviously these men are using different selection criteria for women they marry and women they have sex with — in these cases there are some virgin/whore overtones but that isn’t always the case. Policing who people are allowed to be into hurts everyone. The issue is not who these men are attracted to, the issue is their disrespect for the women they’re involved with. Your friend is basically saying that disrespecting ugly people is okay.
Moreover! I think the friend’s justification is very telling: “I mean, usually guys go after girls prettier than their wives.” This assumes that when guys cheat, it’s because of sexual dissatisfaction and only sexual dissatisfaction. They couldn’t have any sort of emotional motivation whatsoever — just sexual.
Grumble.
I think the friend is missing something key here: Tiger and people like him travel in circles in which women are required to be conventionally pretty even to enter. So you would expect all the women involved to meet that threshhold, such that it’s not a relevant factor. The only relevant factor is his motivation. But really, Dorkie is right. This guy deserves none of our attention and energy. Let’s move on-say, to skeezy quarterbacks in Pittsburgh.
*fantasizes about punching Rothlisberger in the face-or elsewhere*
Re: Who cares that they knew Tiger was married?
Marriage =/= monogamy. For plenty of people, sure, but not all. Judging from Bullock & Nordegren’s reactions, theirs probably were, so yeah, betrayal. And the mistresses probably should’ve known better, but there are couples who have an “understanding” and married cheaters who claim they do.
“It was always wild and crazy. As far away from boring, married people sex as you can imagine…”
Dammit, I have to remind my husband to stop being imaginative and experimental in bed. Clearly, our married sex life isn’t boring enough.
But seriously, I think this is another part of the problem. No matter how great the sex actually is, I think some people start to assume that married sex is boring, therefore extramarital sex must be better. That doesn’t mean the betrayed wife wasn’t fantastic in bed, just a socially approved ‘grass is always greener’ mentality. The idea that you’re giving up great or frequent sex when you marry is so much are part of our psyche that even if your sex life is great, it’s easy to imagine it would be better if you weren’t in a monogamous marriage.
@joytulip: Marriage =/= monogamy. For plenty of people, sure, but not all.
Definitely true. But if a married man came on to me and said “Oh, my wife and I have an open marriage, she’d be totally fine with it” I would want him to answer a lot of hard questions before I’d believe it. True open marriages–where the parties have mutually agreed not to be monogamous–are pretty rare.
@ BeckySharper
Agreed. And I have seen plenty in which a spouse plays like they do have an open marriage in despiration to try to keep a known cheater. It’s hurtful to watch and twisted to be around.
To me there is nothing surprising about someone choosing different kinds of people to have meaningless affairs with than the kind of person you chose to make a life and family with. It makes sense, if it lacks a certain ethical and aesthetic sophistication. You get bored and want some strange. What always makes me sad is people who cheat with someone exactly like their spouses. I just feel like, they could have found what they were looking for right there in their own house but just stopped communicating or whatever happened. Slightly off topic, I realize.
Tiger’s mistresses’ actions make complete sense to me, this is probably the most exciting thing that has ever happened to many of them and it reinforces what they have been told their worth is, being pretty and fuckable.
Tiger, on the other hand, is completely in the wrong because he negotiated a relationship with wife, and then when he was no longer happy with that relationship, he did not feel like he should address that unhappiness, or attempt to renegotiate the terms or give her a chance to build the relationship she wants with someone else, he unilaterally changed the terms, probably because he stopped seeing her as a person. And that is not acceptable. IMO.
@beckysharper – Thanks for explaining. I was way confused, clearly I didn’t read it straight. I also appreciated your talk about morality – completely agree.