Things are certainly not how they used to be, in many ways. These days, it seems almost normal to us that when a couple is going through marital problems, especially if one or both of them have some degree of celebrity, that their marital issues will be made public. In fact, you can almost bet that as soon as the news comes out that some celebrity or other has been cheating on his wife, rather than everyone looking kind of embarrassed about it, several women will come striding confidently toward the reporters, announcing that they, too, slept with the man in question (be it Tiger Woods, or Sandra Bullock’s husband, or whomever). It’s almost like some bizarre, disgusting badge of honor – that they would trade fifteen minutes of questionable notoriety in exchange for dragging a family or two through even worse pain and suffering than they were already going through.
Twenty years ago, I was in a similar position, and yet in never occurred to me to alert anyone. Dating a married man was not seen as something you would go around announcing to anyone who would listen – it was a shameful thing that you hid from people, as I did hide it even from my closest friends and family. The man I was going out with was married when we got together, and in the end that was what broke us up, ironically. The whole situation was frightening and embarrassing, and it never would have occurred to me that I could use the information about our affair to publicly humiliate him and his family further. For me, it was bad enough that I had believed his lies, that I hadn’t been smarter about my choices, and that I had convinced myself that everything was going to work out for us. To this day, even though I can say that I learned a few things from the situation, the one thing that still saddens me is that his wife had to deal with the awful grief of seeing her marriage shredded in front of her. I can’t imagine choosing to make it worse on purpose.
Yet, that’s exactly where we are today. This is the level that women will sink to now – flaunting their indiscretions as if it were something to be proud of, coming forward and telling the dirty, detailed truth to people who don’t have any business knowing that information. And why? What would prompt a woman to come forward and give all the gory details of her affair, humiliating and further destroying people who are already in a living hell?
The answer is simple. Money. This is how being a tramp has now evolved into being a prostitute. These women get paid mind-boggling sums to talk to tabloids, gossip TV shows, and even “legitimate” news outlets, about every detail of what they did with these married men. For some reason, we all think we have the right to know what goes on in a faltering marriage, and these women take advantage of that, and get a paycheck in the process. It sure beats having to get a real job, or having to find some self-esteem somewhere.
Given how hard women have had to work to gain the relatively small distance we have traveled toward freedom and equality, it’s frustrating and saddening that any woman would go so far out of her way to completely unravel all that progress. I really wish I know what would prompt them to do that, but I think one thing is for certain: self-esteem is at the heart of the issue, and that is exactly where we will have to begin to heal what is wrong in our exuberant “look at me, I’m a prostitute” culture.
To see Maryanne discussing her personal experience in this vein, view this week’s video blog visit: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=odk2p36PadY
